There's a new New York Times/CBS poll out, and that floor holding up Bush's approval rating at approximately 40% is apparently made of concrete:

The hurricane, alone, does not appear to have taken any significant toll on Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating, which remains stuck virtually where it has been since early summer....

Mr. Bush's support remained strong among Republicans, conservatives, evangelical Christians and those who said they voted for him last fall....

Over all, 41 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Bush's performance in office, while 53 percent disapproved. Those figures are in line with other national polls conducted in the last week, roughly equal to the worst ratings Mr. Bush has ever received, comparable to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's worst ratings, but well above the worst ever posted by the president's father, Jimmy Carter and Richard M. Nixon.....



We keep waiting for Bush to do something that will make the scales fall from these people's eyes. It's not going to happen. Ever. We have to accept the fact that this is as unpopular as he's ever going to get.

Forget politics -- the model for what's going on is ethnic. What you have to understand is that the people in Bush's base believe they are as embattled, as hated, as discriminated against as non-whites have been in this country, or as various white ethnic groups have been.

Think of how African-Americans in the middle part of the twentieth century embraced black heroes of popular culture -- Joe Louis, say, or Jackie Robinson. Italian-Americans of my parents' and grandparents' generation similarly embraced Sinatra, DiMaggio, Caruso. Bush's base feels about him exactly the way those groups felt about those heroes: He is one of them, and against great odds he has risen to glory. You could reveal whatever there is to reveal about Sinatra; pizzeria owners in Brooklyn and East Boston and elsewhere will never take his picture off the walls. That's how Bush's base feels about him -- he could never do anything that would make them reject him, and if something he does causes others in America to reject him, they'll rationalize it or shrug it off, or turn their anger on his critics.

Of course, ethnic prejudice in America has been a real thing; by contrast, it's not clear what drives the sense of grievance in Bush's base. Actually, it is clear: If you say that people who don't believe in the majority religion have the right not to be coerced to pray that religion's prayers by the state, the religious Bushists think they're being discriminated against. If you say that gay people should have all the rights straight people have, the social conservative Bushists insist their rights are being taken away. If you say that the Iraq War has made America less safe, the bellicose Bushists say that you're making them less safe.

So the Bushists -- embattled everywhere they turn -- feel like blacks in the Jim Crow south, or Irish-American Five Points slum-dwellers faced with Abraham Lincoln's military draft. They're the most hated group in America -- never mind the fact that they form the country's most powerful voting bloc, or that their allies control every part of the federal government. They're under siege. Every day the rest of us grind them into the dust -- but one man stands up for them, and stands tall. Rejecting Bush would be like rejecting themselves.

OUR PAL

Did our ally the Pakistani president really say this?

...Musharraf also became animated when he spoke about the case of Mukhtar Mai, a 33-year-old illiterate woman who spoke publicly about having been gang-raped on the orders of village council in 2002.... earlier this year Musharraf earned the ire of the Bush administration when he blocked her from traveling to the United States to publicize the case.

Musharraf said that Mai was free to travel now -- though she has never left Pakistan -- and that he had no regrets about how he handled the incident....

"You must understand the environment in Pakistan," Musharraf added. "This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."

Yeah, he said it. Here's the link. The mind reels.

(Story via feministing.)

So apparently what Bush is going to announce tomorrow night is the creation, on the Gulf Coast, of the new state of Norquistan -- a place where government has actually been drowned, not in a bathtub, but rather in the polluted waters of Lake Pontchartrain, and the twentieth century has thus been repealed:

From today's Washington Post:

...The first major public event in the White House effort to take control of the post-Katrina political and policy agenda will occur tomorrow night in a prime-time speech to the nation.

...Bush already has dispatched his top strategist, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and other aides to assemble ideas from agencies, conservative think tanks, GOP lawmakers and state officials.... The idea, aides said, is [to] provide a quick federal response that comports with Bush's governing philosophy....

In what may become the next major post-Katrina policy, the White House was working yesterday to suspend wage supports for service workers in the hurricane zone as it did for construction workers on federal contracts last week, administration and congressional officials said.

... the Bush administration and congressional GOP leaders are working on proposals to encourage business investment in the devastated areas and to test conservative ideas such as ... low-tax business zones and waived environmental regulations.

...Republicans are lining up behind plans to use vouchers to help displaced students find new schools, including private ones, and a mix of vouchers and tax breaks to help flood victims pay for health care expenses, from insurance to immunization....

Grover Norquist, a Rove ally who runs Americans for Tax Reform, is among those lobbying the White House to suspend wage supports for service workers in the hurricane zone....

So I guess if you want to read the speech before Bush delivers it, you can go here and read it in the form of a Heritage Foundation "research" paper (lead author: Ed Meese). Solutions in the "research" paper and the list of proposals in the Post article are almost exactly in sync -- although the Heritage paper also recommends ANWR drilling, medical savings accounts, elimination of the estate tax, "improving ... personal responsibility," and turning over some recovery responsibilities to "faith-based groups, as well as uncertified or non-union individuals."

So this is going to be Bush's big, inspirational speech -- the Scrooge-like agenda of right-wing think tanks, delivered as a gift to the nation while bodies are still being recovered.

*****

By the way, does anyone else find it odd that the Bush administration keeps talking about cutting the pay of those involved in the recovery? Whatever happened to all of John Stossel's blather about having to pay people more to get them to supply needed services after a disaster?

*****

UPDATE, THURSDAY MORNING: From today's Washington Post:

President Bush will call tonight for an unprecedented federal commitment to rebuild New Orleans and other areas obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, putting the United States on pace to spend more in the next year on the storm's aftermath than it has over three years on the Iraq war, according to White House and congressional officials....

So pewrhaps he's just going to talk about dessert tonight, and save the soggy vegetables for later.

At the Huffington Post, Cenk Uygur says the unsayable:

Did We Let Osama Get Away on Purpose?

The New York Times reported this weekend that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew he was in Tora Bora.

... The piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine also says there was an American commander with 4,000 marines standing by within striking distance. Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis requested permission to join the fight. He was denied.

...Osama had about 1,500-2,000 well-armed, well-trained men in the region. 36 guys to get 2,000? Why would we let ourselves be outgunned like that? ...

I am not a conspiracy theorist and I don’t believe in crazy talk about how the administration planned 9/11. You don’t have to believe any of that to understand that our priorities were grossly out of order....

"On purpose"? That seems like a stretch. And yet....

We know that, for the administration, going to war with Afghanistan was a little bit like getting large amounts of federal aid to victims of Katrina -- it seems to have been done reluctantly, to placate pesky ordinary citizens (in the case of 9/11, what the pesky citizens were demanding was that the response be aimed in the general direction of the actual killers of fellow pesky citizens). From Richard Clarke we know that many in the administration thought Afghanistan was a sideshow, an annoying distraction from the real war, which was with Saddam:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate....

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said.... "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq...."

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this...."

We also know, from Clarke and others, why this was the case -- the belief was widespread in the Bush White House that terrorists weren't as important as their (real or imagined) state sponsors:

...The extent of [terrorism "expert" Laurie] Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." ...

So maybe the Bushies didn't let bin Laden go on purpose so much as assume that it wasn't all that important to get him -- after all, he'd be powerless without the backing of a state (secondarily Afghanistan, but primarily Iraq).

