Saturday, September 24, 2005
YEAH, YOU HEARD ME, YA HIPPIE DITTOHEAD - I'M A FREAKIN' LIBERTARIAN!
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WHAT IS A LIBERTARIAN?
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Defining Libertarianism
Here's how some organizations, individuals, Web sites, and reference works have defined a libertarian. Perhaps one of them closely matches your political beliefs, or is similar to your definition of a libertarian.
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lib·er·tar·i·an: One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state. -- American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition
Libertarianism is, as the name implies, the belief in liberty. Libertarians believe that each person owns his own life and property, and has the right to make his own choices as to how he lives his life -- as long as he simply respects the same right of others to do the same. -- Sharon Harris, President, Advocates for Self-Government
Libertarianism. The belief that government should not interfere in the lives of citizens, other than to provide police and military protection. Libertarianism cannot easily be placed on the left-right scale that is usually used to analyze political philosophies. Libertarians are strong supporters of capitalism and free trade and yet also tolerant on social and lifestyle issues, which are considered none of the government's business. The basic philosophy is "live and let live." -- AmericanSpirit Political Dictionary
A libertarian is the opposite of an authoritarian. Strictly speaking, a libertarian is one who rejects the idea of using violence or the threat of violence -- legal or illegal -- to impose his will or viewpoint upon any peaceful person. Generally speaking, a libertarian is one who wants to be governed far less than he is today. -- Dean Russell, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
Libertarianism is what your mom taught you: behave yourself and don't hit your sister. -- Dr. Kenneth Bisson
Libertarianism is America's heritage of liberty, patriotism, and honest work to build a future for your family. It's the idea that being free and independent is a great way to live. That each of us is a unique individual, with great potential. That you own yourself, and that you have the right to decide what's best for you. -- David Bergland, author, Libertarianism in One Lesson
Libertarianism encompasses all or most of the following: strong support of individual civil liberties, social tolerance, and private property; belief in the positive powers of the free market; and an espousal of constitutionally limited and greatly reduced government. Libertarian thought at its most basic level agrees with Jefferson's statement, "That government is best which governs least." -- Deanna Corbeil, PageWise.com
Libertarianism holds that human happiness and prosperity are maximized to the extent that individuals are allowed to make their own decisions about how to live and what to believe. Individuals should be free to follow their own consciences and inspirations, to choose their own values, and to decide for themselves as much as possible their occupations, undertakings, pastimes, and transactions. Libertarianism is self-determination. It is thinking for yourself. -- Michael S. Wolf
Libertarians believe individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon the equal rights of others. They further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect those rights. -- The FreeDictionary.com
[Libertarianism] is the classic idea of freedom tempered with responsibility for the consequences of your actions. -- Charles Murray, author, What It Means to Be a Libertarian
Basically, libertarianism is a restatement of how we learned to get along with each other as youngsters. We honor our neighbors' choices, and they honor ours. We don't start fights and only fight back when attacked. We try to make right any wrongs that we do. Simple, isn't it? -- Dr. Mary Ruwart, author, Healing Our World
Libertarians wish to build a society based primarily on voluntary rather than involuntary relationships between individuals. Libertarians share with liberals a concern for freedom of expression. Libertarians share with conservatives a concern for free enterprise. The result of this mixture is a political philosophy which favors as little government as possible.-- Glen Raphael, creator, Liberals & LibertariansSaturday, September 24, 2005
WHICH IS IT?
Saturday, September 24, 2005
BILL FRIST IS A LYING SACK OF SHIT FATCAT
Frist Knew About Blind Trust Investments
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., was updated several times about his investments in blind trusts during 2002, the last time two weeks before he publicly denied any knowledge of what was in the accounts, documents show.
The updates included stock transactions involving HCA Inc., the hospital operating company founded by Frist's family.
Frist's sale of HCA stock is under scrutiny by the federal government. Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA said Friday it had received a subpoena from prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, asking for documents the company believes are related to Frist's sale of company stock this past summer.
Prosecutors also have contacted the senator's office, Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson said Friday. He said neither the senator nor his office had received a subpoena.
Frist's office confirmed the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into the sale.
"Senator Frist had no information about the company or its performance that was not available to the public when he directed the trustees to sell the HCA stock," Stevenson said in a statement.
Frist sold his HCA stock from several blind trusts this summer, at a time when insiders in the company also were selling off shares worth $112 million from January through June. Frist aides say he sold his stock to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.
Frist, asked in a television interview in January 2003 whether he should sell his HCA stock, responded: "Well, I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust. So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock"
Frist, referring to his trust and those of his family, also said in the interview, "I have no control. It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea."
Documents filed with the Senate showed that just two weeks before those comments, the trustee of the senator's trust, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., wrote to Frist that HCA stock was contributed to the trust. It was valued at $15,000 and $50,000.
The documents filed by the trustees of Frist's blind trusts were obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.
On Nov. 20, 2002, Scobey wrote Frist that 14,781 shares of HCA were sold, along with three other investments. The same day, Scobey wrote that four other investments were sold, none of them HCA stock.
On May 16, 2002, Scobey advised Frist that four investments were contributed to a Frist blind trust, including HCA stock valued at $500,000 to $1 million. A second letter the same day mentions the same four investments going into a different trust, but with different valuations, including HCA stock valued at $250,000 to $500,000.
On Jan. 14, 2002, a trustee for Frist's children notified the secretary of the Senate that two investments were added to the blind trusts of Frist's sons Jonathan and Bryan — including HCA stock valued at $5,000 to $10,000. It was not clear whether Frist received a copy of the letter.
Stevenson, the Frist spokesman, said he could not comment on the updates received by the senator. He added that Frist properly notified the Senate Ethics Committee this summer that he was initiating the sale of all remaining HCA shares, a requirement under Senate rules. All the stock was sold by July 1, including shares owned by his wife and children.
