Little Red Scooter

Okay, so it's no surprise that Scooter Libby was Judith Miller's source, but how could we have guessed that he'd replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the bench?

Paneed Lobbyist with Side of Staffer and the House Red

I have lamb chops thawing right now but they look like mouldering bread compared to this. O, ye bitter partisans....

P.S. I know I've broken delayed fulfilling promises in the past, but I swear to recount my recent adventures in my sodden city of New Orleans.

David Brooks: Deception is White House Policy

In case you missed it, David Brooks reports what's been obvious for years: The Bush White House's public relations strategy is intentionally deceptive and usually involves deflecting blame onto other, less blameworthy people. Next: David Brooks admits that the sky really is blue and not fuchsia, as Ari Fleischer claimed in 2003.

Footlights?

Brian Williams might want to mention illustrative moments like this on more than just his blog:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

(Via TPM.)

Now I'm not one to give this president the benefit of a doubt, since he gave up any right to one years ago, but could there possibly be security reasons for such an occurrence? If not, then it's noteworthy as political theater aimed at Bush's ego, not at the electorate whose slipping faith in him was the impetus for last night's monologue.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger!

In his speech tonight, President Bush asserted that the federal government's failure to adequately respond in the aftermath of Katrina indicates that it needs more power and authority.

But according to emergency management expert William C. Nicholson (and several other experts, according to Ira Glass of This American Life), the Department of Homeland Security had all the authority it needed, once the president had declared a state of emergency. Nicholson said that "there was all the authority in the world." Under the National Response Plan, even if the president hadn't declared a state of emergency, Chertoff, the head of Homeland Insecurity, could have acted. "It's utterly clear that they had the authority to preposition assets and to significantly accelerate the federal response.... They did not need to wait for the state." (Click on the Ira Glass link above and listen to the first few minutes.)

But Louisiana Governor Blanco did declare a state of emergency on the Friday before the storm. (Administration shills claimed she hadn't.) She then asked the president to follow through, which he did, and...well, you know what didn't happen then.

The point isn't to assess Bush's proportional responsibility for the weak federal response but to stress that this situation should not be used as a pretext to give the federal government more power. It may, however, be a great reason to fire the political appointees who staff FEMA (following the late but welcome resignation of Michael Brown) and to liberate that agency from the yoke of Michael Chertoff, who we could roast over some hot coals while we're at it. That would give the agency its former power without actually increasing that of the federal government. And it would give some stray New Orleans dogs some much longed-for, if stringy meat.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not suggesting Blanco, Nagin, Barbour, or anybody else down here be absolved of responsibility. But the early Administration "don't look at us" line was perfumed bullshit.

Supreme Soviet US Senate Republicans Want Partisan Katrina Kommission

Let the whitewashing begin. According to an ABC-WaPo poll

...76 percent of the public favors an investigation of federal storm response efforts by an independent commission similar to the one that probed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The proposal drew strong bipartisan support: 64 percent of all Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats favored creating the independent panel.

So what did the new Supreme Republican Soviet do? They voted against it. Don't you love Imperial life?

Of course, not all Republican bootlickers voted against it. For example, chickenshit Louisiana senator David "I helped DeLay and Abramoff fuck over them gambling Indians" Vitter just didn't vote. The wrath of Rove presumably would've been too much for a fledgling water-carrier senator.

We're looking forward to a thoroughly biased report with cherry-picked information that exonerates the administration while shitting on everyone else. You know, like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on all those pre-war CIA failures. A nice, thick, meaningless report that propagandists can quote whenever Bush-undermining facts get in the way.

Unfortunately, what America needs is a thorough, unbiased investigation that lays bare every iota of this travesty, regardless of party affiliation, and puts the entire event in the decades-broad context of US emergency management, the Army Corps of Engineers' levee system and the erosion of Louisiana's wetlands.

Too bad we won't get it.