Uygur adds this:

A caller on our radio show posited that if we had caught Osama, then it would have been harder to justify an invasion of Iraq. At that point, it would have seemed like we got our man and the mission was accomplished. That’s the best guess I’ve heard so far.

And, of course, we know that NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported this in 2004 about counterterrorist activity that also might have undermined the case for an Iraq war:

NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had [three] chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill [Abu Musab] Zarqawi himself -- but never pulled the trigger....

I'd like to think the administration couldn't possibly be that cynical about Zarqawi or bin Laden -- but if you don't think terrorists themselves really matter, if you think it's all about state sponsorship (and Iraqi state sponsorship in particular), maybe it's not cynicism at all. Maybe it's just monomania and dogged adherence to a crackpot theory.

Oh, and today's New York Times reports this:

Senior Pentagon and military officials are discussing a proposal to cut American troop levels in Afghanistan next spring, perhaps by as much as 20 percent, the largest withdrawal since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001....

Although [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld emphasized that American troops would continue to handle the counterinsurgency mission "for a time," he said NATO should consider deploying troops to the eastern border region, which the United States oversees and where much of the fighting is occurring. He added that "over time, it would be nice if NATO developed counterterrorism capabilities, which don't exist at the present time."...

The eastern border is, of course, the border with Pakistan -- so this means the administration is looking to reduce the forces committed to the area where, as everyone on the planet knows, bin Laden sits pretty. So I guess they really don't give a damn whether he's caught or not.

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM

Headline of a story prominently linked today at Lucianne.com:

Hurricane Victims Pile Up Credit Card Debt

Snippy comment that immediately follows, from La Goldberg or whoever ghostwrites for her:

Historical Note: When liberating G.I.s gave starving Berlin kids fresh milk, it made them very sick

Lucianne? I hope you bleed to death in a putrid gutter someday, in intense pain, and no one offers to help you.

(Incidentally, the story isn't even about those Red Cross or FEMA debit cards -- it's about exiled Gulf Coast residents maxing out their own plastic. So Lucianne gets today's Right-Wing Remedial Reading Award.)

DAISY ... DAISY ...

No, you're not imagining this (and yes, he said it again today):

Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

--George W. Bush, speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, June 28, 2005

Our strategy can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down....

--George W. Bush, speech in Morgantown, West Virginia, July 4, 2005

As Iraqis stand up, Americans and coalition forces will stand down.

--George W. Bush, speech in Grapevine, Texas, August 3, 2005

Our approach can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

--George W. Bush, press availability, Crawford, Texas, August 11, 2005

Our approach can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

--George W. Bush, weekly radio address, August 13, 2005

Our military is strategy is straightforward: As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.

--George W. Bush, speech in Salt Lake City, Utah, August 22, 2005

And as I'll remind the good folks of Idaho, our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.

--George W. Bush, press availability, Donnelly, Idaho, August 23, 2005

Our approach can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

--George W. Bush, speech in Nampa, Idaho, August 24, 2005

Our strategy is straightforward: As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.

--George W. Bush, weekly radio address, August 27, 2005

As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.

--George W. Bush, remarks at the White House, September 13, 2005

E. J. Dionne in today's Washington Post:

...the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country's consciousness. Yesterday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown put an exclamation point on the failure.

The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans. Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.

Maybe, maybe not.

Consider two near-simultaneous headlines from this past weekend:

Bush's Popularity Hits New Low: Poll

Speedy Confirmation Expected for Roberts

That's the era we're living in.

In The Nation (subscription only) and Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn wrote a rebuttal to Dionne a month ago that still stands, even after Katrina:

...The measure of a stricken president is surely an inability to push through the legislation he desires. Remember Bill Clinton. By midsummer in his maiden year of White House occupancy, 1993, he was truly stricken and had to send a Mayday call for lifeboats, which duly arrived under the captaincy of Republican Dave Gergen, with Dickie Morris soon to follow. By July, 1993, as the receptacle of liberal hopes, the Clinton presidency was over.

Look now at Bush. Stricken he may be in the popular polls, but his political agenda flourishes.

... does [John] Roberts face a gauntlet of ferocious interrogatories from Democrat senators? Hardly....

Go now from Roberts to John Bolton and yes, we find another summer triumph for the stricken president.... with the recess appointment, Bolton is installed as US Ambassador to the UN till January, 2007.

Let's move from nominees to legislation.... his energy bill sailed through Congress and he put CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement), which had seemed dead, over the top. Topping off these triumphs, Bush spun on a dime, deep-sixed his declared intent to veto the Highway Bill, and signed the $286 billion gift to the cement lobby and endangered Republican politicians....

The war in Iraq? It's not popular and there is vocal and conspicuous opposition among the people, but not in the Congress. Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, draws national attention as she demonstrates outside the gates of Fort Bush in Crawford. Where are the Democratic politicians who should be standing beside her? ...

He's right. Bush has taken some serious hits. Bushism, by contrast, has escaped with hardly a scratch.

From CNN:

Pakistan said Monday it is prepared to erect a fence along its border with Afghanistan to prevent incursions by Taliban and Islamic extremists.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, made the proposal Monday in a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the United Nations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri said....

"Pakistan can do nothing more than that to prevent incursions," Kasuri said. "We are fed up of people who say we have to do more."...

Yeah, because, as the Sydney Morning Herald notes, the Pakistanis are doing such a great job now:

Welcome to Taliban Central, pay at the gate

Before easing his machine forward, the Afghan motorcyclist sits back from the throng and nods to a Pakistani border guard.

His hand goes into his pocket as the guard raises two fingers. They shake hands and a tight wad of cash is exchanged. As the guard pockets the money, the Afghan throttles up and enters Pakistan in a cloud of dust.

Just 30 minutes at the Waish border crossing, in this south-eastern corner of Afghanistan, reveals all of Islamabad and Kabul's hand-wringing about tighter border security as a joke at Washington's expense - there is virtually no border to secure.

...Despite a sign that says "only for passport holders", hundreds amble through with no documentation - and without challenge. Heavily laden trucks and utilities, many without numberplates, stream in both directions. None is searched.

Dozens going both ways wear jet-black turbans, which at the very least indicates they may be Taliban sympathisers. They waltz through as untouchables....

If this is the fine work the guards do at individual crossings, imagine what they could do with a whole fence!

While flipping through a Time magazine from a couple of weeks ago, I discovered this article (full text here; UPDATE: go here) -- from which I learned that you might burn in hell if you stroll down the primrose path and engage in the unmodified heathen practice of ... yoga:

... Susan Bordenkircher, a Methodist from Daphne, Alabama, ... discovered yoga in 2002. "I knew right away I was getting something out of it spiritually and physically, but it felt uncomfortable in that format," she says. So Bordenkircher prepared a vinyasa, or series of postures, with a biblical bent. Meditations focus on Jesus. She calls the sun salutation, a series of poses honoring the Hindu sun god, a "warm-up flow" instead; other Christians call it the "Son" salutation.

But that may not have been Satan-free enough:

At first, Bordenkircher and other yoga teachers encountered skepticism. Officials at Bordenkircher's church asked her if she could call her exercises something other than yoga, and she has had to convince potential students that meditation is not anti-Christ....

"Christian yoga is an oxymoron," agrees Laurette Willis of Tahlequah, Okla. She says yoga led her to dabble in a rootless New Age lifestyle until she became a Christian in 1987. Willis now speaks to Christian groups against yoga, offering instead a series of poses called PraiseMoves.