"As with the SEC, the majority leader will provide the U.S. attorney's office with any information that it needs with respect to this matter," Stevenson said.
The SEC also contacted HCA on Friday to informally request copies of the subpoenaed documents, said company spokesman Jeff Prescott. "We of course will comply with that request," he said.
Herb Haddad, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, said the office had no comment on the matter. SEC spokesman John Nester declined to say whether the agency had contacted Frist's office.
David Becker, who was general counsel at the SEC from 2000 to 2002, noted that both Frist and HCA were being put under scrutiny.
In insider trading cases, "you connect the dots not by simply going from one dot to another but by starting at both dots and working toward the middle," Becker said. "The facts that are public don't come close to demonstrating wrongdoing. It's way too premature to have any judgment."
HCA, the nation's largest for-profit hospital company, was founded by Frist's father, the late Thomas Frist Sr. His brother, Thomas Jr., was formerly its CEO and chairman and remains on the board of directors. Frist is a heart surgeon by training.
Frist asked a trustee to sell all his HCA stock in June, near a 52-week price peak of $58.40 a share. Reports to the SEC showed HCA insiders sold about 2.3 million shares.
Frist's sale came about two weeks before the company issued a disappointing earnings forecast that drove its stock price down almost 16 percent by mid-July and still have not recovered. HCA rose $1.70 Friday, closing at $47.60.
The value of Frist's stock at the time of the sale was not disclosed. Earlier this year, he reported blind trusts with all holdings valued at $7 million to $35 million.
___Saturday, September 24, 2005
OR, THEY COULD JUST BRAND YOU AN 'ENEMY COMBATANT' AND THROW AWAY THE KEY
Navy Secretly Contracted Jets Used by CIA
SAN DIEGO, Associated Press - A branch of the U.S. Navy secretly contracted a 33-plane fleet that included two Gulfstream jets reportedly used to fly terror suspects to countries known to practice torture, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
At least 10 U.S. aviation companies were issued classified contracts in 2001 and 2002 by the obscure Navy Engineering Logistics Office for the "occasional airlift of USN (Navy) cargo worldwide," according to Defense Department documents the AP obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Two of the companies — Richmor Aviation Inc. and Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. — chartered luxury Gulfstreams that flew terror suspects captured in Europe to Egypt, according to U.S. and European media reports. Once there, the men told family members, they were tortured. Authorities in Italy and Sweden have expressed outrage over flights they say were illegal and orchestrated by the U.S. government.
While the Gulfstreams came under scrutiny in 2001, what hasn't been disclosed is the Navy's role in contracting planes involved in operations the CIA terms "rendition" and what Italian prosecutors call kidnapping.
"A lot of us have been focusing on the role of the CIA but also suspecting that certain parts of the armed forces are involved," said Margaret Satterthwaite, a New York University School of Law researcher who has investigated renditions.
The Navy contracts involve more planes than previously reported — other news outlets totaled 26 planes; the AP identified 33 planes.
Italian judges have issued arrest warrants for 19 purported CIA operatives who allegedly snatched a Muslim cleric from Milan in 2003 and flew him to Cairo, according to FAA records cited by the Chicago Tribune, aboard Richmor's Gulfstream IV. The jet belongs to a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, who told The Boston Globe that the team's logo was covered when the CIA leased the plane. Another case involves two men taken from Sweden to Egypt in 2001 aboard Premier's Gulfstream V.
Neither the CIA nor a Navy spokeswoman at the Pentagon would comment for this story. Officials at the Navy Engineering Logistics Office, or NELO, in Arlington, Va., didn't respond to messages requesting comment.
Joseph P. Duenas, counsel for the logistics office, declined to provide the contracts, saying they "involve national security information that is classified."
The secrecy surrounding the deals makes it unclear why NELO issued them, but one reason may be the office's anonymity — the agency is so buried within the Pentagon bureaucracy that some career Navy officials have never heard of it.
John Hutson, a retired rear admiral who was the Navy's Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000 and is critical of the Bush administration's detainee policies, said he was not familiar with NELO. Told of its activities, Hutson said NELO employees could be held liable if they knew the planes would be used for renditions. Human rights lawyers allege rendition flights violate criminal law.
The office has been around since the mid-1970s, according to a former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because NELO's activities are secret. NELO operates under different names: it's also known as the Navy's Office of Special Projects and its San Diego location is called the Navy Regional Plant Equipment Office.
None of those names is listed in the U.S. Government Manual, the official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices. A man who answered the phone at NELO's Arlington office refused to give his name or the agency's address, suggesting it may be classified.
In court documents filed in the case of a fired Office of Special Projects whistleblower, government attorneys described the agency's principal function as "the conduct of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence activities."
The AP learned of the airplane contracts through a Freedom of Information Act request that focused on a different subject — permits granted to all 10 aviation companies that let them land at any Navy base worldwide.
The permits list planes operated by the companies and a contract number issued by NELO. The numbers provide some details about the contracts, including when they were issued, but do not say when they expire. In the documents the AP reviewed, contracts were issued in 2001 and 2002 and were cited on landing permits issued in 2004. The NELO contract numbers also appear on permits issued in 2003 and 2004 that allowed seven of the companies to buy fuel at military bases worldwide.
The permits list 31 planes under NELO contract other than the two Gulfstreams. They include a small Cessna; three huge Lockheed Hercules cargo planes; a Gulfstream 1159a; a Lear Jet 35A; a DC-3; two Boeing 737s; and a 53-passenger DeHavilland DH-8 photographed by plane spotters in
Afghanistan.
Ownership of the planes is shielded behind a maze of paperwork and elusive executives.
James J. Kershaw is listed as president of three of the companies, located in Massachusetts, Tennessee and North Carolina. Two other companies share the same vice president, Colleen Bornt. Extensive public record searches could not locate either of them.
