Current Events

Nancy Peloski on a conversation she had with President Bush:

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown. ” ‘He said ‘Why would I do that?”’ Pelosi said.
”’I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?”’

Other Bush Katrina Hits:

“Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house… there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”
“…I’m confident that, with time, you can get your life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet…”

Between 10,000 and 40,000 people are DEAD.
All of the spin about “rebuilding the city” and it will be as good as it was before… bullshit.
The only way that New Orleans will become a success is if Bush personally takes the 40,000 dead bodies, places them in one place, and resurrects them all.
If 40,000 dead people come back to life, then Bush can keep his job. If not he and every FEMA and Homeland Security member needs to lose their job, one way or another.

According to Reuters:

The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.

According to journalist Bob Brigham:

We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning their TV trucks around.
Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city.

They realize that the reporters on the ground are what is killing them and their ability to spin the news the way they want people to hear it, and they’re trying to hide the numbers of the dead to lessen the political impact of the tragedy.

I’ve attempted to do some timeline drawing on my site, but this page is the complete detailed picture of what happened and when, and it’s damning for President Bush.
It’s just damning. It’s so clear that the problem started at the top.
The more I read through this, the angrier I get. PLEASE, PLEASE e-mail this timeline to everyone you know.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Washington Post and Newsweek had to issue corrections after it was discovered they printed Bush official’s lies as fact without factchecking the claims, which turned out to be false.
Media Matters has a letter and contact information so you can ask the Washington Post what it will do about it’s grave journalistic mistake.

One of my friends passed along this information:
My church, St. Monica, is accepting clothing donations through Friday (Sep 9). Details can be found here.
The address is 6131 N. Michigan Rd.
Radio stations are also putting together food and clothing drives, as are local fire stations. Check radio station websites for details, and ask at your local fire station to find out which stations in your township are doing it.
————–
UPDATE: Another place you can donate:
Pastors for Peace Emergency Caravan Indianapolis and West Lafayette
Pastors for Peace will have a truck leaving Chicago headed for Mississippi and Louisiana with aid for those in need.
Mississippi Distribution through Black Caucus Member, and Ranking Democratic Member Committee on Homeland Security, Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) Louisiana Distribution through African American Churches, arrangements still in process
You can help by giving:
Clothing
Bedding
Non-perishable food items
Bottled water
Money for gas and driver?s expenses
Items to be picked up by Pastors for Peace Tuesday, September 13th
Collections points will be:
Indianapolis:
North Meadow Circle of Friends
1710 North Talbott Street
Items can be left on porch if door is not open: Contact Tony or Jenny Barrows
317- 924-1086

From a funeral director deployed to handle bodies in New Orleans:

“DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies,” Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.
His partner, Dan Hicks, of Paducah, Ky., was deployed Monday. Buckner, of Dickson, is on standby. Their funeral home is one of several collection sites for donations to be taken to the Red Cross in Fayetteville on Wednesday for transfer to places in need.
The 40,000 estimate does “not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from … mausoleums,” Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday.

The Times-Pickayune estimates at least 10,000 dead, and discusses in grisly detail finding some of the bodies at the convention center. Don’t read that link unless you have a strong stomach. It’s horrifying. I keep thinking about my family members being caught in something like this. When they’re talking about the elderly, I keep picturing my mom’s mother, and it breaks my heart.

If you need to locate someone in New Orleans and have not heard from them, you can submit a report requesting they search for someone.

We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we’re going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard regarding Friday:

The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” and he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you.” Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday… and she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night! [Sobbing] Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us…”

Barbara Bush “lets them eat cake” on Sunday:

Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated:
“Almost everyone I’ve talked to wants to move to Houston.”
Then she added: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed with the hospitality.
“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (she chuckled)–this is working very well for them.”

Also on Sunday after Barbara’s misguided statements:

“They killed a man here last night,” Steve Banka, 28, told the Reuters news agency before he left on Sunday.
“A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them. He jumped up on the truck’s windscreen and they shot him dead,” Mr Banka said.

Mitch “The Blade” Daniels and the New Orleans Disaster:

Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was forced to resign in 2002 over budget disagreements with the White House. He clashed with Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the administration’s annual budget goals.
“One time I took two pieces of steel into Mitch Daniels’ office,” Parker recalled. “They were exactly the same pieces of steel, except one had been under water in a Mississippi lock for 30 years, and the other was new. The first piece was completely corroded and falling apart because of a lack of funding. I said, ‘Mitch, it doesn’t matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates — either way it’s the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame.’ It made no impact on him whatsoever.”
Daniels, now governor of Indiana, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Army Times calls American citizens “insurgents” and New Orleans a “combat operation:”

While some fight the insurgency in the city, other carry on with rescue and evacuation operations. Helicopters are still pulling hundreds of stranded people from rooftops of flooded homes.

Katrina’s real name: global warming

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming. When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming. … And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one day — killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others — the villain was global warming.