“Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the “human storm” – the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation’s history, it’s striking how often political turbulence followed.”

Leonard Witt, writing yesterday in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, unearthed a chilling quote from a July 24 story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own.”

For the victims of the storm, “not acceptable” is the ultimate irrelevancy. Nothing is unacceptable. Living or dead, they have to accept what happened. Because it did happen, and it will always have happened, and they will always have had to accept it.

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller took a break from burnishing the Bush action figure to write about Republican concerns that the deaths caused by the administration’s incoherent response to the Hurrican Katrina catastrophe may negatively impact the president’s second term agenda, but Missouri congressman Roy Blunt insisted that abandoning efforts to repeal the estate tax would deprive the nation of exactly the medicine it needs.

The efficiency of the international response stands in stark contrast to the US federal government’s hesitant and confused relief efforts and highlights the Bush administration’s decision to gut the Federal Emergency Response Agency and place it in the hands of Michael Brown, whose previous emergency management experience consisted of settling disputes among Arabian horse owners, and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, whose disaster relief experience is dwarfed by Brown’s.

President Bush has announced that he will oversee an investigation into the delays and failures that characterized the disaster relief effort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, beginning with the question of who decided to convert the Federal Emergency Management Agency into a warehouse for political patronage beneficiaries and why Air Force one didn’t fly low enough over Louisiana last Wednesday that the president could hear the screams of help from people trapped in attics and on rooftops waiting for rescue helicopters that were grounded to clear air space for the president’s jet.

Former Time Magazine political reporter John Dickerson has joined the staff of Slate Magazine, bringing with him a wealth of inside-the-beltway experience and sources which he put to good use in his excruciatingly stupid Slate debut. The theme? How Bush can surmount the political fallout created by letting tens of thousands of desperate Katrina victims rot, many of them literally, for a week.

The timeline documents delays in the federal response along with some of the more egregious elements of the PR and smear campaigns mounted by the Bush administration, among which are the grounding of rescue effort air traffic and the comandeering of 50 firefighters for a Biloxi, Mississippi, presidential photo opportunity, and the Washington Post’s September 3 publication of an anonymous claim by a “senior Bush official” that Governor Blanco had never declared a state of emergency.

Allbaugh’s appointment heralded the transmogrification of FEMA from an efficient emergency management organization into a storehouse for otherwise unqualified Bush administration patronage appointees. The man Bush calls “Brownie” was the chief beneficiary of the process. And it now appears as though his college days with Allbaugh were his only qualification for the job.

The Los Angeles Times reports today that the US has suspended major reconstruction projects in Iraq because security costs have consumed the funds Congress appropriated for the purpose.

More than the levee was breached this week. The social contract that binds us was breached this week. The obligation we have as a nation to secure all citizens and the protection we purchase by restricting our actions in exchange for the benefits of civil society were both breached this week. The patina of civil rights and of equality of access were breached this week. The illusion that the government has done anything more than talk about security or preparedness or that security is even a priority, was breached this week.

As New Orleans is slowly drained of its human population, numerous press reports describe what remains. Along with homes and possessions and, all too often, friends and family who died during the storm and its hideous aftermath, residents of the city are leaving behind what numerous press reports have described as a “toxic gumbo.”

The description doesn’t do justice to the situation.

The United States has been by any measure the world’s strongest and most prosperous post-World War II nation. With the end of the Cold War and the removal of the counterwieght provided by the Soviet Union, American imperialists such as those at present embedded in the Bush administration — Dick Cheney, former Rumsfeld deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, Bush himself, and others — have looked to recast the country as a deliberate empire rather than one by default. Bored by the niggling proxy wars spawned in the contest with Russia and still enraged by the outcome of the post-war adventure in Vietnam, these men sought a far more direct and unabashed application of US military might and economic dominance.

Sunday morning I got up early and went on down to the Pentagon’s “America Supports You Freedom Walk”

But with a very few exceptions, no one is attacking the people who are on the front lines saving lives. And in the instances where criticism has been aimed at police, for instance, it arises from situations such as the one during which racist Louisiana cops prevented threw down on a crowd of storm victims attempting to walk out of New Orleans. Overwhelmingly, the criticism is of federal officials who didn’t get those “front line” responders into the afflicted areas quickly enough to do the jobs they’re trained to do, and then didn’t provide them with clear direction.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has been in a distressingly public tailspin since 911, has now become so delusional that he mistakes George W. Bush for America and blames the former’s inadequacies on the latter.

I think I just witnessed a train wreck in slow motion. The Galloway versus Hitchens debate in New York was a traversty that I admit I never foresaw, but which with the benefit of hindsight may have been only too obvious from the start. The debate sold out more than a week ago so I [...]