Record searches also failed to turn up information on Leonard T. Bayard, whose firm bought Premier Executive Transport Services' Gulfstream. The address of Bayard's firm is the Portland, Ore., office of attorney Scott Caplan.
Asked if his client is a real person, Caplan replied: "No comment."Saturday, September 24, 2005
NOT POOR, NOT STUCK, NOT BLACK
Rita's Victims Wealthier Than Katrina's
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Hurricane Rita smashed into a region that is wealthier, more mobile and much less densely populated than the one devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Most of Rita's victims are by no means wealthy. But they are less likely to live in poverty, more likely to own a car, and less likely to be a member of a minority group than were Katrina's victims, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data.
Experts said the wealth and mobility of people in Rita's path — combined with a new sense of urgency following Katrina — led to a more thorough evacuation.
"They have cars," said Carnot Nelson, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida. "They have a way to leave. It's as simple as that."
Money and transportation were in short supply for many affected by Katrina.
In densely populated New Orleans, more than 27 percent of the households had no access to a vehicle, according to 2000 census data. The family median income, at $32,300, was nearly $20,000 below the national average.
Fred Medway, a psychology professor at the University of South Carolina, said Katrina's destruction provided incentive for people to flee Rita.
"They have seen what a hurricane can do," Medway said. "That's a very powerful motivator."
Rita made landfall along the Texas-Louisiana line, and worked its way north, bringing flood waters inland.
On the Texas side is Jefferson County, home to Port Arthur and Beaumont, two oil refining towns. To the north are Orange, Jasper and Newton counties.
On the Louisiana side is Calcasieu Parish, home to Lake Charles, and Beauregard Parish to the north.
The AP analysis of 2000 census data showed:
_A majority of residents in all six counties and parishes at the center of Rita's wrath are white. Jefferson County, where about 34 percent of the residents are black, has the largest minority population. New Orleans, by comparison, was 67 percent black.
_Rita's eye tracked over mostly rural areas. The most densely populated county hit by Rita was Jefferson, with 279 residents per square mile. Jasper, Newton and Beauregard all had fewer than 50 people per square mile.
Orleans Parish in Louisiana, home to New Orleans, had 2,684 residents per square mile.
_None of the counties had median family incomes above the national median of $50,000, but all had incomes above the median in New Orleans, which was $32,300.
_All six counties and parishes had higher poverty rates than the national average of 9.2 percent. But none came close the 24 percent of families in New Orleans living below the poverty level.
_Relatively few people in the six counties and parishes did not have access to a vehicle. About 10 percent of the households in tiny Newton County did not have a vehicle, the highest percentage among the counties. In New Orleans, 27 percent of the households did not have a car or truck.Friday, September 23, 2005
IT'S JUST GONNA GET WORSE, FOLKS.
Report says global warming could spark conflict
A medieval bridge has emerged from the depths of the San Juan reservoir in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, 70 kilometres (43 miles) outside Madrid, as a result of dramatically low water levels, September 21, 2005. (Susana Vera/Reuters)
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Rising world temperatures could cause a significant increase in disease across Asia and Pacific Island nations, leading to conflict and leaving hundreds of millions of people displaced, a new report said on Thursday.
Global warming by the year 2100 could also lead to more droughts, floods and typhoons, and increase the incidence of malaria, dengue fever and cholera, the report into the health impact of rising temperatures found.
Compiled by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the country's leading medical and environment groups, the study predicts average temperatures will rise by between 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) and 6 degrees by 2100.
"We're not just talking about a longer summer or a shorter ski season," AMA president Mukesh Haikerwal told reporters.
"Climate change will damage our health. People will get sick as a direct result. People will die in larger numbers as our earth, our world, our home, heats up."
In Australia, Haikerwal said up to 15,000 people could die each year due to heat stress by 2100, up from about 1,000 a year at present, while dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases could spread as far south as Sydney.
Dengue fever in Australia is currently confined to the country's tropical and sparsely populated far north.
Internationally, higher world temperatures would increase the incidence of violent storms and droughts, and could lead to crop failures which could cause political and social upheaval.
"As stresses increase there is likely to be a shift toward authoritarian governments," the report said.
"At the worst case, large scale state failure and major conflict may generate hundreds of millions of displaced people in the Asia-Pacific region, a widespread collapse of law, and numerous abuses of human rights."
The report said crop yields were likely to increase in parts of Northern Asia, but would decrease in countries in Southern Asia, where the incidence of floods, droughts, forest fires and tropical cyclones would all increase.
The report, titled Climate Change Health Impacts in Australia; Effects of Dramatic CO2 Emission Reductions, calls on governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions to limit the impact of global warming.Wednesday, September 21, 2005
RESPONSIBABBLE
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
GIMME THAT CLICKER, MAN
WHAT SHOW DID YOU WATCH DURING THE WAR, DADDY?
By Ted Rall Wed Sep 21, 6:08 PM ET
Iraq War, Downgraded to a Box Score, is Lost
NEW YORK--Sectarian civil war, long predicted by yours truly and other antiwar types, has arrived in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Sunni bombs killing a hundred people a day, spurred on by Al Qaeda and a declaration of "all-out war" in retaliation for the Shiites' refusal to allow Sunni representation in the next government, have become routine. Kurds and Arabs are assassinating each other over oil rights. A year ago these developments would have sparked accusations, counterarguments and fierce debates in the U.S. over what to do next. Now no one cares.
Passions that burned hot during the build-up towards and immediate aftermath of the spring 2003 invasion have cooled and hardened into bitter, silent, mutual disdain. Supporters of the war, their ranks dwindled to a hardcore 44 percent in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, remain true believers regardless of its $2,000-a-second price tag, intentionally unquantified carnage among Iraqis, and continued failure to locate weapons of mass destruction. For those opposed to America's adventure in nation-building, neither Saddam's reported confessions nor any number of "things are better in Iraq than the media says" reports (in the media, natch) can change their minds.
