Looks like the rumors were wrong. No phone, just an iPod. As a replacement for the mini.

update Oh wait, there’s a phone as well. Cingular only, for now.

[Quote:]

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

[Quote:]

With the size and difficulty of the task of rescuing and rebuilding New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas still unfolding, it seemed early to talk about investigating how this predicted cataclysm had been allowed to occur and why the government’s response was so slow and inept. Until yesterday, that is, when President Bush blithely announced at a photo-op cabinet meeting that he, personally, was going to “find out what went right and what went wrong.” We can’t imagine a worse idea.

No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience – the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example – that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs.

Mr. Bush signaled yesterday that we are in for more of the same when he sneered and said, “One of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game.” This is not a game. It is critical to know what “things went wrong,” as Mr. Bush put it. But we also need to know which officials failed – not to humiliate them, but to replace them with competent people.

It’s obvious, for instance, that Michael Brown has met the expectations of those who warned that he would be a terrible director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This is no time to be engaging in a wholesale change of leadership, but in Mr. Brown’s case there seems to be precious little leadership to lose. He should be replaced with someone who can do the huge job that remains to be done.

[..]

Before throwing the system into chaos again, an investigation should determine whether the problem lies in the structure or in execution. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal showed how the Bush administration had systematically stripped power and money from FEMA, which had been painfully rebuilt under President Bill Clinton but had long been a target of Republican “small government” ideologues. The Journal said state officials had been warning Washington – as recently as July 27 – that the homeland secretary, Michael Chertoff, was planning further disastrous cuts.

[Quote:]

The seemingly carefree behavior of top Bush administration officials early last week, who stuck to their vacations as tens of thousands cried for help in New Orleans, gained another twist with revelations that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was taking in a ball game in San Diego last Monday night–about 24 hours after Katrina hit.

Rumsfeld has come under increasing criticism for the military’s lack of early intervention in the rescue.

An E&P reader tipped us off to a column in last Tuesday’s San Diego Union-Tribune by regular columnist Diane Bell. One item reads:

“Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield wasn’t the only VIP who joined Padres President John Moores in the owner’s box last night at Petco Park. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, here to join President Bush at the North Island Naval Air Station today, took in the game, too. Three weeks ago, Winfield stopped by the Pentagon with his family and later joined the Padres as they visited wounded soldiers at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital during a road trip. “Winfield was very moved by the experience,” says his agent, Randy Grossman. So he invited Rumsfeld to the Padres game.

“After the first few innings, the plan was to shift to dugout seats, for a closer look at the action.”

[Quote:]

The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.

An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the rescue boats and that “the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect.”

“We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media,” the spokeswoman said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry.

Gee – afraid it might look bad?

Too late:

The body of a Hurricane Katrina victim lies under a sheet on the front porch of her home Tuesday, Sept. 6 2005 in New Orleans, La. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

[Quote:]

The House majority leader late Tuesday tried to deflect criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina by saying “the emergency response system was set up to work from the bottom up,” then announced a short time later that House hearings examining that response had been canceled.

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said House Republican leaders instead want a joint House-Senate panel set up to conduct a “congressional review” of the issue.

Tempers flared Tuesday during a contentious closed-door meeting between House members and Cabinet secretaries in charge of directing Katrina relief efforts. A Republican representative stood up and said, “All of you deserve failing grades. The response was a disaster,” CNN was told by lawmakers emerging from the meeting.

But DeLay countered that assessment later in a news conference by saying that the onus for responding to emergencies fell to local officials.

“It’s the local officials trying to handle the problem. When they can’t handle the problem, they go to the state, and the state does what they can to, and if they need assistance from FEMA and the federal government they ask for it and it’s delivered,” DeLay said.

Meanwhile, let’s switch to the other channel, where a White House press conference is going on:

[Quote:]

Q Scott, the National Response Plan that was adopted by the administration back in December 2004 contains proactive federal response protocols which get around some of what you’ve just been talking about, in terms of liaising or asking permission from the state, and make it very clear that in an emergency you can just go in and take over. Was this implemented?

MR. McCLELLAN: The National Response Plan was implemented last week, and as you’re aware –

Q What about the proactive federal response?

