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President Bush’s job approval rating took a hit in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, dropping to a historic low of 41%, a new Zogby America poll reveals. The same survey found the nation’s forty-third president would lose election contests against all of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter.

The Zogby America survey of 1157 likely voters, conducted from September 6 through 7, 2005, has a margin of error of +/-2.9 percentage points.

The public rates the performance of all levels of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina negatively, with 36% giving the President passing marks on his handling of the crisis—slightly higher than the 32% who give government in general good marks for its handling of the storm that devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf coast.

In another key finding, the Zogby America survey finds that 86% of likely voters assess the response of private charities favorably, and one charity, the American Red Cross, gets higher marks than the federal government, as well as state and local governments. In fact, four times as many respondents say the Red Cross did a better job than the federal government, with the charity being seen as more effective by 69% and the government’s response viewed more favorably by 17%. The Red Cross also gets better marks than Louisiana’s state and local governments, by a 72% to 10% margin.

[..]

“Ironically, the Republican message to Americans is to rely less on government. And it looks like that message is getting across, as Americans have more faith in the Red Cross in this crisis than government.”

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White House Information Minister and stenography session leader Scottie McClellan has argued that we should not play the blame game by assigning responsibility to the Bush administration for their failures to respond to Hurricane Katrina. F*%k that Scottie! I’m gonna play the blame game whether you like it or not you little pudgy faced bastard!

            

The young members of the Presidential Prayer Team for Kids should be charged with dereliction of duty for inadequately praying for both Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and FEMA chief Michael Brown. On June 10, 2005 they were given clear orders to pray for Michael Brown. Twenty days later, on July 1, they were specific instructions to pray for Michael Chertoff. Therefore, PPT Kids members had three full months to pray for these leaders before Hurricane Katrina struck on August 28.

“Brownie” was doing a heck of a good job even though he was abandoned by the bratty kids who willfully chose to ignore their Presidential Prayer Team Weekly Briefings. Clearly they either did not pray enough, or their measly prayer effort was not enough to convince God to enable these bureaucrats to save the city of New Orleans.

“No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise.”

~ Marian Anderson

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Picking up on a thought bouncing around back at TMW after a Chris Floyd post, I thought I’d find out for myself exactly which Louisiana parishes were and were not included in George W. Bush’s declaration of emergency effective August 26th, which you can also reach by clicking the map itself.

I checked the parish map against the White House’s own press release, posted on their own site.  I have tried to figure out how this is my own mistake, but I can’t find it.  And the results are frankly so bizarre I had to make the graphic in order to properly show you.

Welcome to upside-down-land: the areas at risk for Katrina were quite remarkably the areas not included in Bush’s declaration of emergency.

What the hell?

Compare and contrast with the full and specific statewide list of parishes and the services they will receive issued after the storm hit.

Is this really what Bush authorized before the storm hit?  Are they really that incompetent?

PS: Putting to rest any nightmares, the map doesn’t correlate in any way I can find with demographics, income, voting patterns, campaign contributions, or the like.  If I haven’t made an obvious mistake, I’m just hoping now that the press release simply got the list of “emergency” and “non-emergency” parishes mixed up.

In other words, more galling incompetence in the White House, albeit trivial, is really the best-case scenario.

Otherwise, we’re looking at more galling incompetence of a frighteningly non-trivial kind.

UPDATE: I’ve received numerous emails explaining that all of the coastal parishes were already declared disaster areas because of Tropical Storm Cindy, which struck in June.  Checking with FEMA’s own website… nope.  Only five coastal parishes — Jefferson, Lafourche, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, and St. Charles — seem to be covered here, and only on a limited basis at that.

This is explicitly confirmed by the presidential authorization of August 23, as posted on the White House website.