The war divided families, destroyed relationships, even prompted the vandalism of cars adorned with the wrong bumper sticker--but that was then, back in 2004, during a hotly-contested election campaign featuring a warmongering draft dodger challenged by a peacenik Vietnam vet. Iraq has faded from the top headlines, its daily agony of dead, wounded and bombing victims downgraded to the dismal, gray status of a daily box score. It has been replaced by fresher outrages--the government's non-response to Hurricane Katrina, skyrocketing gas prices, rising unemployment, white collar criminals subjected to excessive prison sentences on a par with those received by druggies. Waiting in the wings: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, depending on what acts of state treason prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald managed to dig up over summer vacation.
The fighting over the war is over. Long live the war.
Television and its 24-hour news cycle may be the poisonous root causes of national ADD, but our growing disinterest in Iraq also owes a lot to the polarization that has characterized reaction to this war ever since it was conceived in
Dick Cheney's executive suite. Americans remained focused on World War II through four tough years partly because the war effort required a wholesale transformation of the economy and everyday life, but also because its initial popularity--affirmed by a legal, Congressional declaration of war--amounted to society's tacit commitment to endure the inevitable ups and downs. By contrast, Americans' initial support of intervention in Vietnam proved wide but thin after the growing cost reminded them that the endeavor had been optional from the start.
As Gordon Goldstein, national security advisor to JFK and LBJ, said in 2003: "There was no strategy to generate public support for an engagement that would be long and costly and difficult. They didn't sell it that way in Vietnam and they haven't sold it that way in Iraq."
The Iraq war, validated by neither constitutional legality nor (unlike Vietnam) international endorsement via the U.N., prompted millions to protest before it even began. So when the reality of Iraq belied the Bush Administration's promises--no WMDs, no body armor, no rose petals, no mission accomplished--we clammed up like a bickering couple whose positions are intractable and diametrically opposed. After 9/11, only a fool would have let Saddam remain in power, say the Bushian 44 percent. And 56 percent reply: only a fool would have attacked Saddam while 9/11 remained unavenged. But they keep their opinions to themselves and the occasional pollster.
Without consensus, war relies on publicity to keep it a priority. News that is always the same, however, is no longer news. Another suicide bomber kills 20 Iraqi policemen near Mosul. Another roadside bomb (IED if you watch Fox, because Fox likes military jargon) blows up a Humvee or Bradley fighting vehicle, killing three Marines and an Iraqi translator. Another helicopter crashes in a sandstorm; the
Pentagon is conducting another investigation to determine whether weather, enemy fire or faulty equipment is to blame. Since March 2003 suicide bombings and burning choppers have become almost as routine as the sun rising in the east--and thus, from a producer and editor's standpoint, boring.
At Starbucks and sports bars Americans are talking about broken levees and gas prices, not Iraq. We have not yet arrived at the point where Americans were during the early '70s, when Walter Cronkite read the (fictional) casualty reports from both sides of the Vietnam conflict alongside such financial minutiae as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the number of shares traded on the NYSE, and used similar graphics to illustrate both. Nevertheless, the war has become institutionalized. It is background noise. It is hard to imagine what could happen in Iraq that would make pay attention and talk, even argue, about the war. A bomb that killed a thousand civilians? Probably not even that...
Right or wrong? Essential or idiotic? When it comes to the war against Iraq, Americans only agree about one thing: it is no longer interesting. And so, pro or con, it is lost all the same.Wednesday, September 21, 2005
I SAID THERE WERE GONNA BE MORE OF THEM, AND STRONGER - FOLKS LAUGHED THEN, BUT I'M LAUGHING NOW
Rita becomes Category 5 Hurricane
GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) - Hurricane Rita grew into a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm on Wednesday and took aim at Texas as officials began evacuating more than a million people from most of the coast and parts of Houston.
"We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we've got to be ready for the worst," said U.S. President George W. Bush, who was heavily criticised for an ill-prepared federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
Bush declared emergencies for Texas and neighbouring Louisiana, which authorised the Homeland Security Department and Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate all disaster relief operations.
The U.S. National Hurricane Centre said Rita had become "an extremely dangerous" Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph (265 kph) as it moved over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A Category 5 storm can cause catastrophic damage.
Rita lashed the Florida Keys on Tuesday but did little damage to the vulnerable Florida islands.
The storm was expected to strengthen over the central Gulf but may also weaken slightly as it continues west, the National Hurricane Centre said earlier on Wednesday. The storm was expected to make landfall by Saturday "as a major hurricane ... at least Category 3," the centre said. A Category 3 storm can cause extensive damage.
Rita would most likely hit the Texas coast southwest of Galveston, where in 1900 at least 8,000 people died in the deadliest U.S. hurricane.
Just last month, Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and killed at least 1,037 people.
Markets reacted immediately on news the storm had gained strength, with the prospect of more destruction and oil-supply interruptions affecting everything from stocks and the dollar to oil prices.
EVACUATIONS
Galveston, on a barrier island, began evacuating residents on Tuesday. About 50 miles (80 km) inland, Houston Mayor Bill White ordered an evacuation of residents in areas prone to storm surges or major floods.
By evening, as many as 1.2 million people were expected to begin leaving Houston, America's fourth most populous city, officials said. Katrina displaced about 1 million people, including nearly all of New Orleans's 450,000 residents.
Stores in Houston quickly ran out of emergency supplies, plywood and food. The last major hurricane to hit Houston was Alicia in 1983, but Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 caused extensive flooding in the city and killed more than 40 people across the United States.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged Texans along a 300-mile (483 km) stretch comprising most of the state's coastline, to leave. He said nursing home residents already were being evacuated.
A major hurricane could send a 20-foot (6-metre) storm surge over the Texas coast.