It won’t be long before George W. Bush speaks to the nation from Jackson Square, a beautiful and relatively unscathed New Orleans landmark. He’ll talk about taking responsibility and moving forward, about the heroism and sacrifice of those involved in the rescue and relief efforts, about the American qualities that will make rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast not only possible, but imperative.

What he won’t say are any of the things he should say. So we’re taking the liberty of saying them for him.

Hyperbole and inaccuracy notwithstanding, I had some sympathy with the calls to scrap the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day as reported in the Sunday Times at the weekend

When Jerry Bremer arrived in Baghdad to take over as Iraq proconsul, he immediately set about rewriting the country’s civil code — in violation of international law — for the benefit of US corporations, and dispensing, pallet loads, literally, of cash looted from Iraqi’s oil revenues. Now that president Bush has designated political assassin and ongoing national security threat Karl Rove as the new Gulf Coast proconsul, Bremer will soon look like a classic piker.

The New York Times is publishing a serial novel, disguised as a spate of editorials, plotted around their jailed celebrity stenographer, Judy Miller. This week’s episode features a comparison between Miller, jailed for refusing to name a source involved in the investigation of White House involvement in outing an undercover CIA agent, and Zhao Yan, an actual reporter for the Times in China who has been jailed for reasons that aren’t at all clear.

Dick Cheney seems to be the insider’s choice to lead the GOP presidential ticket in 2008, but given the rate at which various Cheney body parts seem to be failing, one important question remains to be answered: Is America ready for a cyborg president with anger management issues? We think not, so we’re looking at alternatives.

Only 32% of respondents in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted September 16-18 approve of the way president Bush is handling the war in Iraq, while 67% disapprove. The number is by far the lowest since the invasion, and documents an astonishing 8 point drop in the week since the previous poll. Prior to the current survey, the president’s approval rating on the war had held steady at 40% since mid-May.

Sorry for the long absence everybody – I’ve been spending a lot of time working in a New York City political campaign and then recovering from it.
So it looks like Roberts is going to be confirmed easily, since Patrick Leahy is going to support his nomination. This is of course very disappointing, and I [...]

My first reaction on learning of the New York Times plan to put their op-ed columnists behind a subscription wall was one of relief. “Halleluja! Tom Friedman is halfway to rehab.” No more public flirtations with the happy-face fascism that keeps Singapore’s trains running on time and its inhabitants safe from the Atlantic hurricane season.

Columnist Robert Novak, perhaps best known for his bookend performances as the stoic iguana in John Huston’s 1964 film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams classic, “Night of the Iguana,” and Soulless Lizard #2 in “The Outing of Valerie Plame,” has filed a disturbing report on a gathering of high-powered Republicans in Aspen, Colorado.

The Bush administration have spent the better part of five years systematically dismantling the US government as we know it. Whether Bush himself is aware of this, only he (and possibly his wife) can say. But it’s what he’ll be remembered for, along with a disastrous war that will ultimately have damaged this country more, and in more ways, than Vietnam ever did. That’s his legacy: Presiding over what one can only hope is a failed attempt to remove governance from the province of government, and for exposing and increasing the limits of US power in and over the world.

Bull Moose doing his best Leonard Cohen impersonation:
The Roberts nomination is not the end all and be all of politics, but it has provided some valuable insight about the state of the Democratic Party. Everyone knows Roberts is eminently qualified for this position. Everyone knows that he is not a Thomas or a Scalia. [...]

Some time ago I set up a Technorati search for the term “weldon berger” and subscribed to the rss feed for the results, which until recently consisted entirely of links to sites linking to this site. But when Congressman Curt Weldon broke (or rebroke, or re-rebroke) the news that a Pentagon datamining operation called Able Danger had identified the 911 hijacking ringleader before the attacks, or that several members of the group thought it had, or thought that someone told them it had, and had seen a chart proving it, or that they thought proved, or that someone else said proved it, “weldon berger” took off.

Brady recognizes and respects both the business and the marketing aspects of the professional sport he plays. I think Brady recognizes that his success is dependant on more than his throwing arm and his swift legs. His relatively modest acceptance of a reduced contract, for example, solidifies his image as a selfless leader among his teammates, and that’s priceless for any Visa commercial in which he is featured. An effective leader, whether in business, politics, or sports, cannot even be perceived to have a selfish agenda. Vick, on the other hand, has made it quite clear that money is his most important motivation, and by that admission he loses much of the leadership qualities that enabled Brady to lead a team to three Super Bowls in this decade, proclaiming a new dynasty in the business of professional American football.