I’m still hoping and half-expecting to find I’ve overlooked something.  I hope so.  Honestly.  I do not exactly enjoy this, and I hope this is my own mistake in some way.  But I’ve looked and looked on the White House and FEMA websites and Googled my fingers half off, and while I do find several parishes coming in line for various types of aid piecemeal at various times over the last several years, I cannot yet find anything which even comes close to accounting for the diagram above.  It still appears that while northern Louisiana was covered, much of Louisiana directly in the storm’s path was simply not covered by the president’s declaration at the time the storm hit.

UPDATE 2: I’ve tried calling FEMA general number repeatedly, but the phone is ringing endlessly with no answer.  Not even a machine or voicemail.  They seem a bit overwhelmed.  I’m reluctant to take anyone’s time there anyway right now anyway.  Instead, I’ve sent polite emails to the public FEMA email addresses that seems relevant, asking for a brief explanation of the above once things have calmed down.

[Quote:]

Remember Valerie Plame? Because the US news media doesn’t. As you might recall, she was “outed” as a NOC (non-official cover) agent of the CIA by the Bush administration in retaliation for her husband, Joseph Wilson, making remarks critical of Bush policy on Iraq. This saga was once front-page news, especially as it was reaching a boiling point with many fingers pointing to Karl Rove as the source of that leak.

But then the American Media 4-second attention span kicked in, and nothing significant has been reported since August 16, when the editor of Time said the info from Rove was not worth a promise of confidentiality. Since that time, it’s all been editorials and bloggers keeping the story alive. The news media forgot to follow one of the biggest stories of the 21st century (so far).

Then there’s Tom DeLay’s questionable ethics. When was the last time you heard anything significant about the investigation into his behaviour? Maybe August 11 when his lobbyist buddy Jack Abramoff was indicted for fraud. But even that isn’t news about Tom DeLay himself. For that, you have to go all the way back to August 5 when it was reported that lobbyists donated to his legal defense fund (and Harry Reid’s as well) in violation of House ethics rules.

But the US news media saw a shiny object out in the Gulf of Mexico or in Crawford, Texas, and as usual immediately forgot about all the longer-term stories of great importance to the nation. They are so tightly focused on what happened today that they completely forgot about what’s happening now, in our time. They’re so worried about being fast that they forgot to be complete.

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When we were out on the Prairies last week, we took the kid to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, which is generally very good, especially Megamunch. Much to my surprise, there was an exhibit on Internet Explorer, up through release 6, and I got a picture.

Doubtless the terror of its ecosystem, in its day.

[Quote:]

In 1995, the Washington Monthly wrote about FEMA’s miraculous turnaround after its abysmal performance dealing with Hurricane Andrew. In that story was this tidbit from Jeffrey Itell, who conducted a massive study of FEMA’s operations, which uncovered that FEMA had extensive powers according to the Stafford Act that, to everyone’s detriment, it was not exercising:

We found that without state requests, FEMA could assess the catastrophic area, assess what assistance the state needed, start mobilizing that relief, present its recommendations to the governor, and, if necessary � get in the governor’s face to force the issue of accepting federal help.

This should all still apply — unless the Department of Homeland Security nullified these common-sense FEMA powers when it subsumed the agency a couple years ago. (If it did, DHS has a lot of explaining to do.)

Jon Stewart: So no one’s going to be held accountable for this at all?
Ed Helms: No. In fact, if history is any indication, they’ll be hard-pressed finding enough medals to pin on these guys. My sources tell me the head of FEMA will be dipped in bronze and turned into an award to be given to other officials.

[Quote:]

Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday’s UN report provides statistical proof that for many – well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare.

[..]

The annual Human Development Report normally concerns itself with the Third World, but the 2005 edition scrutinises inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty.

It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years – and is now the same as Malaysia. America’s black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.

The report is bound to incense the Bush administration as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows that Washington does not care about poor black Americans. But the 370-page document is critical of American policies towards poverty abroad as well as at home. And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having “an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security”.

some points from the report:

The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia

Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala

Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent

[Quote:]

Dispossessed victims of Hurricane Katrina will receive debit cards good for $2,000 to spend on clothing and other immediate needs, the Bush administration announced Wednesday, working to recast a relief effort drawing scant praise from Republicans and scathing criticism from top congressional Democrats.