Maria Stephens helped fellow residents of Galveston Island board evacuation buses and then prepared to drive inland with her husband and their three children.
"Everyone's scared, that's why we're all leaving," she said, citing television images of Katrina's devastation. "I saw the people at the shelters and the bodies floating in the water. I don't want that to be my family."
NASA prepared to evacuate its Johnson Space Centre in Houston and turn over control of the International Space Station to its Russian partners.
Taking lessons from problems after Katrina hit, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said authorities had positioned supplies and were checking on communications systems. The government sent Coast Guard Rear Adm. Larry Hereth to Texas to coordinate the response.
"I hope that by doing what the state officials and mayors are doing now ... getting people who are invalids out of the way, encouraging people to leave early, that when the storm hits, there will be property damage but hopefully there won't be a lot of people to rescue," Chertoff told MSNBC.
NEW ORLEANS TAKES NO CHANCES
Louisiana declared a state of emergency. New Orleans, flooded by Katrina and considered vulnerable to Rita, was taking no chances. Mayor Ray Nagin said two busloads of people had been evacuated already and 500 other buses were ready.
State officials said an estimated 9,700 residents of Cameron Parish on the Louisiana-Texas border were told to leave.
A FEMA spokesman said Rita was not expected to re-flood New Orleans if the storm stayed on its current westward course.
About 1,100 Katrina evacuees still in Houston's two mass shelters were being sent to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Some city hospitals were being evacuated.
Rita's centre was about 600 miles (965 km) east-southeast (1,215 kph) of Corpus Christi, Texas, at 5 p.m. EDT (10 p.m. British time). The storm was moving towards the west near 13 mph (21 kph), the hurricane centre said.
Oil companies just starting to recover from Katrina evacuated Gulf oil rigs as Rita moved closer. Four Texas refineries were shut down, even as four refineries remained shut in Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina.
Together with the 5 percent of U.S. refinery capacity shut since Katrina, the four closed Texas refineries add up to about 11.5 percent of U.S. oil refining.
A U.S. energy official said the risk of flooding at the Texas refineries was less than what Katrina posed in Louisiana, because they were on higher ground.
U.S. light crude oil rose $1.15 per barrel to $67.35. The dollar weakened and U.S. stock prices amid concerns about the storm's impact on energy costs and consumer spending.Monday, September 19, 2005
THERE HAS BEEN NO DEMOCRACY IN THE USA SINCE Y2K
A Diebold Insider Speaks Out
by Brad Friedman, Huffington Post
You were warned about Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. And you didn't listen. You were warned about the levees in New Orleans prior to Katrina. And you didn't listen.
You are now being warned about what both the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security has already warned you about and what someone who knows has called "one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known."
Will you listen this time before it's too late? Please?
Here's the warning the Dept. of Homeland Security gave you in August of 2004. Before the election. Read it.
Here's the warning that "someone who knows" gave you last Thursday. Read it.
When I say "you", you may be surprised to learn that I'm referring to you Democrats and I'm referring to you folks in the Mainstream Media. Yes, you. You who all had largely the same warnings that George W. Bush had about the threat that was Al-Qaeda and the quagmire of lies that was Iraq and the disaster-in-waiting that was New Orleans. You who hold George W. Bush responsible now for not having paid attention then.
But -- as you know -- you didn't pay much attention then either. You didn't yell and scream and take to the streets and do what needed to be done to save the lives of thousands of Americans. You didn't insist that what had to be done was to be done before it was too late to avoid those national tragedies.
You failed to follow Wendell Phillips' warning about your freedoms and your democracy: That "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." You didn't give a damn back then. Not until after it was too late.
Well here's the good news: You've got another chance. A chance to pay attention. This time before it's too late. That is, if it isn't already.
Elections in 2006 and 2008 are just around the corner and you Democrats are making big plans. Good for you. You probably think you're in a terrific place to regain your majority in Congress and perhaps even re-take the White House. You probably are. Or at least you might have been...
Because here's the bad news: Unless you follow Phillips' advice and pay attention now to what has happened to your Electoral System in America -- to what is happening even as you read this every single day in every single Board of Elections in every single county in every single state in America -- you will be in for an even bigger surprise in '06 and '08 than you found yourselves waking up to on the morning of November 3rd, 2004.
Because here's the deal: Your Electoral System in America -- theoretically the world's greatest democracy -- has been sold to the Corporate Interests of the very good friends of the Neo-Republican Party in America. It's gone. It's been sold. Your Republican and Democratic elected leaders watched it happen. Gave their approval. And you let them do it. And now...your democracy is no longer in your hands. That is, unless you do something now about it.
Have you read this warning yet?
So as you fight your fruitless fight to save a Supreme Court from falling over a Righwing cliff, I hope you realize by now that your store is being well-looted from right under your well-meaning noses. Your Supreme Court fight is already lost. You lost that one long ago. You lost it last November 3rd when you bought into the impossible notion that an incredibly unpopular Republican "President", in the most contentious National Election ever, with the largest turn-out in the history of America, during an incredibly unpopular war, suddenly and magically -- after being behind in the standings the entire day -- suddenly and still-without-explanation-or-accountability "won" by the time the "results" were in. You lost your Supreme Court battle and so many others when you failed to stand up that day and ask questions. When you failed to demand answers. When you failed to fight for the Right to Vote in America and to have that vote actually counted. When you failed to hold anybody accountable for your once-great democracy. When you failed to be vigilant.
You (Democrats) bought those "results" in 2004 and you (Mainstream Media folks) didn't bother to question them. You were both, apparently, under Dubya's post-9/11 spell when you believed in a greater America than the one that we actually have: An America were nobody would ever cynically or criminally game a National Election to retain their stranglehold on power. Such a notion was as impossible to believe or forsee as a President of the United States lying an entire nation into a war...or somone flying a commercial airplane into a building...or the levees breaching in New Orleans.