2000 Doesn't Equal 618

Prominent right-wing propagandists have been proclaiming that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin didn't use 2000 buses to evacuate poor, carless people from the city before the storm. They're right. But only because New Orleans didn't have 2000 buses. Media Matters, which unlike Jack Kelly and Sean Hannity bothered to check facts, reports that New Orleans has had a total of 618 working school and city buses. Now according to my calculations, if each bus had been able to hold 50 people—and that's unrealistic if not impossible—and had made three trips apiece, they would've been able to transport 92,700 people somewhere. Not out of the city, though, since one trip a reasonable distance from the city would've taken hours with all the traffic, and they wouldn't have been able to return because of contraflow (which worked pretty well, by the way). I imagine this is why the weekend before the storm the mayor told New Orleanians that buses would pick them up and take them to one of several shelters of last resort. Apparently some of those buses didn't show up; but that's a different issue.

We're Getting Out of Here

This story from a friend of a friend appears in the 9/16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only). It isn't as dramatic as some, but it makes me really glad I left before the storm.

As told to JOHN GRAVOIS

Bill Lavender runs the Low Residency Creative Writing Program at the University of New Orleans. His companion, Nancy Dixon, teaches in the university's English department. Over a cellphone, Mr. Lavender described their journey out of the city.

When we heard about the storm, we decided not to evacuate, because we really didn't think our house was in grave danger. We live in Mid-City, which is a part of New Orleans that's relatively high but not as high as the French Quarter. It's an old house. It's been through plenty of hurricanes.

I guess the storm was at full force at midmorning on Monday. It never was really that bad -- I actually put on my motorcycle helmet and walked around outside at the height of it. We lost power, of course. We still had water, we still had gas.

By about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the storm was over. There was a little bit of water in the street, but nothing I couldn't have driven through. Our reaction at that point was, Well, this wasn't really that bad.

If that had been all the storm was, I wouldn't have regretted staying.

At some point in there, the water did start to rise. It was rising in the full sunshine, with no rain, just coming up in the streets.

Our neighbor across the street, who had evacuated, had a boat under her house -- a 14-foot light aluminum skiff with oarlocks and oars. As kind of a lark, I went and pulled it out from under her house and put it in the street.

That night, Monday night, we went out on the front porch. There was absolutely no light, and there was no noise, and the stars were fantastically clear.

We got up the next morning, and the water was higher. We were trying to listen to the radio, trying to figure out what was going on. We were hearing that the flooding on the east side of New Orleans was really bad. We were starting to hear helicopters flying around.

There was a rumor that the levee was broken somewhere, but that they were going to be fixing it, and that as soon as they got the levee fixed, they were going to be able to pump the water out. I was thinking maybe the end of the week, at the most.

One of my neighbors came to my door and said there was a guy around the corner with a baby who needed to go to the hospital. The guy was scared to death of water.

So we got in the boat, and we were rowing down the street, trying to pick the best route to Mercy Hospital. There was water all the way -- right up to the front door.

Some guy in scrubs got down in the water and helped me dock the boat there on the steps. He was a paramedic who worked for the city. He said they had no power in the hospital, and he had a generator down at his office. He wanted to know if I could row him down there so he could get this generator.

And I asked him, "Doesn't the hospital have backup power?" He said, "Yeah, they have a generator, but it's in the basement."

It was ludicrous, this notion of going to get a 5,000-watt generator to power a hospital. But he said, "There are people dying in here, and it's all we can do."

So we went to his paramedic station, a little two-story metal building. Two of his colleagues were there.

This guy I'm with told them, "I've come to get the generator." And they told him no. He said, "Look, there are people dying in Mercy."

"Well things are tough all over, and before this generator comes out of here, I've got to get me and my dogs out."

At that point, I kind of exploded. I said, "You're not even using the generator. The generator has nothing to do with your dogs." It kind of shamed them. We finally did get the generator.

We had our last good meal that night. We were having wine on the front porch, all the neighbors were out on their porches, and I got out my guitar and sang "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

That night it was really hot and really still. There were helicopters messing around all night. I had this idea they were either evacuating Mercy Hospital or bringing them a generator. At one point they were so close that I could feel the wind, so I took to praying for them to come over.