MR. McCLELLAN: — the Department of Homeland Security is the umbrella for all the federal agencies and departments that are involved in the National Response Plan. And they’re the ones who can talk about exactly what was implemented in terms of the National Response Plan.

Q Thank you.

[Quote:]

De Nederlandse overheid mag de Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP) geen subsidie meer geven, omdat de partij vrouwen discrimineert. Dat heeft de rechtbank in Den Haag woensdag bepaald. De partij laat geen vrouwen als volwaardig lid toe en dat is in strijd met het Vrouwenverdrag, meent de rechtbank.

Het Proefprocessenfonds Clara Wichmann en zeven andere maatschappelijke instanties hadden bij de rechtbank ook geëist dat de SGP een einde moest maken aan het weren van vrouwen als volwaardig lid van de partij. De rechter zou daartoe de huidige statuten nietig moeten verklaren. Hierin ging de rechtbank niet mee, omdat geen SGP-vrouwen zich bij het proces hadden aangesloten.

De rechtbank herinnert eraan dat de Nederlandse regering eind jaren tachtig het Vrouwenverdrag heeft geratificeerd. “Daarmee heeft Nederland zich verplicht passende maatregelen te nemen om discriminatie van vrouwen in het politieke en openbare leven uit te bannen. Nederland is de verplichtingen uit dit verdrag niet nagekomen. De overheid heeft niets ondernomen om aan de discriminatie van vrouwen door de SGP een einde te maken, maar heeft zelfs de SGP ondersteund door middel van het verlenen van subsidie”, stelt de rechtbank.

Eindelijk weer ‘s een rechter met gezond verstand.

[Quote:]

Minister Donner (Justitie) wil de internetgegevens van Nederlanders centraal opslaan. Dat maakt de voorgenomen bewaarplicht aanzienlijk goedkoper voor internetaanbieders, is zijn redenering in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer. De providers hebben echter ook grote principiële bezwaren.

Het Centraal Informatiepunt Opsporing Telecommunicatie (CIOT) zou de internetgegevens moeten gaan bewaren. De informatie is volgens de minister nuttig om terroristen en misdadigers op te sporen. Het CIOT fungeert nu al als telefoonboek voor de opsporingsdiensten.

“Het model kent vele voordelen”, schrijft Donner. “Het CIOT bewaart en doorzoekt de informatie. De lasten voor de internetaanbieders kunnen worden beperkt tot het beschikbaar stellen van de gegevens en een eventuele aanpassing van hun systemen daartoe.”

Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat Donner zich niet realiseert wat de potentie voor misbruik in deze situatie is. Ik vraag me af wat zijn beweegredenen zijn om het daar maar niet over te hebben.

[Quote:]

Three women are taking the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights because they were forced to travel abroad for an abortion, the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) said Wednesday.

Abortion remains illegal in Ireland under an 1861 law unless in circumstances where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, including suicide.

The practice has been hugely contentious in mainly Roman Catholic Ireland for decades, forcing thousands of women to travel abroad every year — mainly to Britain — to have their pregnancies terminated.

The IFPA said it was facilitating the women’s case, which was filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg last Monday. The women are not being identified.

Power corrupts…

[Quote:]

“Moral hazard” is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If your office gives you and your co-workers all the free Pepsi you want—if your employer, in effect, offers universal Pepsi insurance—you’ll drink more Pepsi than you would have otherwise. If you have a no-deductible fire-insurance policy, you may be a little less diligent in clearing the brush away from your house. The savings-and-loan crisis of the nineteen-eighties was created, in large part, by the fact that the federal government insured savings deposits of up to a hundred thousand dollars, and so the newly deregulated S. & L.s made far riskier investments than they would have otherwise. Insurance can have the paradoxical effect of producing risky and wasteful behavior. Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about such moral hazard for good reason. Insurance is an attempt to make human life safer and more secure. But, if those efforts can backfire and produce riskier behavior, providing insurance becomes a much more complicated and problematic endeavor.