Who could have ever forseen such things happening in America?
(Seriously...Have you read this yet?)
Now you can shrug off this blog item, or anything else I've ever written, as a "wild conspiracy theory." That's up to you. You are still allowed that much freedom in America. You can buy into your Rightwing "ditto-head" talking points about folks like me wearing "tin-foil hats" to bed. You can say that folks like me have nothing but "sour grapes" because John Kerry didn't win. (I didn't vote for him -- just so you know.) You can go get on with your day and your life just as you did when you heard those warnings -- and you know you did -- about Osama wanting to destroy America or there being no WMD in Iraq or a Hurricane that might someday destroy the Big Easy. You can continue to believe in the ultimate sense of goodness and fairplay of Americans in America. There is a great number of people and a great deal of money riding on you believing all of those things after all.
Or you can pay attention -- this time to the FACTS and to the warnings -- before it's too late.
For the first time an insider from Diebold, Inc. is speaking directly to you. Diebold: The company who tabulates -- with zero accountability and zero transparency -- the majority of America's votes. Diebold: The company who gives millions and millions of dollars to Republican politicians and virtually every Board of Election in every county in every state in America. Diebold: The company -- based in Ohio and Texas, by the way -- whose CEO promised in a Republican fundraising letter in 2003 to deliver the state of Ohio to George W. Bush in 2004.
And what is this insider -- who we'll call DIEB-THROAT if it helps get your attention -- telling you, America? Only what you already should have known. What even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security already acknowledged in full prior to Election 2004: That your Electoral System, now wholly privatized and run by the "Halliburton of the Voting World" -- is, and has been, open and vulnerable to be rigged by one -- just one -- malicious person. Not "a conspiracy of many." Just One.
DIEB-THROAT -- someone who knows and works with them -- tells us, in a BRAD BLOG exclusive that I recommend you actually read, that the Diebold system is "one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known."
DIEB-THROAT tells us -- and the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security agrees -- that "one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election."
DIEB-THROAT is warning you. The U.S. DHS is warning you. I am warning you. The FACTS are warning you. So what will be your excuse next time?
I am speaking to you...Democrats...and you...Mainstream Media. Because, you know, the neo-Republican Party is perfectly content to watch your democracy fade away. Just as much as they were willing to watch the truth collapse in a pile of unread memos about 9/11, explode in a volley of shock-and-awe over Baghdad, or drown in the streets of New Orleans.
I've said countless times, to countless Americans who would listen: This is not a matter of Right and Left...It's a matter of Right and Wrong. So what will you do about it?
It is, after all, only your democracy at stake.
Monday, September 19, 2005
IF I TRIED THAT SHIT, MY BANKER WOULD LAUGH AND CUT ME OFF
Bush vows to repair Gulf Coast, prompting fears of deficit spending
WASHINGTON, Knight Ridder - President Bush and lawmakers from both parties are pledging record reconstruction spending in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, estimated as high as $200 billion. That's certain to add to a mushrooming national debt that already has the country dependent on foreign investors.
The $200 billion is about equal to what's been spent so far on the wars in
Iraq and
Afghanistan. It's almost half the size of this year's domestic discretionary spending, essentially everything the government does besides national defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Bush vowed Friday to rebuild the tattered Gulf Coast, "whatever it costs." He ruled out tax hikes, which means the new spending must add to the federal budget deficit, now $331 billion, and the national debt, now $4.6 trillion.
Economists say that even a $500 billion federal deficit won't injure the economy in the short term. It will stimulate growth, in fact. But it will have costs, both short term and long.
Each year's deficit spending adds to the federal debt, which is passed on to future generations. The net national debt has risen from $3.4 trillion to $4.6 trillion under Bush.
Taxpayers will pay about $208 billion for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 simply to cover interest costs on that debt. That's more than 25 times next year's $8.2 billion budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, illustrating that exploding deficits impose large costs on today's taxpayers. The money for interest payments on the debt goes to investors in Treasury bonds, such as the Chinese government. Foreigners now hold 46 percent of the Treasury's debt.
Increasingly, financing the federal deficit depends in part on the kindness of foreigners, because they determine the demand for Treasury bonds. If these nations sour on U.S. treasuries, interest rates would have to rise to keep investment coming in.
Asked on Friday about the impact of rising deficits and debt on tomorrow's taxpayers, Bush called on Congress to make some offsetting cuts in spending on other things. He didn't specify what.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other fiscal conservatives suggest that the first place to begin offsetting Katrina's costs is to chop the $287 billion highway bill, which Congress passed earlier this summer. They see $24 billion in savings by eliminating "earmarks" that individual lawmakers inserted for special projects back home, in other words "pork-barrel" projects that hadn't been approved by the usual review committees.
"We have to be concerned about future generations of Americans upon whom we're laying an additional $100 (billion), $150 (billion), $200 billion in debt burden that they're going to have to pay for," McCain said. "We're going to end up with the highest deficit probably in the history of this country."
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center, also emphasizes that Katrina's costs require Washington to slash spending on other government programs.
"Offsetting the cost of rebuilding is all the more important because the rebuilding effort follows a 33 percent expansion of the federal government since 2001," Brian Riedl of Heritage wrote in a report.
Democrats, however, emphasize rethinking all the tax reductions that have passed since Bush became president, for they reduced the revenue flow that funds government spending.
"I'm not really into cutting (spending) right now," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Thursday. Instead he urged Republicans to abandon plans to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, especially the repeal of the estate tax.
"While we're talking about saving money, maybe we could get the Republicans over here to consider not having $70 billion more in tax cuts for the wealthiest in this country," Reid said.
But with Bush and the Republicans who control Congress dead-set against raising taxes, and with history showing that Congress is highly unlikely to cut existing programs anywhere near $200 billion, most if not all of Katrina's cost will add to the deficit. And that spells trouble down the road.