Oh, and it's not just Protestants:

In 1989 the Vatican issued a document saying the practice of Eastern traditions like yoga "can degenerate into a cult of the body," warning Catholics against mistaking yoga's "pleasing sensations" for "spiritual well-being."

I bet some of you can guess the punch line:

It was signed by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI.

The yoga mat: Satan's bedchamber.

AP:

Mike Brown, the subject of blistering criticism after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and overwhelmed the government's response, quit Monday as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency....

Bush named R. David Paulison, head of the FEMA's emergency preparedness force, to replace Brown....

Who's R. David Paulison? Oh, you remember February 2003:

Americans have apparently heeded the U.S. government's advice to prepare for terror attacks, emptying hardware store shelves of duct tape.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after U.S. Fire Administrator David Paulison described a list of useful items, stores in the greater Washington, D.C. area reported a surge in sales of plastic sheeting, duct tape, and other emergency items.

These items, Paulison said, can be helpful after a biological, chemical or radiological attack....

THE DUCT TAPE GUY! THEY REPLACED BROWN WITH THE FRIGGING DUCT TAPE GUY!

Oh, but at least we know from that story that there won't be drastic changes at FEMA:

With concerns growing about al Qaeda's interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, Paulison cautioned that aid after an attack could be hard to come by, at least initially.

He said that in the first 48 to 72 hours of an emergency, many Americans will likely to have to look after themselves.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Y KANT BUSHIES READ

How can we expect FEMA to deal effectively with a horrendous natural disaster when the people it hires to run its educational Web site for kids can't even spell the boss's name right?

It's Chertoff with two f's, schmucks.

****

And on the soon-to-be-pulled FEMA for Kids page about Michael Brown, this grammar gem:

Mr. Brown always wanted to be a lawyer and did!

So who'll be the right's designated scapegoat for this?

Gulfport Family, Escaping Katrina, Finds U.S. Aid Is Brick Wall

Destiny Beverly now plays with borrowed toys. The 6-year-old lost her own dolls when Hurricane Katrina ravaged her family's apartment in Gulfport, Mississippi.

With her father serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq, Destiny and her brother, sister and mother fled to a friend's home as the storm raged. A pecan tree blew through the roof, just missing the huddled family....

After four days struggling to find food and water, and avoid roving looters, the family managed to take shelter with relatives in Jackson, the state capital. There, they face a new ordeal: Two weeks after Katrina struck on Aug. 29, federal disaster aid has yet to reach the Beverlys and other evacuees in Jackson....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, hasn't yet sent representatives to Jackson. At the state fairground, where the American Red Cross and other private and local agencies are attempting to aid evacuees, FEMA hasn't set up a table....

"This takes some time to happen," says James Shebl, a FEMA spokesman for Mississippi. The agency is training 600 personnel in Atlanta to take aid applications in the state and some of them will arrive in Jackson as early as this week, he says....

Oops! Can't blame Governor Haley Barbour -- he's a Republican. Oh, phew -- the mayor of Jackson is black and a Democrat. It must be his fault FEMA's still not there.

(Via DU.)

THE GOP HATES BLACK PEOPLE

Or poor people. Choose one -- you can't choose "neither":

In 1966, the Supreme Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new voter ID law that requires many people without driver's licenses - a group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly - to pay $20 or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta where the cards are sold. The law is a national disgrace.

Until recently, Georgia, like most states, accepted many forms of identification at the polls. But starting this month, it is accepting only government-issued photo ID's. People with driver's licenses are fine. But many people without them have to buy a state ID card to vote, at a cost of $20 for a five-year card or $35 for 10 years. The cards are sold in 58 locations, in a state with 159 counties. It is outrageous that Atlanta does not have a single location. (The state says it plans to open one soon.) But the burden is also great on people in rural parts of the state.

The Republicans who pushed the law through, and Gov. Sonny Perdue, also a Republican, who signed it, say that it is intended to prevent fraud. But it seems clear that it is about keeping certain people away from the polls, for political advantage. The vast majority of fraud complaints in Georgia, according to its secretary of state, Cathy Cox, involve absentee ballots, which are unaffected by the new law. Ms. Cox says she is unaware of a single documented case in recent years of fraud through impersonation of a voter at the polls....

If Georgia's law remains in place, other states are likely to follow....

The U.S. Constitution, Amendment XXIV:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

But, of course, the law has been OK'd by the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department.

Is it too much to hope that somebody on the all-white Judiciary Committee will ask John Roberts what he thinks about this?

(Yes, Georgia has an all-GOP government as of this year, and the ID-card bill was passed mere months after the new Republican-majority legislature was sworn in.)

Good Lord, it really is all about appearances for these Bush people, isn't it?

One of Mr. Bush's prominent African-American supporters called the White House to say he was aghast at the images from the president's first trip to the region, on Sept. 2, when Mr. Bush stood next to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, both white Republicans, and praised them for a job well done. Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of New Orleans to meet with black victims.

"I said, 'Grab some black people who look like they might be preachers,' " said the supporter, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the White House.

Hug a black minister, George! We don't care if you save any black people, just hug a black minister! Yeah, that's what African-Americans wanted.

And that's exactly what followed:

Three days later, on Mr. Bush's next trip to the region, the president appeared in Baton Rouge at the side of T. D. Jakes, the conservative African-American television evangelist and the founder of a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas.

Bishop Jakes, a multimillionaire and best-selling author, is to deliver the sermon this Friday at the Washington National Cathedral, his office said, where Mr. Bush will mark a national day of prayer for Hurricane Katrina's victims.



Er, I don't think this is going to impress a lot of African Americans. I think the Legendary K.O.'s song, based on Kanye West's denunciation of Bush (and on West's song "Golddigger"), is a bit closer to the mark:

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People."

Preach, K.O.

(Hat tip: Greg T.)

Here are Freepers digging up recent mortality statistics for Louisiana to make the point that, compared with a typical couple of weeks in New Orleans, the post-Katrina period really hasn't been that bad, therefore Bush is a swell guy.

Sick bastards.

So what was the biggest story in America between the arrival of yesterday morning's papers and the arrival of today's? The canning of Mike Brown at FEMA, right?

Not according to the New York Post.



Mike Brown is nowhere to be found.

(There is a brief story, "from Post wire services," at the bottom of page 3.)

Brownie was on the Post's front page on Wednesday, as "FEMA Fool," but I guess the Ministry of Truth on Pennsylvania Avenue has ordered him banished to the inside pages.

So ... you're in the midst of an interminable war that's at least partly about fossil fuels. You've just suffered a natural disaster that knocked out a big part of your domestic oil industry -- and you're getting a lot of bad storms -- they might be getting worse because of global warming. Gas prices were high before the storm and are now over $3 a gallon.

What do you do?

Well, if you're the Bush administration, you immediately jack up the price of train travel:

WASHINGTON - Amtrak announced Friday it will raise fares nationally to counter higher energy costs....

Hardest hit will be the approximately 18,000 Northeast Corridor commuters who have monthly passes, whose fares will increase an average of 50 percent. The cost of monthly passes vary. A monthly pass to ride Amtrak between Trenton, N.J., and New York City currently costs $522. The trains run largely on electricity.

Yeah -- hit the region of the country where many people actually prefer to ride trains. That's brilliant.

Rep. Robert Andrews, D-NJ, rides Amtrak from Philadelphia to Washington several times a week when Congress is in session, but does not hold a monthly pass. He said that he has heard several complaints from commuters about the fares.