In 1968, the economist Mark Pauly argued that moral hazard played an enormous role in medicine, and, as John Nyman writes in his book “The Theory of the Demand for Health Insurance,” Pauly’s paper has become the “single most influential article in the health economics literature.” Nyman, an economist at the University of Minnesota, says that the fear of moral hazard lies behind the thicket of co-payments and deductibles and utilization reviews which characterizes the American health-insurance system. Fear of moral hazard, Nyman writes, also explains “the general lack of enthusiasm by U.S. health economists for the expansion of health insurance coverage (for example, national health insurance or expanded Medicare benefits) in the U.S.”

What Nyman is saying is that when your insurance company requires that you make a twenty-dollar co-payment for a visit to the doctor, or when your plan includes an annual five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar deductible, it’s not simply an attempt to get you to pick up a larger share of your health costs. It is an attempt to make your use of the health-care system more efficient. Making you responsible for a share of the costs, the argument runs, will reduce moral hazard: you’ll no longer grab one of those free Pepsis when you aren’t really thirsty. That’s also why Nyman says that the notion of moral hazard is behind the “lack of enthusiasm” for expansion of health insurance. If you think of insurance as producing wasteful consumption of medical services, then the fact that there are forty-five million Americans without health insurance is no longer an immediate cause for alarm. After all, it’s not as if the uninsured never go to the doctor. They spend, on average, $934 a year on medical care. A moral-hazard theorist would say that they go to the doctor when they really have to. Those of us with private insurance, by contrast, consume $2,347 worth of health care a year. If a lot of that extra $1,413 is waste, then maybe the uninsured person is the truly efficient consumer of health care.

The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because we’re sick. “Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”

For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn’t do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is “a blunt instrument.” Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurance—like getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive care—are anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.

[Quote:]

As noted here two days ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s decision to ask evacuees to call (800) 621-3362 or browse to www.fema.gov to start the process of filing a claim for disaster assistance was greeted with disbelief by most relief workers we talked to, who noted that most of these people don’t have ready access to telephones.

It turns out, according to a Red Cross worker here, the response is even a bigger Catch-22 than I realized.

It turns out, according to the worker, who like the other aid workers spoke on condition of anonymity, that the call to the FEMA number does not open a claim; it results in a package containing the claim form being mailed to the address of the evacuee.

Since the evacuee is in a shelter, mail service has been suspended in many of the hardest hit areas and some of the homes are likely still under water, it seems clear that those claim forms won’t be mailed back any time soon.

[Quote:]

Het kabinet wil de oliemaatschappijen verplichten biobrandstoffen te mengen door benzine en diesel. Daarmee moet de uitstoot van broeikasgassen worden teruggedrongen en moet Nederland minder afhankelijk worden van buitenlandse energievoorziening.

Het kabinet zal bij prinsjesdag bekendmaken hoe de verplichting eruitziet, bevestigden bronnen rond het kabinet woensdag een bericht uit de Volkskrant.

Zaterdag werd al bekend dat het kabinet volgend jaar geen accijnzen wil heffen op de biobrandstoffen. Het kabinet trekt daarvoor 70 miljoen euro uit. De verplichting voor oliemaatschappijen om de milieuvriendelijker brandstoffen bij te mengen is onderdeel van hetzelfde plan.

Let wel, in elk bericht dat ik tot nu toe gezien heb staat “volgend jaar”. Dus per 2007 kun je verwachten dat je ook voor biobrandstof gewoon weer uitgemolken wordt. En heb overigens niet het lef om zelf zonnebloemolie te tanken!

[Quote:]

“In principe mag dat niet!”, meldt Renee Westdorp, woordvoerster van de douane. “Je bent verplicht om te rijden met brandstof waar accijns op wordt betaald. Wij controleren regelmatig in het land en wordt men betrapt met zogenaamde bio-brandstof in de tank, dan volgt er een boete en een naheffing.”

En aan wat voor een bedrag moeten we dan denken? “Eén momentje, even bladeren”, zegt Westdorp, terwijl ze door wat papieren ritselt. “Die boete is een schikkingsvoorstel dat wij namens het openbaar ministerie doen, en komt neer op €4,53 per liter tankinhoud. Het gaat er dus niet om hoeveel liter zonnebloemolie je in je tank hebt zitten. Stel, jouw brandstoftank kan 50 liter aan, dan betaal je dus 50 keer €4,53 en dat is €226,50. Bovendien komt daarbovenop nog een naheffing en dat betreft het bedrag aan accijns dat je moet betalen per 1000 liter, en dat is €374, 91.”