It wasn't until Wednesday that we started to get more information. There was a press conference at 12. They said they thought the levee repairs would be done by about Friday. Then they said they should have the water out of the city within about 30 days. I said, "We're getting out of here. We can't live like this for 30 days."

We packed up very hastily -- all our drinking water and a good bit of food. I left my hard drive with 30 years of miscellaneous writings on it, plus Nancy's hard drive with all her scholarship on it. I just tried to hide them in the attic. I didn't know what else to do.

We had to put our cat in a carrying cage, and we put our dogs on the boat. We went and got our neighbor, my friend Charlie Franklin. We told him what we'd heard and we told him it's time to go. He thought about it for about two minutes, and then said OK.

We were nervous. We knew there were no police. We'd been warned that there were roving bands of armed looters. We knew that the boat was becoming a valuable commodity. The dogs were nervous also. They would not let anyone approach closer than about 10 feet from the boat. Charlie had a gun.

When we turned one corner, there was a kiddie pool floating in the middle of Canal Street, and I could see a head sticking up over the side of it. There was another guy pushing it and another guy wandering around in the chest-deep water looking kind of dreamy. They were junkies that had looted the Rite Aid. They were using this kiddie pool to get out of the water to shoot up.

A little further, there was a dead man in the water. Someone had hung his shirt up on a street sign. I couldn't really see his face, but the shirt was sticking up like a tent. We heard later they were tying corpses to street signs and poles.

Across the street was a building called the City Hall Annex. It has a big front porch that was just above water level, and it was full of people, maybe 150. On one end, there were women and kids holding up signs saying, "Help us please." At the other end of the porch there was this mad party going on. They were breaking windows and throwing whiskey bottles around and kind of whooping and yelling.

We were starting to get very careful about our route because we were getting close to the Superdome, and we didn't want to get caught there. Our plan was to go to the Macy's parking lot, which is just adjacent to the dome, where we had parked our car. We were just praying that we might be able to get to the car and drive out.

There were no cops. In this whole ride, we never saw a cop.

When we got to the Macy's parking lot, we saw that the entrance was four feet deep. So we couldn't get our car. We followed the water to the corner of Girod and Carondolet, and that's where the water ended. We had to abandon the boat.

So we started walking uptown, to go to my ex-wife's house, which we knew was dry, and they had a generator and probably food and water. For all I knew, they were still there, because I hadn't talked to them since Monday morning when the phones went out.

We saw this two-story house with the facade completely removed. It was just like a dollhouse. I could see the furniture and the bookshelves, everything neat, nothing in disarray, and these two black labs up on the second floor looking down at us.

After a while, a guy caught up with us. He told us he had walked all the way from the lower Ninth Ward. I'm guessing that must be at least five miles. He told us that down in the Ninth Ward he was literally wading through bodies on the way out. He didn't know where any of his family was. He had a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old kid, and he suspected that they were both dead. He was coming uptown because he had a brother who was a butler in a Garden District mansion.

He told us that in the end there will be tens of thousands dead.

We got to my ex's house. We were just praying that we were going to see her pickup outside the house. But there was nothing, and our hearts just sank. We'd been on the road now for about four to five hours. We were exhausted.

Then I remembered that our friends lived just a few blocks away, and they had left their car. Not only that, but I knew right where the key was. We got to Alex and Kat's house, and the car was intact, and the key was in the mailbox. But we couldn't make the key work in the door. I tried it and Charlie tried it, and finally I said, "Charlie, move," and I threw a brick through the window.

We crammed all of us in the car. We drove to Tchoupitoulas Street and then straight across the bridge to the West Bank, the only way out.

The next day, we were going to leave Charlie in Baton Rouge to take the bus to Alexandria, but we found out that there were 200,000 people downtown trying to get out. So we took him all the way to Alexandria. We started to have the emotional breakdown. It was strange how, going through the whole thing, I just sort of never stopped. None of us did.

But when we dropped Charlie off, all three of us broke down and started crying and pretty much didn't stop for about three days.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Notes From Academe
Volume 52, Issue 4, Page A56

Hurricane Pam: Where It All Started to Go Wrong

Greg Peters was there. (Via Oyster.)