"You could not pick a worse time to raise train fares, with gas prices skyrocketing, making public transportation more attractive," Andrews said. "I sat next to a guy yesterday who said he and his friends were talking about carpooling rather than taking the train."...

Oh, good -- one more car on the road (and, undoubtedly, several when the carpooling arrangements start being inconvenient).

New Jersey's Democratic senators — Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg — were preparing to send Amtrak chairman David Laney a letter Friday expressing their outrage that Northeast Corridor commuters would be bearing the brunt of the fare hikes.

"As electrified rail service, service along the Corridor should be immune from recent elevated oil prices," they said in the letter. "This huge price increase and the way it will be abruptly implemented appear targeted at taking out the frustration caused by pitiful Bush administration policies on the wallets of Northeastern commuters."...

The Bush administration and some lawmakers have pushed to eliminate Amtrak subsidies.

Idiots. Trains are energy-efficient, especially in the Northeast, where there are a lot of riders. Trains would be even more energy-efficient in this country if we didn't keep looking for ways to dissuade people from taking them. The federal government could absorb rising Amtrak fuel costs -- it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the war.

We should regard spending on Amtrak as spending on national defense. I say put Amtrak in the damn Pentagon budget, just so people understand why it's important.

Excellent Tom Oliphant cartoon on Bush and Katrina.

(Via The Sideshow.)

****

Oh, and if you don't know yet about the folks who think New Orleans was destroyed for its baby-killing ways by a storm shaped like a fetus, check out posts at Eve's Apple, Pandagon, and Feministing, all citing the first download here.

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING DUE PROCESS

US can detain 'enemy combatant' indefinitely

President George W. Bush was handed a major victory on Friday in his effort to assert sweeping presidential powers in the war on terrorism as a US appeals court upheld his authority to imprison indefinitely a US citizen captured on American soil.

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Jose Padilla, a suspected al-Qaeda operative who US officials say was planning to carry out a terrorist attack inside the US, could be detained as an "enemy combatant" without any review by US civilian courts.

... the court's ruling, written by Judge Michael Luttig, who is considered a potential Supreme Court nominee, said definitively that Mr Bush had been given such powers by the congressional declaration authorising military force following the September 11 terrorist attacks. ...

--Financial Times

Not only is this decision utterly in sync with White House policy, it came out on a Friday afternoon, the Bushies' favorite time for sneaking embarrassing news out, and on a Friday afternoon when the whole country is focused on Katrina and the semi-sacking of Michael Brown. Luttig must really want that Supreme Court gig.

Does anyone else wonder whether the White House itself handed Time magazine the material for its story on apparent fibs in Mike Brown's resume -- so he could be relieved of his duties without the ostensible reason being his job performance, which would reflect badly on Bush?

Think back to the Kerik affair -- charge after charge came out, but everyone involved insisted that Kerik was dropped as a nominee not because of any significant transgression that should have been a dealbreaker for Bush, but because Kerik had a problem with a nanny who's yet to be named, identified, or found.

Fig leaves must be created to minimize embarrassment to the Boy King...

****

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt at TPMCafe agrees.

Fox News says Mike Brown has been removed from Katrina duties.

Fox cites AP. That's all I know.

UPDATE: CNN says,

FEMA director Michael Brown being sent back to Washington; Homeland Security Director Chertoff to announce new leader for on-the-ground Katrina relief efforts, senior administration official tells CNN. Details soon.

I'm expecting not Rudy Giuliani, Jimmy Carter, or Colin Powell, but a well-regarded milquetoast, quite possibly with no related experience, but someone who won't show The Big Guy up.

UPDATE: Here's the AP story. Brown stays in his FEMA job, but is no longer working on Katrina recovery.

Brown will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad w. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief and rescue efforts.

Allen was recently designated Michael Chertoff's Katrina deputy. He seems well regarded.

Though, given the nature of the Commander in Chief, I half-suspect he was promoted not for his skills, but for his knee-slappers:

Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, head of the Coast Guard, had his own contribution to the finger-pointing debate Thursday.

Appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America," Allen, who has been tasked to assist in the recovery efforts, said, "I give Mother Nature an F."

Har-de-har-har.

THE BLAME GAME

From a compassionate conservative Christian in East Texas. KLTV reports:

A confrontation this morning between an East Texas church and an evacuee from New Orleans ... centers around a sign out front of Woodland Hills Baptist Church on Old Jacksonville Road in Tyler, about a mile inside the loop....

"I drove by that sign and was just horrified when I saw that," says Kelly Jackman who now lives in Tyler but used to live in New Orleans.

That sign at Woodland Hills Baptist Church reads ,"The big easy is the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah."



Kelly along with her sister Robin Lafont, an evacuee from New Orleans, showed up this morning at the church to talk to the man who put it up, Pastor Wiley Bennett.

During a heated discussion, Robin asked, "What's the point of the sign out there?" Pastor Bennett replied, "The point of the sign is New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and New York City are some of the most wicked cities in America."

Robin, who still has family members unaccounted for in New Orleans, is offended by the sign. "I'm telling you. This hurts. Why would you want to put more hurt, more salt in my wounds and why would you want to do this to me?"...

Pastor Bennett says the sign, is a sign of the times. "The purpose of the sign is to wake American up to the fact that America is going away from God. New York City's 9/11 was a call of judgment and New Orlean's horrible incident was judgment on a wicked city." ...

And this isn't just one crank pastor:

We were at Woodland Hills as they prepared for Wednesday Night services.

They say earlier in the day, they were deluged with phone calls from people urging them to take the sign down.

But they say after our report, the response has been 100 percent positive.... we spoke with many members including these who say they support the message on the sign.

Betty George has been a member for 23 years.

"Our pastor has a strong stand on the Bible and he preaches God's word, and he has compassion for America and the souls of America."

Randy Hays joined Woodland Hills in 1999.

"All our pastor was trying to say is that America is pulling away from God, and He wants America to realize that."...

It's good to know that other area ministers are appalled, and that most viewers who wrote to KTLV about the marquee find it offensive. But not all:

C.L. writes, "You expressed shock that a church would express God's disappointment and possible judgment on New Orleans. Have you read the Bible? Jesus in my Bible will return with a flaming sword, not as some milk toast hippie!!..."

Yee-haw!

(Story via DU.)

From the anti-abortion site LifeNews.com:

Planned Parenthood Continues to Exploit Hurricane Katrina Victims

...On its national web site, Planned Parenthood solicits funds for Hurricane Katrina support efforts. In fine print, the abortion advocacy group explains that all of the money raised will be used to support its local abortion businesses.

Under a headline "Help Those Affected by the Hurricane," Planned Parenthood admits that "100% of your tax-deductible contribution will go directly to helping Planned Parenthood affiliates." ...

Also from LifeNews.com -- same site, same writer:

Help Needed to Support Pregnancy Centers Damaged by Hurricane Katrina

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), a nationwide network of 950 pro-life pregnancy help centers in 48 states, has set up an emergency relief fund to help pregnancy centers devastated by the recent hurricane in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama....

Jesus told us it's not exploitation if we do it....

(Planned Parenthood's solicitation is here; the anti-abortion pregnancy center solicitation is here.)

Just a reminder: As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in the event of a bird flu pandemic, the agency that will lead the federal response is, according to Michael Chertoff, the Department of Homeland Security.