"I think the short answer is it is going to make the budget situation even worse, and the way we're going to pay for it is borrow the money," said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal responsibility.
Adding to the debt is particularly risky because it complicates a grim scenario that's just around the bend. In 2011, the first wave of the baby boom generation will turn 65. For the two decades that follow, budget experts warn, there'll be unprecedented strain on government spending for retirement and health-care programs.
"We're on the verge of a huge national expense, and we have no idea how to pay for that," Bixby said. "The danger here is that we're simply making that problem even worse by entering it with the budget so deeply in deficit."Sunday, September 18, 2005
GOOD. NOW MAKE A FUCKING DIFFERENCE.
Hurricane Reporting Changes TV Journalists
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer Sun Sep 18, 2:21 PM ET
NEW YORK - Jeanne Meserve is haunted by voices in the dark pleading for help. John Roberts won't forget the woman whose husband of 53 years died at her feet. Shepard Smith remembers seeing bodies on highway ramps around the stadium where he had often driven to football games. Campbell Brown never wants to lose track of the 9-year-old who scavenged for water to keep his grandmother alive.
The horror of Hurricane Katrina will stay with the television journalists who covered it long after the story moves on, and some say it will profoundly influence how they work in the future.
"I'll never forget those mothers and daughters, the elderly, who swam out of their neighborhoods looking for life's basic necessities of food and water, hoping to walk on the road to somewhere and find it and couldn't for days," said Fox News Channel's Smith. "It was the most helpless feeling I've ever encountered."
Smith, Fox's chief anchor, reported on the plight of people stuck on the highway seeking help that took days to come. As their anger increased, so did his.
It was that emotion, and the angry confrontations with public officials by familiar faces like ABC's Ted Koppel, NBC's Tim Russert and CNN's Anderson Cooper, that made clear to viewers how desperate things had become in New Orleans.
So did Meserve's halting voice when she described a late-night boat ride through flooded neighborhoods to CNN's Aaron Brown. She told of the cries from people who couldn't be rescued.
"People have made a lot of the emotion that was in my voice that night," she said. "It was totally spontaneous, it was totally unrehearsed. It was simply a human reaction to what I was hearing and what I had seen."
Besides those voices, Meserve won't forget the woman she saw pleading with a police officer to help her mother who was overdue for dialysis. The officer said he couldn't take her anywhere, and his radio was broken. There was nothing he could do.
The elderly woman Roberts saw stranded on a road, trying to flag a police officer as her husband suffered a seizure, similarly couldn't find anyone who would stop in time to save him. A day later, she was still there with her husband's body, he said.
Two days later she was gone, but the body remained.
"We always think that this is the privileged country and we go to all these hellholes around the world and find situations that human beings shouldn't be allowed to live in," the CBS newsman said. "And then we find one right at home. To me, it was really disappointing to see that while we can do so much good work overseas, when it comes to looking after our own people, we just fell down so horribly."
Nine-year-old Charles Evans took NBC's Brown by the hand for a tour of the New Orleans convention center, pointing to the body of a woman in a wheelchair and to a man he had befriended who died the day before.
He had no parents, only some cousins and a grandmother in her 80s, and he was trying to keep her alive.
"He has stayed with me," Brown said. "I haven't been able to stop thinking about this child."
She tracked him down at a relative's home in Dallas and flew there to find him last week.
"I'm in shock at how all levels of government failed these people," the weekend "Today" host said. "I'm struggling to define my role as a journalist in the midst of all this. I have lost my objectivity. I am emotionally involved. I can't pretend that I'm not."
Brown grew up in Louisiana and her father still lives in Baton Rouge; she was bombarded with messages from friends who wanted her to check on their homes or help find missing relatives. Smith is from Mississippi and knows New Orleans well.
The journalists helped where they could. Roberts passed out any water or snacks his crew had and gave rides in boats and cars.
"You can't pass people by in a situation like that," he said. "You have to help out. You have to put aside your role as a journalist to just observe the situation and you have to get involved. You have to become a human being in those cases."
Roberts tried to let people describe what they were going through. But this story opens the door for journalists to share their own thoughts more frequently, he said. Roberts remembered when CBS anchor Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam in 1968 and concluded the war couldn't be won.
"Journalists today, would they make that sort of judgment?" he said. "I don't know if they would. But I think that after what we saw the last few weeks that it's all right to make judgments based on our observations."
For days, Smith heard government officials say help was on the way when it wasn't. He heard stories about what went on at the convention center and Superdome dismissed as rumors when he saw it himself.
"You can't let the facts as you see them with your own eyes get distorted by what you're told by those in charge," he said. "I think I will forever have a greater degree of skepticism of people who are in the business of public service, and I think that's a good thing for me, it's a good thing for my colleagues and it's a good thing for our viewers."
Meserve doesn't know whether this experience has changed the business, or her as a reporter.
"Our role is a little different because the reporters who have been on the scene realize that what they've seen transcends politics," she said. "It's elemental.
"I think most of us have this feeling that this country is good, and that we're capable and competent and responsive. We saw that it wasn't in this instance. Because of what we've seen and because it isn't about political shading, people are asking tougher questions. But it's far too early to know whether this will last or not."
___
On the Net:
http://www.msnbc.com
http://www.cbsnews.com
http://www.abcnews.com
http://www.cnn.com
http://www.foxnews.com
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EDITOR'S NOTE — David Bauder can be reached at dbauder(at)ap.orgSunday, September 18, 2005
A LITTLE LATE, BUT THANKS, BILL
Clinton launches withering attack on Bush on Iraq, Katrina, budget
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticised George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.
Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."
The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism "and undermined the support that we might have had," Bush said in an interview with an ABC's "This Week" programme.
Clinton said there had been a "heroic but so far unsuccessful" effort to put together an constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.
