In what one can assume to be BushCo’s upcoming book, How To Be An Asshole, one can see how quickly Bush responds to issues that are important to him.

For Katrina, Bush responded publicly that the “results are not acceptable.” That blurb took him 4 days to build up the testicular fortitude to say.

After Chief Supreme Court Justice Williams Rehnquist died, Bush was notified of Rehnquist’s death shortly before 11 p.m. EDT on Saturday night. At 2:35 AM Sunday morning, Dan Bartlett released a statement on behalf of Bush, “It’s a tremendous loss for our nation.”

So 20,000 poor people – 4 days.

The guy who put him in the White House in 2000 – 3 hours, 35 minutes.

[Quote:]

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

[Quote:]

Lexmark, one of the largest makers of laser printers, is a believer in the “give away the razors, but charge them for the blades” tactic, counting on the fact that consumers routinely underestimate “life cyle costs” for products like printers. In other words, if you low-ball your customers on the price for the printer, you can gouge them later for ink.

Until now, those kinds of business practices have been held in check by secondary markets that restrain a manufacturer’s ability to overcharge for “consumables.” That’s where cartridge remanufacturers come in — they refill Lexmark cartridges and sell them for less than new cartridges sold by Lexmark.

Now Lexmark (which already unsuccessfully tried to use the DMCA to wipe out the refills market) has turned to patent law to prop up its effort to keep its customers in bondage. According to Lexmark, the “single use only” label on the boxes of their “Prebate” printer cartridges creates an enforceable contract between Lexmark and consumers. By opening the box, you’re agreed to the contract.

Sound familiar? It’s a variant on the “shrinkwrap license” that used to appear plastered on software. Lexmark is bringing this practice to the world of patented goods. If you step outside the bounds of the “contract” (by giving your spent cartridge to a remanufacturer), you’re suddenly a patent infringer. More importantly, Lexmark can sue cartridge remanufacturers for “inducing” patent infringement by making and selling refills.

ACRA, an association of cartridge remanufacturers, sued Lexmark to block this anti-consumer use of patent law. EFF filed an amicus brief on their behalf before the Ninth Circuit. Unfortunately, the Ninth Circuit this week ruled in favor of Lexmark, agreeing that the “single use only” restriction contained in the “box-wrap license” on the package could create an enforceable contract between Lexmark and its customers, and that a violation of the contract could be a patent infringement.

The consequences for consumers, innovators, and competition are potentially dire. Will patent owners exploit this decision as an opportunity to impose over-reaching restrictions on formerly permitted post-sale uses, repairs, modifications, and resale? Will consumers soon confront “single use only, not for resale” notices on more and more products? Will innovators stumble over labels announcing “modifications prohibited”?

Only time will tell.

[Quote:]

Two key U.S. senators said on Friday they will launch a bipartisan coverup of what they described as an “immense, but probably unavoidable failure” of the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the panel’s other top-ranking Republican, said they hope to shift as much blame as possible to lower-ranking officials and career federal employees — ideally at an obscure government agency that few Americans have ever heard of.

“In keeping with recent congressional practice, we will try to shield the president and the senior members of his administration from directly responsibility for this fiasco, although a few token resignations may be required this time around,” the pair said in a joint statement. “Our primary focus, however, will be on figuring out how to throw billions of dollars in additional funding to the very same agencies that failed so spectacularly this past week.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist expressed his own support for a cover up, saying it would follow in the “proud footsteps” of Congress’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, the completely inadequate investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture abuses, and the Senate Intelligence Committtee’s whitewash of administration efforts to cook the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Speaker of the House Denny Hastert declined to comment on the hurricane or the proposed Senate investigation, other than to make a loud “BRRRRRRRR” sound while pushing a toy bulldozer across a map of New Orleans.

[Quote:]

Another 10,000 National Guard troops are being sent to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, raising their number to about 40,000, but questions linger about the speed with which troops were deployed.

Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state’s National Guard last Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come from Washington until late Thursday.

Paperwork? PAPERWORK?

We are hearing similar stories from all quarters, over and over. It seems the response to the hurricane on the national scale was beyond incompetent, beyond indifferent, and somewhere approaching the line of … what, exactly? CrapMcFungled? Jackasstrophic? Neroesque?

The top political appointees and candidates, in interview after interview, have decided on their defense. In each specific instance, aid wasn’t given because that particular fragment of aid wasn’t asked for (or because four or five days after landfall they still didn’t know about, oh say, 15,000 evacuees in a major evacuation center.) There are still, today, reports of small communities that haven’t yet gotten more than a token amount of aid.