Oh, great.

Canadians Arrived In New Orleans Five Days Before The U.S. Military

Louisiana state senator Walter Boasso is praising the rapid response of rescuers who arrived in New Orleans to assist in saving trapped residents as the waters from the corrupted levees began to rise the day after Katrina. The surprising aspect of the senator's praise was the fact that he wasn't referring to the United States military or FEMA. He was praising the Canadians.

The forty-six member Vancouver-based Urban Search and Rescue Team arrived in the St. Bernard Parish which lies east of New Orleans a full 5 days before American rescue units, and the volunteers worked 18-hour days rescuing 119 people in total.

... A St. Bernard official offered sincere gratitude and told the team that the Canadian rescuers were their first sign of relief.

St. Bernard Parish was home to 68,000 people but was virtually forgotten by U.S. officials who were concentrating their search and rescue efforts on New Orleans which is only a few kilometers away....

--HalifaxLive.com

For the seriously geography-challenged: Vancouver is on the west coast of Canada, up near Seattle.

Distance between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans: 955 miles.

Distance between Crawford, Texas, and New Orleans: 458 miles.

Distance between Vancouver and New Orleans: 2179 miles.

From a blog post by NBC news anchor Brian Williams:

...While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard....

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads.... Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history....

So how long do you suppose it'll be before someone in authority takes a shot at some member of the press in New Orleans? Not at a big-name anchor, obviously -- maybe, say, at a wire-service soundman. ("I thought he was a looter!")

Paging Eason Jordan....

(Williams link via Talking Points Memo.)

Maybe you've already seen the latest TownHall column by ABC's house libertarian, John Stossel -- "In Praise of Price Gouging." If not, expose yourself to the dark side of the "free to choose" philosophy, as Stossel looks at the post-Katrina hell and prays for the triumph of greed:

...Consider this scenario: You are thirsty -- worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that's open, and the storeowner thinks it's immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won't charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can't buy water from him. It's sold out.

 You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an "outrageous" price -- say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

 You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's "exploitation" that saved your child.

 It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it...

Got it? Ability to pay = greatest need.

But why stop with money, John? Why not take your argument to its logical conclusion and defend this?

A British tourist stranded for five days with his wife and seven-year-old son in a New Orleans hotel has called the US relief operation a "shambles"....

He said at one point a group of girls was standing on the roof of the hotel lobby and called to passing rescuers for help.

"They [the authorities] said to them 'well show us what you've got' - doing signs for them to lift their t-shirts up. The girls said no, and they said 'well fine', and motored off down the road in their motorboat....

Some people would be appalled at that -- but why? After all, if rescuers demand to see a total stranger's breasts as their fee for providing much-needed services, isn't that their right? Shouldn't they decide what their help is worth in a free market? Doesn't their refusal to give help to someone who won't show her breasts help conserve what they have to offer and make sure it goes to those who really need it, i.e., those who are willing to show their breasts to a stranger under desperate conditions?

Right, John?

Additional reactions from Jesse at Pandagon, Ross at the Talent Show, and S.Z. at World O'Crap.

By the way, do you think Stossel would have the guts to say this on national TV while bodies are still floating through the streets of New Orleans?

More whining whiners whining about the Bush administration's brave and heroic response in New Orleans?

...Among people here, frustration is rising with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in particular....

"It's a joke how long it has taken to get help down here," says Todd Schweizer, one of nine men from Florida who drove ... with 2,000 hamburgers, 2,000 hotdogs, and an enormous grill. The men, who work for a trash-collection business, also brought diapers, dog food, and water - $25,000 worth of products, says Mr. Schweizer, the company's owner. "These folks need our help."

...Councilman Bill Stallworth ... says people have been calling in, asking for mattress vouchers, brooms, buckets, and mops. His district has only four portable toilets. "It is 10 days later, and there is still not a peep," he says. "Most are still living in unsafe housing, exposed to the weather. FEMA has been missing in action."

Linn, ... who didn't want to give his last name because he works for the city, says his house is moulding and his three cars are destroyed. FEMA told him he can collect $3,000 for the cars, but the agency hasn't said when. Though he's told there are places he can get information, he has no way to get around. "Everyone I talk to says FEMA tells them the same thing: 'I'll call you back,' " he says on his way to ask the police if he can borrow a bicycle....

Nope -- this is Biloxi.

Oh, but this must be more left-wing propaganda. Surely the real fault must lie with inept local Democrat politicians.

Whoops -- the mayor of Biloxi is a Republican. As is the governor of Mississippi.

Well ... er ... maybe it's all Hillary Clinton's fault....

NOT ABOUT KATRINA

So ... that very limited number of embryonic stem cell lines that can be researched using federal dollars under the Bush Doctrine?

Er, it appears that the cells are mutating and may start becoming useless.

The story comes from Ronald Bailey at Reason Online (yeah, I know, libertarians; hey, they're very much on the right side on this issue):

... it turns out that many current stem cell lines may have expiration dates. An international team of scientists headed by Aravinda Chakravarti at Johns Hopkins University, using a series of highly sensitive genetic and molecular tests, checked nine of the available 22 federally approved human embryonic stem cell lines and found that older batches of cells experienced changes that look a lot like the transformations that scientists see in cancer cells.

...The team of researchers matched early passage stem cell lines (ones that had undergone only a few divisions before being frozen) with cells from the same lines that undergone more passages....

One worry for stem cell researchers who are constrained by federal funding is that the supply of early passage stem cells from federally approved lines will be depleted. "We don't know what stocks of frozen early passage cells suppliers have, which means that they might run out of them," said [Dan] Arking [one of the researchers at Johns Hopkins University].... "The science tells us that stem cells go bad in tissue culture and if researchers want to use them for research or therapy, they will need a continual supply of early passage stem cells," concluded Arking. The good news is that many new embryonic stem cell lines have been created around the world and are available to privately funded researchers.

The bad news, of course, is that you won't be able to get federal funding to research those new lines until, at the earliest, Inauguration Day 2009.

The "right to life" crowd is thrilled:

... The new development may mean embryonic stem cells may never be able to help patients suffering from various diseases.

...Transplanting such embryonic cells into a patient could cause more medical problems than they would be likely to solve, scientists said.

...The discovery is another bonus for adult stem cell research, touted as a more ethical and more effective alternative. Such cells come from non-controversial sources like umbilical cord blood and bone marrow rather than by destroying days-old unborn children....

But as Reason's Bailey notes, Dan Arking, the Johns Hopkins researcher, doesn't think that's the case at all:

...Arking points out that adult stem cell lines grown in tissue culture are likely to suffer as much and perhaps even more from mutations and the other genetic changes that embryonic stem cells are subject to. Arking remains a firm booster of embryonic stem cell research, declaring, "I have no doubt that human embryonic stem cells will revolutionize how we do therapy some day."

I imagine that's true -- no thanks to the current administration.

(More information on the study here.)

Key planner criticizes Homeland Security

Emergency plan designer says agency's response to Katrina was too slow

The retired admiral who played a key role in drafting the Homeland Security Department's catastrophic emergency plan said the agency was too hesitant in executing it in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Retired Adm. James Loy, who until February was acting secretary of the department, said in an interview yesterday that the need for an immediate federal response was "pretty evident" but that the department did not act fast enough to take the lead....

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ... waited until Aug. 30 - a day and a half after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast - to invoke the National Response Plan to take control of the disaster.