The US strategy of trying to develop the Iraqi military and police so that they can cope without US support "I think is the best strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that," said Clinton.
On Hurricane Katrina, Clinton faulted the authorities' failure to evacuate New Orleans ahead of the storm's strike on August 29.
People with cars were able to heed the evacuation order, but many of those who were poor, disabled or elderly were left behind.
"If we really wanted to do it right, we would have had lots of buses lined up to take them out," Clinton.
He agreed that some responsibility for this lay with the local and state authorities, but pointed the finger, without naming him, at the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
FEMA boss Michael Brown quit in response to criticism of his handling of the Katrina disaster. He was viewed as a political appointee with no experience of disaster management or dealing with government officials.
"When James Lee Witt ran FEMA, because he had been both a local official and a federal official, he was always there early, and we always thought about that," Clinton said, referring to FEMA's head during his 1993-2001 presidency.
"But both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people."
On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.
"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said.
"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."
Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."Sunday, September 18, 2005
THE JIG IS UP
Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH, New York Times
Published: September 18, 2005
ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.
This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.
But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.
The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.
WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.
It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.Sunday, September 18, 2005
ROUND WHEELS? BRILLIANT!
Key military help for victims of Hurricane Katrina was delayed
WASHINGTON, Knight Ridder Newspapers - Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.
But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.
Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.
"If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. "We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that."
Federal officials have long known that the active-duty military is the only organization with the massive resources and effective command structure to handle a major catastrophe.
In a 1996 Pentagon report, the Department of Defense acknowledged its large role in major disasters. Between 1992 and 1996, the Pentagon provided support in 18 disasters and developed five training manuals on how to work with FEMA and civilians in natural disasters.
"In catastrophic disasters, DOD will likely provide Hurricane Andrew-levels of support and predominately operate in urban or suburban terrain," the report said. "This should be incorporated into planning assumptions."
The delay this time in tapping the troops, helicopters, trucks, generators, communications and other resources of the 1st Cavalry and the 82nd Airborne is the latest example of how the federal response to Katrina lacked organization and leadership. And it raises further questions about the government's ability to rapidly mobilize the active-duty military now that FEMA has been absorbed into the massive, terrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security.
Addressing the nation on Thursday night in a speech from New Orleans, Bush said the storm overwhelmed the disaster relief system. "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice," he said.
Several emergency response experts, however, questioned whether Bush and Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff understood how much authority they had to tap all the resources of the federal government - including those of the Department of Defense.
"To say I've suddenly discovered the military needs to be involved is like saying wheels should be round instead of square," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor and the director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security.
During the last great hurricane - Andrew in 1992 - the failure to get food, water and shelter to Florida and to victims highlighted the importance of quickly engaging the Department of Defense.
"For such disasters, DOD is the only organization capable of providing, transporting and distributing sufficient quantities of items needed," the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, wrote in a 1993 report. It noted that the military has storehouses of food and temporary shelters, contingency planning skills, command capability - as well as the helicopters and other transportation needed to get them to a disaster scene fast.
Indeed, the new National Response Plan, the nation's blueprint for responding to disasters that was unveiled with much fanfare in January by Chertoff's predecessor, Tom Ridge, includes a section on responding to catastrophic events.
"Unless it can be credibly established that a mobilizing Federal resource ... is not needed at the catastrophic incident venue, that resource deploys," the plan says. The plan and a 2003 presidential directive put Chertoff, as Homeland Security secretary, in charge of coordinating the federal response.
Chertoff, who aides said has been engaged in the response to Hurricane Katrina, went to Atlanta the day after the storm hit for a previously scheduled briefing on avian flu. Aides also concede that Washington officials were unable to confirm that the levees in New Orleans had failed until midday on Aug. 30. The breaches were first discovered in Louisiana some 32 hours earlier.
Greenberger, the Maryland homeland security expert, said he wonders whether Chertoff and other top federal officials understand the National Response Plan or even had read it before Katrina.
"Everything he did and everything he has said strongly suggests that that plan was never read," Greenberger said of Chertoff.
Chertoff was in Gulfport, Miss., on Friday to participate in the Harrison County National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. He took no questions from reporters. Homeland Security officials didn't return calls for comment.
Also on Friday, Bush said he thinks Congress should examine what role the military can and should play in natural disasters.
"It's important for us to learn from the storm what could have been done better," Bush said during a question-and-answer session with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "This storm will give us an opportunity to review all different types of circumstances to make sure that, you know, the president has the capacity to react."
Former FEMA Director James Lee Witt, who served under President Clinton, believes that the Bush administration is mistaken if it thinks there are impediments to using the military for non-policing help in a disaster.
"When we were there and FEMA was intact, the military was a resource to us," said Witt. "We pulled them in very quickly. I don't know what rule he (Bush) talked about. ... We used military assets a lot."
Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration who also was a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks, said clear legal guidelines have been in place for using the military on U.S. soil since at least 1996, when the Justice Department was planning for the
Olympic Games in Atlanta.
"It's not like people hadn't thought about this," Gorelick said. "This is not new. We've had riots. We've had floods. We've had the loss of police control over communities.
"I'm puzzled as to what happened here," she said.
Scott Silliman, a former judge advocate general who's now the executive director of Duke University Law School's Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, said he was surprised that military forces weren't on the scene more quickly after Hurricane Katrina.
"I see no impediment in law or in policy to getting them there," Silliman said. "We could have sent in helicopters. We could have sent in forces to do search and rescue and to provide humanitarian aid. Everything but law enforcement."
He said someone failed to pull the trigger, but he added that an investigation is needed by an independent commission to determine who's to blame.
"They're trying to say that greater federal authority would have made a difference," said George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff and the co-author of a textbook on emergency management. "The reality is that the feds are the ones that screwed up in the first place. It's not about authority. It's about leadership. ... They've got all the authority already."
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