[Quote:]

Approximately $2 billion US with much of the money coming in the form of U.S. government assistance. Each settler family [displaced from the Gaza strip] will receive between $200,000 to $300,000 US and the opportunity to relocate to other communities being created for them inside Israel proper. Most of the houses, synagogues, buildings and military infrastructure in the settlements will be destroyed before the land is handed over to the Palestinians.

[Quote:]

Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.

Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.

In Katrina’s wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush’s administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state’s congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana’s representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River — now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project’s congressional godfather — for barge traffic that is less than forecast.

The Industrial Canal lock is one of the agency’s most controversial projects, sued by residents of a New Orleans low-income black neighborhood and cited by an alliance of environmentalists and taxpayer advocates as the fifth-worst current Corps boondoggle. In 1998, the Corps justified its plan to build a new lock — rather than fix the old lock for a tiny fraction of the cost — by predicting huge increases in use by barges traveling between the Port of New Orleans and the Mississippi River.

[..]

Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, remembers holding a protest against the lock four years ago — right where the levee broke Aug. 30. Now she’s holed up with her family in a St. Louis hotel, and her neighborhood is underwater. “Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork,” Dashiell said.

Next time you see a politician talking about a project that is basically pork, shoot him. It looks like pork doesn’t just waste money, but in a very direct way lives as well. Hanging is too good for them.

A few days ago, a few heated comments were left in the thread about Condi buying shoes. After a few email exchanges the atmosphere cooled down a bit, and the author of the messages gave me two examples why he was upset that this weblog appeared to “blame bush only” when there was so much blame at the local level. I asked for examples of local blame, and was sent two things, a link to a webpage, and an email that circulated amongst his friends. Let’s take a look at both. Read the rest of this entry »

[Quote:]

I’m extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I’m afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said “refugees” was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It’s not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees.

[..]

We then started lugging in our food products. The foods I had purchased were mainly snacks, but my mother – God bless her soul – had gone all out with fresh vegetables, fruits, canned goods, breakfast cereals, rice, and pancake fixings. That’s when we got the next message: They will not be able to use the kitchen.

Excuse me? I asked incredulously.

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the “host” goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won’t allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs – and…

it could cause a riot.

It gets worse.

He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and “a sum of money” and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

My son looks at me and mumbles “Welcome to Krakow.”

My mother then asked if the churches would be allowed to come to their cabin and conduct services if the occupants wanted to attend. The response was “No ma’am. You don’t understand. Your church no longer owns this building. This building is now owned by FEMA and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. They have it for the next 5 months.” This scares my mother who asks “Do you mean they have leased it?” The man replies, “Yes, ma’am…lock, stock and barrel. They have taken over everything that pertains to this facility for the next 5 months.”

We then lug all food products requiring cooking back to the car. We start unloading our snacks. Mom appeared to have cornered the market in five counties on pop-tarts and apparently that was an acceptable snack so the guy started shoving them under the counter. He said these would be good to tied people over in between their two meals a day. But he tells my mother she must take all the breakfast cereal back. My mother protests that cereal requires no cooking. “There will be no milk, ma’am.” My mother points to the huge industrial double-wide refrigerator the church had just purchased in the past year. “Ma’am, you don’t understand…

It could cause a riot.”

He then points to the vegetables and fruit. “You’ll have to take that back as well. It looks like you’ve got about 10 apples there. I’m about to bring in 40 men. What would we do then?”

My mother, in her sweet, soft voice says, “Quarter them?”

“No ma’am. FEMA said no…

It could cause a riot. You don’t understand the type of people that are about to come here….”