I'm on TV!

Not really. But CNN just did a piece on a family who appear to be my neighbors. We thought the homes they were walking past looked familiar, and then they walked past Ms. Mae's, the corner bar one block north of our apartment. The neighborhood doesn't look much different from when we left--just that the only cars are camoflaged.

Sing, Caged Bird, Sing!

Oh, please, please, let it be true....

(Just admit it, people, even you want just a teensy bit for another news story to come along. How much Katrina koverage can you take?)

On Your Own, Baby

Heartwarming and Heartwarming II. (Via Andrew Sullivan.) Don't worry, I'm sure that if any of this gets any press, the Bush shock troops will start attacking the victims, per usual.

UPDATE: Think the two eyewitness accounts above aren't bad enough? Try what happened to Charmaine Neville (for those who don't know, she's a famous local singer). It's somewhere approaching what happened when the USS Indianapolis sank, only with choppers flying overhead that don't drop any food or water or offer any assistance whatsoever. Heartwarming. WARNING: Not for the faint of heart or those without ample supplies of Kleenex. (Also via Andrew Sullivan.)

Note: A previous version of this post overreached. The comments refer to that.

I Love You, Keith Olbermann

But, you know, not in a funny kind of way. Just in a tell-it-like-it-is, brother, kind of way.

A Refugee's Tale

P., a friend of A.'s, had this to say about leaving New Orleans:

Well, you know me... everyone evaced on Sunday but G. and I stayed along with our soccer buddy J. (british) and Katrina wasn't too terrible. The wind was crazy and the water rose and the trees lost huge branches. We stayed in a friends big brick house, they'd taken off for Houston, and the top windows blew out and we had to board them up with nails and beach towels, the next door landlords weren't as lucky, their windows blew in and the rain destroyed their ceilings, collapsed them, but just wallboard, an easy fix really. My house was fine, just two knocked down fences and a broken gate. The shed I built was fine and only lost a few shingles. The three of us spent Monday night frying up chicken and potatoes and drank port on the porch and enjoyed the no lights and the fact we could see the stars. But come Tuesday, when we heard the water was rising and that the Mississippi was getting in [Note: it was Lake Ponchartrain. -Rob] we rode bikes to the business district and saw the water advancing and people looting, albeit small-scale. We headed to Wal-Mart where we heard they were handing out free water. We get there and the place was an orgy of looting. Cops putting TV sets in their gov't cars church ladies stealing pots and pans and tampons and facial cream. I can only assume that the items on the shelves left were condoms, encyclopedias, and healthy foods like fruits and veggies and whole wheat bread. We made the decision to leave then and spo we ciphoned fuel from G.'s car and a couple of neighbors' gas cans into my car and took off. The Rite-Aid was being looted as we did this and shots rang out and a chase ensued as a mid-fifties man on a bike who took a few photos had to pedal for his life. Its a mess, quite literally and now there are supposedly armed gangs on the streets and the water ain't stopping. My story really ends there, and now I'm here in Austin, TX and looks like we'll have some time off from work, so wonder what I'll do.

-P.

P.S. Hurricane Katrina is a major cock-block.

ED. NOTE: It's worth mentioning that when the upscale Whole Foods Market was looted, people allegedly took only what they needed, like water. The wine and much of the rest of the merchandise was left on the shelves—and they have some kick-ass wine.

Move over, Harding

From David Remnick's 9/12 New Yorker editorial:

...In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.

Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million. Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, "All of us said, 'Look, build it or you're going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.' And they didn't, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water."

The President's incuriosity, his prideful insistence on being an underbriefed "gut player," is not looking so charming right now, either, if it ever did. In the ABC interview, he said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." [Note: I heard about it on the radio before the hurricane. -Rob] Even the most cursory review shows that there have been comprehensive and chilling warnings of a potential calamity on the Gulf Coast for years. The most telling, but hardly the only, example was a five-part series in 2002 by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a newspaper that heroically kept publishing on the Internet last week. After evaluating the city's structural deficiencies, the Times-Picayune reporters concluded that a catastrophe was "a matter of when, not if." The same paper said last year, "For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade." A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would be a catastrophe: "Soon the geographical 'bowl' of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops—terrain they would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline, refinery chemicals, and debris." And that describes much of the Gulf Coast today.