[Quote:]

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

– Ambrose Bierce (1842 – 1914), The Devil’s Dictionary

[Quote:]

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

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

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

A call seeking comment from FEMA was not immediately returned.

“We called in all the available resources,” said Dr. John Simkovich, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

“They responded within 30 minutes, which is phenomenal, to meet the needs of the citizens coming in from Louisiana,” he said.

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

“Unfortunately, the plane did not come in,” Simkovich said. “There was a mistake in the system, coming out through FEMA, that we did not receive the aircraft this afternoon. It went to Charleston, West Virginia.”

A line of buses and ambulances idled behind him at Charleston International Airport as he described what happened.

Of course it’s the fault of state governments for naming 2 different cities Charleston. How was the federal government supposed to keep track of these things?

[Quote:]

The Hurricane Hunters have tracked hundreds of storms since flying their initial humanitarian hurricane surveillance mission in 1976. But Katrina was definitely something special. Not only was it one of the most powerful storms to ever strike the United States, but it hit perilously close to the 53rd’s home base — Keesler Air Force Base, Miss.

The reservists from the 53rd who tracked the storm as it made landfall had a bird’s-eye view as Katrina dealt a devastating blow to Keesler. Some watched from the sky as their own homes and neighborhoods were leveled.

“I would estimate that 70 percent of our people were directly affected by Katrina. … their homes were either damaged or, in some cases, destroyed,” said Lt. Col. James Linder, the squadron’s commander.

Since the storm made landfall, the colonel has had his hands full trying to make sure all of his people are OK and are getting the help they need. However, at the same time he realizes that despite the difficult circumstances, his squadron still has a critical mission to accomplish.

As of Sept. 1, the National Hurricane Center was closely watching three new storms that were brewing in the Caribbean.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re going to have a lot of time to recover from Katrina,” Colonel Linder said.

He and about 90 Airmen with the squadron temporarily set up shop here, and more of their fellow reservists are arriving every day. Seven of the squadron’s 10 specially equipped WC-130 Hercules aircraft are here, two are being used for training at Little Rock AFB, Ark., and one is safely parked in a hangar at Keesler.

“Our No. 1 priority right now is to make sure all of our people are safe,” Colonel Linder said. “We want the people who lost their homes to concentrate on taking care of their families right now. We’ve had a great response from our people who live outside of the Keesler area.

“We’re gearing up right now to begin flying new storm missions the beginning of next week (Sept. 5),” he said.

[Quote:]

MR. RUSSERT: People were stunned by a comment the president of the United States made on Wednesday, Mr. Secretary. He said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” How could the president be so wrong, be so misinformed?

SEC’Y CHERTOFF: Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, “New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,” because if you recall the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.

Okay, let’s see if we can find out which newspapers secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff is reading (or check for yourself):

[Quote:]

President Bush somehow missed the significance of what was happening on the Gulf Coast last week as he and his political guru, Karl Rove, flitted between Texas and California and, finally, Washington.

But now, facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.

This campaign is to salvage Bush’s reputation.

Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.

It doesn’t necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn’t include any admission of error.

It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism — and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.

It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the “blame game.” While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.

But in some ways, this post-Katrina campaign poses Bush’s aides with unprecedented challenges.

The problem — an achingly slow federal response to what has turned out to be one of the greatest natural disasters this country has ever faced — can be traced at least in part to one of the Bush White House’s most defining characteristics: The protective bubble within which the president operates.

Bush’s aides intentionally keep him mentally and physically aloof from any ugliness — political or otherwise. It lets them keep tight control over the presidential imagery and stay on message.

But inside his bubble, Bush first failed to recognize what was becoming clear to almost anyone watching the news: That Americans needed help. And in his two meticulously staged visits to the Gulf Coast on Friday and Monday, it is precisely because Bush was kept so far away from dissension or mess that he appeared so out of touch.

He cracked jokes on Friday, including one about his drinking days in New Orleans, but has yet to confront the true horror of the situation so widely seen on TV. He has yet to acknowledge the disgrace of a major American city being rendered uninhabitable on his watch. He has yet to come face to face with people left to suffer for days in hellish conditions and explain to them why their government failed them. And he has yet to demonstrate the strength that Americans require from their president in a time of crisis.