I turn and walk out of the room…lugging all the healthy stuff back to the car. My son later tells me the man went on to say “We’ve already been told of teenage girls delivering fetuses on buses.” My son steps toward him and says “That’s because they’ve almost been starved to death, haven’t had a decent place to get a good night’s sleep, and their bodies can’t keep a baby alive. I’m not sure that’s any evidence some one should be using to show these are ‘bad people’.”

We then went to the second dorm room and made up beds. When we got through and were headed outside the host says to me and my daughter, “How did you get in here?” I told him we came in through the back gate. He replies, “No, HOW did you get in here? No one who doesn’t have credentials showing is supposed to be in here.” (I had noticed all the “hosts” had two or three badges hanging around their necks.) I told him it might have had something to do with the fact my daughter was snapping pictures of the OHP presence at the gate. He then tells us, “Well, starting in the morning NO ONE comes in. So if you have further goods you want to donate you will have to take them to your local church. They will collect them until they have a full load and then bring them to the front gate.”

If the US press follows the administration advice and decides not to show pictures from New Orleans, you can always switch to Foreign news sources..

“The president is going to build a dam in Arkansas. We’re going to fight water there so we don’t have to fight it here!”

Charmaine Neville is a member of the well-known Neville musical family from New Orleans. She is an accomplished singer and songwriter and is well-known in musical circles.

Her first-hand account of surviving the hurricane and her desperate attempts to save others and herself afterward provide one of the most gripping first person accounts of the disaster yet heard.

Another must-see video.

Reporters covering warzones in Iraq, Chechnya and the Sudan were not offered near-mandatory trauma counselling by the New York Times.

Journalists in Lousiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast were.

Imagine why:

Sometimes the reporters were so far out ahead of the story that they found themselves ignoring official statements, instead filing reports of what they were seeing themselves.

It’s an interesting article on the state of the press in the USA.

A reader sent me this:

Just a note on the Katrina aid. The Red Cross is certainly a good organization and is doing valuable work all over the world, but please consider linking to this site and the smaller organizations listed there:

http://www.sparkplugfoundation.org/katrinarelief.html

Red Cross runs with about a $2.9 Billion revenue, pays their top person about $400,000 a year, and has only distributed around $150 million of the $500 million donated to them after Sep.11
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005/010905redcross.htm

Not to detract from their work, yet for those who want to see the maximum aid result from their donations might consider some of the lesser known, grassroots efforts. One large organization which I continuously hear praise for in my non-profit work is The Salvation Army. They keep a very lean and effective profile, delivering more aid for the buck than some of the more bureaucratic institutions out there.
I would be most thankful if you would consider adding links to those alternative organizations alongside the Red Cross logo.

After the tsunami, I ran a few posts about local charities, and we collected a few thousand euro for one of them. If you know about some good local charities not listed on the link above, let me know, and I’ll post about them.

Keith Olbermann goes off on one here…

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”

Well there’s your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security�?: “Louisiana is a city…�?

Watch the video here

From (Crooks and Liars)

[Quote:]

Internet giant Yahoo has been accused of supplying information to China which led to the jailing of a journalist for “divulging state secrets”.

Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo’s Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao’s e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information.

The media watchdog accused Yahoo of becoming a “police informant” in order to further its business ambitions.

A Yahoo spokeswoman, Pauline Wong, said the company had no immediate comment.

Shi Tao, 37, worked for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, before he was arrested and sentenced in April to 10 years in prison.

According to a translation of his conviction, reproduced by Reporters Without Borders, he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message.

Reporters Without Borders said the message warned journalists of the dangers of social unrest resulting from the return of dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in June 2004.

The media organisation accused Yahoo of providing Chinese investigating organs with information that helped link Shi Tao’s personal e-mail account and the text of the message to his computer.

“We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

Western internet companies have regularly been criticised for agreeing to China’s strict rules governing the internet, which Communist Party leaders fear could be a tool to spread dissent.

Link to Reporters Without Borders.