New Orleans, yes. That's on TV right now. Apparently, the first G.W. saw of the disaster was when he flew over it in his chopper. If that's true, it's appalling. We know Bush doesn't read the papers—the best source of in-depth information—but did he not even turn on the television to see what was going on?

In any case, there's plenty of blame to spread around, going back decades. But I want the head of this serial abuser of office and the public trust on a pike in front of the White House, warning all future holders of that office not to do what this man-child has done. Move over Harding, here comes G.W. Bush, the worst president in United States history.

Bill Shanks: God Punished New Orleans

Pastor Bill Shanks, of New Covenant church, which I used to visit on occasion, back in my Christ-worshipping days, thinks Katrina was, you know, good for New Orleans:

"New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again."

Unfortunately, New Orleans isn't free of Bill Shanks.

I hate to say it, but I know this guy (haven't seen him in years). I've even taken his kids to the zoo. His church is pretty insular and cult-like. Not on purpose; he's no David Koresh. But Bill's only moderately educated and is self-taught in all things biblical. He's short and chubby and could be anybody's uncle. He'd blend right in at a barbecue. Until he started talking Jesus. And prophesying and laying on hands and casting out demons (you know, for kids!). Like many folks on the religious Right, he means well but he's just really, really misguided.

I know you're never going to read this, Bill, but for the record, you can go to hell.

Gross Negligence

WHAT THE FUCK!!!???

UPDATE: With a side order of Sick.

UPDATE: Finally, some relief for those in the Convention Center.

Halliburton Gets Katrina Kontract

Surprise, surprise. (Thanks, Larisa.)

Dear News Media

As usual, the national print coverage of the Katrina aftermath has been good if not excellent (e.g. Knight Ridder), while the national TV and radio coverage has been mediocre. That's not to say that CNN, NPR and others haven't filed some oustanding reports from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but (unfortunately) their reporting stops there. Many refugees are starved for information about their cities and homes, and the national news media aren't providing it.

I know it's hard to fathom, but the function of news reporting isn't solely to fill corporate coffers with advertising dough wrung from others' suffering. It's also to inform the public.

I am that public. Many of my friends are that public.

We who fled New Orleans would like to know the state of our homes. CNN has show innumerable helicopter shots of New Orleans, careful to pan east where the worst flooding is, and to zoom in on the Superdome and the fire on the West Bank. That leads me to believe that CNN is capable of determining what parts of the city aren't yet flooded, how fast the water may or may not be moving and how high the water appears to be from various rooftops. That would be useful information. Wolf Blitzer in his "situation room" could show a map with, say, blue indicating where water is. He could tell us where the water isn't. This could take, say, five minutes, tops.

We who fled South and Central Mississippi (and those who remained) would like to know the state of Hattiesburg, Meridian, Laurel, Brookhaven, Jackson and other places that, unfortunately, don't provide the dramatic footage available on the Gulf Coast. There are, however, plenty of trees down and homes wrecked. Might that not justify a quick trip north, Mr. Cooper? We promise to have plenty of starving, heat-exhausted people desperate for a meal and a drink. We promise to give you lots of tragic stories of families torn apart, relatives lost and couples reunited. Come, will you? Please? Those of us who fled would like to know if we can go back. Those who remained would like to know (if they have batteries and a portable TV) where and when food and ice and water will arrive, and when the phones and lights and water will work. Well, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and FOX, can you spare one reporter and a camera crew?

UPDATE: We finally got somebody on the phone in Laurel, Mississippi. The power's supposed to return on Sunday. I found no reporting on this; even Mississippi Power's website had nothing. How did we find out? A phone call to neighbors in Laurel (the phone must've come back on in the last 24 hours).

Changes in Attitudes

Rumsfeld on looting in post-Saddam Baghdad, 2003:

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said.

Bush on looting in post-Katrina New Orleans, 2005:

I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.