In doing so, Chertoff declared the situation an "incident of national significance," which put him in charge of the overall effort - trumping the authority of state and local officials ....

Once Chertoff made the declaration, he designated FEMA's Brown as his top man on the ground....

The plan allowed Brown to call the shots on how state and federal resources should be used, including the Defense Department. Instead, Loy said, the federal government used a slow "bureaucratic licensing process," in which it waited until local and state governments were overwhelmed before stepping in and waited again before asking the Pentagon, "the ultimate resource provider," to help.

"For God's sake," Loy said, the Defense Department gets "$450 billion a year to do what the federal government needs to get done." ...

"I would have expected the principal federal official [Brown] would have a once-a-day news conference down there," Loy said, adding that there's ample guidance in the national plan. "Heck, we even developed a public affairs index to the plan."...

--Baltimore Sun

****

Here's Loy's bio from whitehouse.gov.

From Katrina's hand into Cheney's pocket.

By the way, when the hell did Rush Limbaugh start calling himself "America's Anchorman"? It's a little pathetic, no? Kind of like when Michael Jackson started demanding that everyone call him "the King of Pop," just before his career went into the toilet?

The pig-ignorance of the right-wing commentariat is never clearer than when they suggest that the local response to Katrina could have been just like the local response in New York after 9/11.

Limbaugh:

It is becoming clear, and has been for two or three days here, of the utter failure of local government and state government to handle the circumstance. Everybody is out there saying, "We need a Giuliani! We need a Giuliani!" What was Rudy Giuliani? He was a mayor. Has anybody seen Ray Nagin? Was Ray Nagin at the Superdome? Was Kathleen Blanco at the Superdome? Were these people there? We saw Rudy everywhere. Yeah, we need a Rudy, fine, but Rudy was not part of federal government, folks; Rudy was not part of any FEMA organization; Rudy was not part of any federal bureaucracy. He was mayor of New York, and when you saw pictures of Rudy on TV he was flanked by the New York police chief and he was flanked by New York fire chief, and he was flanked by New York City officials, and the governor, of course, Pataki was there as well. But you haven't seen that in this circumstance.

Mark Steyn in The Telegraph:

...Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows where to point the finger.

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online:

Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our darkest hours....

I would note that we’ve seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently collapsing, ... and yet somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society, etc....

Just want to refresh your memory -- four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next… and the cops, among others, showed up to work.

So what's the difference between Katrina and 9/11?

Oh, just this: In New York on 9/11, hardly any infrastructure was destroyed.

Nothing outside the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero suffered so much as a scratch. The subways kept running. Subway service was partially restored within hours. The power never went out. The streets were passable. There was tremendous loss of life among first responders, but of the ones who survived, none was left without a home or a neighborhood to return to.

I won't get into the mistakes New York City made before 9/11, including "poor communication, gulfs in cooperation between police and firefighters and grave deficiencies in the city's 911 emergency telephone network," or Giuliani's absurd decision to place the city's crisis control "bunker" in the World Trade Center's Tower 7, where it was destroyed by the event for which it was most needed. The point is that the reaction to 9/11 was better in part because it was possible to react. Limbaugh and Steyn and Geraghty know that -- but they know most of their readers and listeners don't. And they'll seize any advantage.

****

Incidentally, Geraghty's column is a response to Anne Rice's 9/4 New York Times op-ed; it's directly addressed to Rice and refers to New Orleans as the city "you live in." Problem is, Rice moved to La Jolla, California, several months ago -- a fact Geraghty (or a National Review fact-checker) might have gleaned from the fact that the op-ed begins:

La Jolla, Calif.

or from this sentence about New Orleans:

I was born in the city and lived there for many years.

So Geraghty gets the Right-Wing Remedial Reading Award for today.

Katrina Timeline from Think Progress.

Damning.

I guess Brownie's lost Rupert Murdoch....



Chances are you've seen the AP version of this story, but you might be surprised at the harsh tone of the Post's version (registration required):

FEMA FOOL SAT ON HIS HANDS

The head of FEMA waited a mind-boggling five hours after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf before even contacting his boss about sending personnel to the area -- then suggested workers be allowed two days to get to the ravaged region, shocking internal documents reveal.

One stunning Aug. 29 memo -- sent from embattled Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- called killer Katrina a "near-catastrophic event," but otherwise lacked any other urgent language underlining the potential magnitude of the disaster.

Brown then politely ended his memo with: "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."

In another note sent later to FEMA workers, Brown said one of their duties would essentially be to make the agency look good.

"Convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public," he wrote.

In Brown's memo to Chertoff, he proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security workers within 48 hours and then another 2,000 within seven days.

In explaining the two-day period that workers had to arrive in the disaster area, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said it was to ensure they had adequate training before going down.

The same day Brown wrote his memo to Chertoff, he also urged local fire and rescue departments outside Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi not to send trucks or emergency workers into disaster areas without an explicit request for help from state or local governments....

On the subject of "adequate training," chances are you've also seen the St. Lake Tribune story about trained firefighters from around the country cooling their heels in an all-day lecture and being asked to hand out pro-FEMA leaflets instead of saving lives.

And regarding Brown's claim that he had to hold back aid and workers while waiting for an explicit request for help, here's what Daniel Franklin of The Washington Monthly pointed out in a 1995 article about FEMA:

In the fall of 1992, Senator Barbara Mikulski, then the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over FEMA's budget, told the General Accounting Office (GAO) that it had to suggest real improvements for FEMA or else the GAO itself would see its budget slashed.

... Jeffrey Itell, the GAO project manager who conducted the study, [said] the answer was "a no-brainer." FEMA's enabling legislation, the Stafford Act, provided FEMA officials with powers that the bureaucrats didn't exercise. "We found that without state requests, FEMA could assess the catastrophic area, assess what assistance the state needed, start mobilizing that relief, present its recommendations to the governor, and, if necessary--as Andrew Card did--get in the governor's face to force the issue of accepting federal help...."

Andrew Card? Yup -- he was Bush Senior's secretary of transportation in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew hit; Poppy, criticized for a slow response to Andrew, convened a task force led by Card, and Franklin gives Card credit for breaking the aid logjam in that disaster.

That means that Card, who's now Bush Junior's chief of staff, has some experience in such matters -- yet as the waters rose in New Orleans he wasn't immediately called back from vacation. Stupid.

A mixed verdict in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll:

...Forty-two percent of respondents characterized President Bush's response to the disaster as "bad" or "terrible," while 35 percent said it was "good" or "great."

Federal government agencies' response was described as "bad" or "terrible" by 42 percent, and "good" or "great" by 35 percent. State and local officials' response was described as "bad" or "terrible" by 35 percent and "good" or "great" by 37 percent.

Respondents also disagreed widely on who is to blame for the problems in the city following the hurricane -- 13 percent said Bush, 18 percent said federal agencies, 25 percent blamed state or local officials and 38 percent said no one is to blame. And 63 percent said they do not believe anyone at federal agencies responsible for handling emergencies should be fired as a result.

In recent days, 62 percent said they believe progress made in dealing with the situation is satisfactory.

...Er, mixed with one exception:

However, a resounding 79 percent said they believe gas companies are taking advantage of the situation and charging unfair prices to consumers as a result of the hurricane.

Brilliant:

Add geography to the growing list of FEMA fumbles.

A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

It was not known whether arrangements have been made to care for the evacuees or transport them to the correct destination....