The entire argument is beyond insulting. The reason these communities haven’t “requested” more aid? Because they have no working communications. They have no phones. Police and fire capabilities were all but destroyed, in some areas. Medical capabilities, even worse off. And yet it dawned on nobody, within FEMA or “Homeland Security” or anywhere else in this vaunted post-9/11 world, that maybe the flattened counties that nobody could contact and nobody could get information from NEEDED HELP?

via

[Quote:]

Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country’s emergency management.

[..]

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

[Quote:]

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

Check out this video.

(note, this is a live report from Biloxi)

TRANSCRIPTION

Zum letzten Stand jetzt live aus Biloxi Christine Adelhardt

Vor 2 Minuten ist hier gerade der Präsident in seinem Konvoi vorbeigefahren. Was sich hier in Biloxi aber während des Tages abgespielt hat, ist wirklich unglaublich. Plötzlich tauchten hier Bergungstrupps auf, plötzlich waren hier Räumfahrzeuge, die hatte man die ganzen Tage hier vorher nicht gesehen, und das in einem Gebiet, indem es wirklich nicht notwendig wäre, groß aufzuräumen, weil hier lebt weit und breit kein Mensch mehr, die Menschen sind weiter innen in der Stadt. Der Präsident reist mit einem Pressetross. Dieser Pressetross hat damit sehr schöne Bilder, die da sagen sollen, der Präsident war da und die Hilfe, die wird auch kommen. Das Ausmaß der Naturkatastrophe hat mich geschockt aber das Ausmaß der Inszenierung hier heute schockt mich mindestens genauso. Damit zurück nach Hamburg

TRANSLATION

On the last state of things here’s Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi

2 minutes ago the President drove past in his convoi. But what has happened in Biloxi all day long is truly unbelievable. Suddenly recovery units appeared, suddenly bulldozers were there, those hadn’t been seen here all the days before, and this in an area, in which it really wouldn’t be necessary to do a big clean up, because far and wide nobody lives here anymore, the people are more inland in the city. The President travels with a press baggage [big crew]. This press baggage got very beautiful pictures which are supposed to say, that the President was here and help is on the way, too. The extent of the natural disaster shocked me, but the extent of the staging is shocking me at least the same way. With that back to Hamburg.

And this:

[Quote:]

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

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

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

[Quote:]

There is an increasing variety of options for purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise.

Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.

In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.

This guide “translates” the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM-crippled music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.

“I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expense, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit that such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing perhaps the ending has not yet been written.”

But this time, it has… Myst and the Cyan studio are unfortunatly part of the dying ‘adventure genre’ that saw it’s peak years ago and has yet to be embraced in a world of games that require fast paced, gun-toting crime lords set on City X.

Ah well, the final installment will be avalable in a few weeks.

[Quote:]

William Hubbs Rehnquist, who rose from a lonely conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court to become one of the nation’s most respected chief justices ever, died Saturday of complications from thyroid cancer. He was 80.

His death ends a remarkable 33-year Supreme Court career during which he oversaw the court’s conservative shift, presided over an impeachment trial and helped decide a presidential election.

A statement from Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Justice Rehnquist was surrounded by his three children when he died at his home in Arlington, Va.

“The chief justice battled thyroid cancer since being diagnosed last October and continued to perform his duties on the court until a precipitous decline in his health the last couple of days,” she said.

Ms. Arberg said funeral plans are pending.

President Bush was notified of Justice Rehnquist’s death shortly before 10 p.m. Dallas time.

“President Bush and Mrs. Bush are saddened by the news,” said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. “It’s a tremendous loss for our nation.” The president was expected to make a personal statement about Justice Rehnquist today.

And now W, in all his incompetence, gets to put another judge into the Supreme Court. Bad timing…

Can Bush nominate someone if he’s impeached? Can the president be impeached without a Chief Justice? (U.S. Constitution, Section 3, Clause 6:The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.)

This is from The Scientific American of October 2001.
Say it again George: “Nobody Expected The Levees To Burst”

[Quote:]

Drowning New Orleans
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.

The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms.

The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh–an area the size of Manhattan–will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities.

Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.

Is it possible that the current US administration’s stifling of scientific research has resulted in Bush shooting himself in the foot? And then putting that foot in his mouth?

It’s chilling to read on….