This crisis finds the president looking impotent at best, incompetent at worst. And there is an element of whining to Bush’s refusal to shoulder his responsibility — especially should the press continue to make it clear how intensely he and his top aides are trying to pass the buck.

The men behind Bush’s bubble are clearly hoping that their tried and true methods will serve them well yet again and that over time, Bush’s reputation will recover.

read the full article for plenty of examples.

[Quote:]

The White House’s new response to the political disaster prompted by Katrina — one in which officials are attempting to blame authorities in Louisiana, rather than in Washington, for the slow aid — underscores the Bush philosophy. According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can “attack, attack, attack.”

[..]

The Bush administration’s distance from local disaster-relief officials is by design. From the moment Bush stepped into office, he’s been determined to move away from the coordinated state/local/federal disaster-relief approach used by Clinton. Instead, as Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s first FEMA dirctor, told a congressional panel in 2001, Bush wanted to pull the federal government out of the disaster-relief business and aimed to “restore the predominant role of state and local response to most disasters.” The federal government became even less involved in natural disaster relief after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when FEMA’s mission was shifted toward responding to terrorist attacks. In 2002, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA — which Clinton had elevated to a Cabinet-level agency — was made one department in the massive bureaucracy. As a result, although George W. Bush has a nickname for FEMA director Brown (“Brownie”), Brown enjoys far less clout under Bush than Witt enjoyed under Clinton, which Haddow says is an “incalculable loss of influence” for FEMA.

State and local disaster-relief officials have been complaining about the lack of federal involvement in emergency response for some time. Trina Sheets, the executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, which represents local emergency personnel, told Salon that “since the Department of Homeland Security was established there has been a steady degradation of the capabilities.” Local officials protested earlier this year, when the Department of Homeland Security proposed an internal reorganization that would officially absolve FEMA of its disaster-preparedness functions and instead hand disaster relief to a new agency. Sheets says that her group has expressed its “concern” about the move in a meeting with Chertoff. Other local disaster-relief directors have been more critical. The day after Katrina struck New Orleans, Eric Holdeman, director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post denouncing the reorganization plan as a “a death blow to an agency that was already on life support.” He added: “Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership and no mentors.”

Of particular concern to local officials is the administration’s increasing focus on terrorism to the exclusion of natural disasters. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office showed that “almost 3 of every 4 grant dollars appropriated to the [Department of Homeland Security] for first responders in fiscal year 2005 were for 3 primary programs that had an explicit focus on terrorism.” More than $2 billion in grant money is available to local governments looking to improve the way they respond to terrorist attacks, but only $180 million is available under the main grant program for natural disaster funding, Homeland Security’s Emergency Management Performance Grant program. The administration had proposed cutting that amount to $170 million, even though NEMA had identified a $264 million national shortfall in natural-disaster funding.

“We have testified before Congress countless times, we have sent letters to DHS, we have met with Secretary Chertoff as recently as three weeks ago, pleading for a balanced approach between terrorism and natural disasters,” Sheets said.

And balance, Haddow agrees, is what’s needed. “You gotta do both,” he says. “You’ve got to fight terrorism.” But you’ve got to respond to hurricanes and earthquakes, too. And when Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on the Saturday before Katrina struck the Gulf, he made a promise to residents that he would respond, Haddow says. “People died because they couldn’t get it right,” he says. “People died because they didn’t deliver on their promise.”

here is a video clip of Bush and the flier-fighters I wrote about one post down on this page. It is weird how artificial everything looks. The poor firemen look particularly awkward, unsure of what to do. When Bush stops walking and starts talking to people, they are left sort of standing in the middle of the street, looking lost. And why would they be walking down the street in full gear in the MS heat?

I can picture the conversation that preceded this photo…

Rove (handing Bush a 4×6 card with instructions written on it in sharpie pen): Ok, this bit is really important: as you walk towards the cameras, make sure you get real close to the firefighters, and as they’re about to take the picture, start rolling your sleeves up. It’s kind of allegorical.

Bush: Ali who?

Rove (slaps forefead): never mind. Just do what it says on the fucking card, ok?