Simkovich said that the agency had described some of the evacuees as needing "some minor treatment ... possibly some major treatment."

"Unfortunately, the plane did not come in," Simkovich said....

--CNN

From "FEMA For Kids":

"Disasters don't last very long. Soon, things will be back to normal."

UPDATES

Laura Rozen at War and Piece notes that FEMA no longer lists Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing as a recommended Katrina charity. She provides a screen shot of the list that used to be at the FEMA link; in addition to that, I found live links to this August 29 press release (English) and this one from September 2 (Spanish).

By the way, FEMA also recommended that people donate to Operation Blessing in the wake of 9/11. It's not clear whether the list was compiled before or after Robertson and Jerry Falwell declared on television that 9/11 was caused by abortion, homosexuality, and the ACLU, but the organization was never de-listed.

Also, Rush Limbaugh's people now seem to have actually made tickets available for his upcoming Katrina-benefit live show. However, he's still suggesting you give to Operation Blessing.

(War and Piece link via The Sideshow.)

Look, we know Bush screws up. But notice the pattern of some of the screwups: He fails, then he's criticized -- and then he makes a great show of working to exceed expectations that he himself has lowered. He lowers his own bar, then seeks praise for clearing it.

We know he did this after 9/11. He ran like a scared rabbit that day and made godawful mini-speeches. As Rudy Giuliani displayed unexpected reserves of calm strength and empathy, New York waited a day, then two days, for the president of the United States to show up. He finally dropped by three days after the fact, on 9/14, bullhorn in hand. And a few days after that he gave a speech to Congress that was praised as magisterial, though it was merely adequate. It didn't matter -- he cleared a bar he'd lowered.

It happened again during the tsunami -- the government's relief contribution was late and inadequate, but then, reeling from criticism, he raised the dollar amount, and raised it again. Then he dispatched his father and Bill Clinton to the stricken area. Bush did better than he'd led the world to believe he'd do -- therefore, you were supposed to think, he did well.

It's an interesting pattern: A crisis for millions of people becomes a crisis for him. A problem requiring a response from government departments and agencies that actually do things becomes a problem requiring a response from Bush's imagemongers -- virtually the only people in his administration who are any good at their jobs.

And, of course, the criticism rallies right-wingers in the mainstream and irregular media to do what they do best, which is to try to shift blame to Democrats.

A lot of little kids learn to manipulate grown-ups this way. Some, of course, never stop doing it.

"...We blowed out a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt...."

--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885, anticipating disaster relief in George W. Bush's America 120 years later

...the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

--Paul Krugman in today's New York Times

...the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of "privatization," the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.

--James Carroll in today's Boston Globe

Public vs. private? This, from Friday's Boston Globe, sums it up for me (emphasis mine):

Rescuers finally made it into Charity Hospital, the largest public hospital and trauma center in the city, where gunshots prevented efforts on Thursday to evacuate more than 250 patients.

"We moved all of the babies out of Charity this morning," said Keith Simon, spokesman for Acadian Ambulance Service Inc.

"Our morgue at Big Charity is full and it is under water," said Don Smithburg, CEO of the Louisiana State University hospital system, which oversees the two public hospitals.

He said the morgue had 12 bodies, and five others were stacked in a stairwell -- in both cases under water. Other bodies were in other parts of the hospital.

As for the doctors and nurses: "Some of them are on the brink of unable to cope any longer."

He said some areas are out of food and water. "Some of my staff are giving each other intravenous fluids," Smithburg said.

A very different scenario seemed to have unfolded across the street at Tulane University Hospital, a private facility operated by one of the country's largest for-profit hospital companies, the Hospital Corporation of America. Even before the storm, which flooded the hospital in 6 to 8 feet of water, the company began arrangements to rent 20 private helicopters from around the country.

By yesterday, the hospital had evacuated 200 patients and 1,100 relatives and employees. The hospital also flew in its own security force, satellite phones, food, water, batteries, and linens, said spokesman Jeff Prescott....

Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose....

So now it's Roberts for Chief Justice. Guess I really have to throw out that crystal ball -- as some of you know, I've been predicting Clarence Thomas as Bush's choice for Chief Justice for nearly three years now. Maybe Thomas's exercise regimen didn't meet with the president's approval.

With regard to the new vacancy, this strikes me as silly:

Bush, with an ambitious agenda that includes more tax cuts and Social Security overhaul, doesn't have enough power on Capitol Hill right now to take on another fight on the Supreme Court, [pollster John] Zogby said.

"He is a resilient political figure -- down but not necessarily out -- but he's got to pitch this one, the Supreme Court nominee, right down the middle," Zogby said.

Oh, please. He may feel he needs another stealth zealot -- i.e., a second Roberts -- but I wouldn't count on even that. He's not going to pick anyone to the left of far right. He just doesn't do that.

One more complicated family weekend coming up, so I won't be posting until Monday night. Meanwhile, I've added new links to the blogroll -- some are well known, others less so. Quite a few are blogs run by loyal readers of this blog (thanks, folks). Added are: Birmingham Blues, BlogGram, Bulworth, Crooks and Liars, firedoglake, Greg T., Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness, Isebrand, A Lie A Day, Martini Republic, Mykeru, PSoTD, The Ruth Group, and The Village Voice's Bush Beat. See you soon.

PRIORITIES

New Orleans is now experiencing a third world-style refugee crisis? Hey, perfect time to cut taxes!

With Congress preparing to reconvene in early September, Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist said a vote to fully repeal the estate tax will be tops on the to-do list.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, has not wavered publicly from statements that the either the first or second bill of the September session would be a vote on a bill to repeal the estate tax beginning in 2005 -- meaning a vote is scheduled for the week of Sept. 6.

... According to the Joint Committee on Taxation the cost of a full repeal could be as much as $300 billion.

--WebCPA.com

I appreciate Harry Reid's response:

...Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader, suggested that Republicans should drop plans to repeal the estate tax and concentrate instead on hurricane relief.

"Given the tragic and devastating events along the Gulf Coast, members of the Senate would have great difficulty explaining why we were debating the estate tax during our first days back when we know hundreds of thousands of families are suffering," Mr. Reid said in a letter to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader....

An ad from United for a Fair Economy airs this weekend on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC:

A new TV ad featuring a frivolous heiress figure who thanks Congressional Republicans for their attempts to repeal the federal estate tax will begin airing Sept. 2 on cable stations in the Washington, D.C. area. The ad can be viewed at http://www.faireconomy.org/estatetax/heiressad....

Script of United for a Fair Economy -- Frivolous Heiress TV ad -- :30 TV

Hi, I'm London, and I just wanted to personally thank my Republican friends in Congress for trying to get rid of that mean old inheritance tax.

I already stand to inherit a fortune, and because of you, I will get millions more.

I know the government has a lot of debt and it has to cut benefits to our soldiers. But they're used to making sacrifices. I'm not. So I just wanted to say to the Republican party, thanks for watching out for me. You are so hot.

It's a pretty good ad. The timing might seem tasteless, but so is the timing of the vote.

Hey, if this helps people, I'm fine with it:

Rush Limbaugh on Broadway for Hurricane Relief

Just announced by Mark Simone on WABC radio in New York.

One show only at the New Amsterdam Theater in New York City on Oct 18th.  Sean Hannity to introduce.

Tickets to go on sale at Ticketmaster....

Tickets will be $77.

... Er, too bad the tickets aren't on sale at Ticketmaster as I type this, or, as far as I can tell, anywhere on Limbaugh's site (you'd think he'd want to say something here). The theater, bafflingly, doesn't seem to have a Web site of its own seems to have no information about the show on its Web site. Rush's flagship station, WABC, isn't selling tickets online and just gives the local phone number for Ticketmaster, but the automated response doesn't recognize either "Rush on Broadway" (mis-hearing it as "the Russian Ballet") or "Rush Limbaugh."

Can't any of these right-wingers do disaster preparedness?

Another poll, this one from CBS, shows Bush in the doldrums, though still above the floor his fan base provides -- his approval is at 41%. But with regard to Katrina, there's this:

Hurricane Katrina may give President Bush the opportunity to increase his low approval ratings. In fact, his overall rating did rise on the last day of the poll, after he returned to the White House from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and addressed the nation on the crisis in the Gulf Coast.

... Fifty-four percent approve of the way the President is handling Hurricane Katrina, and only 12 percent disapprove -- but one-third can't say yet. This question was added to the poll on Tuesday, the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf coast.

And while we think there was widespread disapproval of Bush Senior's handling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, there was polling, a few weeks after the hurricane hit, and Poppy's numbers were just fine:

In September 1992, nearly two-thirds approved of then-President Bush's handling of Hurricane Andrew, while three in 10 disapproved -- but that poll was conducted nearly three weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida.

Meanwhile, I think I see the conventional wisdom starting to solidify. Here's Ron Fournier of AP:

...There's plenty of blame to go around - the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.....

Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.

...Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The best leaders running the most efficient agencies would have been sharply challenged.

...Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.

"Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability."...

Lovely -- "I don't know how this all happened -- I guess it's just everybody's fault equally. Gee, let's ask an ethics professor." Hey, Ron, you want accountability? Tell us who's responsible for what.

But that truth will get lost in the murk. There will be careful media examinations of what happened, both in the years before the levees failed and as the relief effort descended into anarchy -- but far more of the coverage will be in this same "It's all so incomprehensible" vein. And the conventional wisdom will be that it was all too overwhelming to really be anybody's fault.

Atrios directs us to this story, which points out that Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing is high on FEMA's list of recommended organizations for Katrina donations.

There are more reasons to object to this than just the obvious ones. For instance:

In 1994, ... Robertson told viewers Operation Blessing was using cargo planes to aid refugees from Rwanda who had fled into the neighboring nation of Zaire (now known as Congo) to escape a violent civil war.

Investigators later discovered that Robertson was using the planes, intended for relief efforts, to haul mining equipment in and out of Zaire for the African Development Corporation (ADC), Robertson's for-profit diamond-mining company. Robertson later said the planes had proved impractical for relief work and insisted he had reimbursed the charity for ADC's use of them.

The Virginian-Pilot newspaper noted that state officials criticized the charity for sloppy bookkeeping and for mixing non-profit and for-profit activities. It also pointed out that Robertson reimbursed Operation Blessing for ADC's use of its airplanes in two stages. Investigators determined that ADC owed Operation Blessing $468,773, and Robertson ultimately gave the group $572,597, although $400,000 of the debt was not paid until two months into the official investigation.

Investigators with Virginia's Office of Consumer Affairs concluded that Robertson "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements and other implications." In fact, the office recommended prosecuting Robertson in 1999 for making deceptive appeals about his charity but was overruled by the attorney general's office. Lawyers in the attorney general's office, headed at the time by Mark Earley, agreed Robertson had made inaccurate statements but decided against prosecution. (Earley, a long-time political ally of Robertson, accepted $35,000 in campaign contributions from Robertson in 1997.)

And prior to that:

As of 1987 Robertson reported that Operation Blessing had sent more than $3 million in aid to the Nicaraguan refugees. [His] CBN [Christian Broadcast Network] gave the $3 million to the contra's Houston-based Nicaraguan Patriotic Association, according to Juan Sacasas, Vice President of the group and representative of the FDN contra force. Robertson denies any connection with Sacasas. However, there is little question that the Operation Blessing donations reached the contra forces. Robertson was so popular among them that one group named itself the Pat Robertson Brigade.

Jesus wept.

U.S. President George W. Bush, flanked by former Presidents Bill Clinton (L) and George H. Bush, speaks about relief efforts from hurricane Katrina in the Oval Office of the White House, September 1, 2005. President Bush asked his father and Clinton to lead a fund-raising campaign for victims of the hurricane....

--Reuters

Send lawyers, guns and money

Dad, get me out of this

--Warren Zevon, 1978

Well, now I understand why there hasn't been a downturn in spending despite rising gas prices, at least pre-Katrina:

 U.S. savings rate falls below zero

Personal incomes increased 0.3% in July, while spending soared ahead by 1%. As a result, the personal savings rate tumbled to negative 0.6%, the lowest since monthly records began in 1959.

Quarterly data show negative savings rates for several quarters during the Great Depression. The savings rate was negative 0.2% in October 2001 and was 0% in June.

Negative savings rates are possible if consumers spend by selling assets, dipping into savings or borrowing against future income....

--MarketWatch.com

Clearly that's what's going on -- clearly people are assuming that their homes will continue gaining value forever, so they can spend and spend. But how much longer are house prices going to go up? Especially if the fastest-growing communities require long commutes to center cities and gas prices are $3.00-plus a gallon?

Just to sum up what I've been saying: Bush and his advisers saw Katrina coming and thought not "crisis" or "tragedy" but "opportunity." Bush has been politicizing the storm -- i.e., trying to use it to gain ground he lost in the polls -- since before it made landfall. And he's been grandstanding ever since. Remember that when someone on the right accuses you -- us -- of politicizing the storm by criticizing the administration.

John DiIulio can't be quoted often enough on the Bush approach:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

And it may be working. The lead of this story (about a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll partly conducted since Katrina hit) suggests continued dissatisfaction with Bush on a number of specific issues, but the bottom line is this:

Overall, 45 percent said they approve of how Bush is handling his job while 52 percent disapproved. That is an improvement from 40 percent and 56 percent in an Aug. 22-26 poll....

To some extent, Bush's bounceback can be attributed to the fact that at 40% he may have hit the "floor" provided by Bush-lovers -- the large chunk of the population who'll never abandon him because they hate Democrats and liberals and coastal sophisticates, love Jesus and NASCAR and country music, and think, Bush is one of us. It also helps Bush that Katrina has largely driven Iraq from the headlines.

But I think his decision to take ownership of the tragedy is doing what it was intended to do. Yeah, he's being criticized by the media. That's not going to hurt him. He'll be hurt only if ordinary citizens and local officials blame his administration for how the recovery goes -- and if that anger is widely reported and treated as justifiable. For now, though, he's playing Daddy, feeling our pain; moreover, he has a new 9/11 he can use as an excuse for a lot of things he's screwed up. So I think he'll be above 50% soon -- at least briefly, until Katrina fades from the headlines.

(Poll story via DU.)

****

P.S.: Yes, I'm reading Atrios and others who are cataloging the ineptitude and mismanagement of the response. But I've also been watching TV news -- and there it's all just a tragedy. As long as this is described as just an awful act of God, with Bush purring soothing words, his administration will get away with incompetence -- and he'll rise in the polls.

Shorter New York Times: Bush's speech sucked.

Shorter National Review Online: Bush's speech sucked.

It's an across-the-board consensus!