Bush saks up.

[T1B Nic]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050913/ap_ ... washington

[Risa]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050913/ap_ ... washington

Take it to spin zone.

(edit: besides saying this --

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said."

aint shit when his first response was this --

"Brownie, you did a heckuva job."


Dude is poll reading. And the sad thing is, so many
stupid ass fake christian americans are gonna buy it
and let him off the hook.

fuck y'all in advance.)

[Cicero]

Let me be the first to say, FUCK YOU.

[Mister Bushice]

First time he's EVER even said that.

[Felix]

"I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there," Bush said.

I'm sure he knows that from watching it on TV

[MuchoBulls]

WHen will Nagin and Blanco do the same?

[BSmack]

WHen will Nagin and Blanco do the same?

Let's see what Bush does that actualy shows "taking responsibility". So far all we have is a bunch of scripted blather. I'd prefer some action and some more heads rolling would be a good start.

[DrDetroit]

Well, we already see the media blatantly distorting what Bush said...



BTW - how do you show actually taking responsibility? He canned Brown, didn't he?

And the only other heads that should be rolling would be Blanco and Nagin's. But I don't you'd go that far...you don't think there was any state/local failure, do you?

[BSmack]

BTW - how do you show actually taking responsibility? He canned Brown, didn't he?

He claimed he didn't even know Brown had resigned. He's a clueless trust fund baby without a clue as to what it means to own up to his actions.

[Risa]

BTW - how do you show actually taking responsibility? He canned Brown, didn't he?

He claimed he didn't even know Brown had resigned. He's a clueless trust fund baby without a clue as to what it means to own up to his actions.

no fucking way, dude. no fucking way.
are you serious?


is anybody still buying his act?
and can they be removed
from the gene pool?

[Ang]

State and local failure was to NOT let in the Red Cross and Salvation Army when they were waiting at the gates of New Orleans to help...and were turned away.

Looking at previous hurricanes, look at the response. It takes a few days for the feds to get there. The folks on the ground right away have always been the non profit big guys like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. They take care of the ground help like water and medical til the feds get there. This was not allowed to happen in New Orleans and people died because of it.

[BSmack]

no fucking way, dude. no fucking way.
are you serious?

Serious as a tumor. Even though Brown gave Andy Card his notice over the weekend, Bush claimed on Monday to have not heard anything about the resignation. It's another classic Bush blunder on tape.

is anybody still buying his act?
and can they be removed
from the gene pool?

Your answers are yes and not very easily.

[Risa]

State and local failure was to NOT let in the Red Cross and Salvation Army when they were waiting at the gates of New Orleans to help...and were turned away.

Looking at previous hurricanes, look at the response. It takes a few days for the feds to get there. The folks on the ground right away have always been the non profit big guys like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. They take care of the ground help like water and medical til the feds get there. This was not allowed to happen in New Orleans and people died because of it.

There's a difference between 'a few days to get there', and offering up such fantasies as this by FEMA and Homeland Security (I didn't put all the hotlinks to the video, I figured people could go to the site, and click on them to hear them, if they haven't already). See, FEMA and Homeland Security, federal version, were claiming help was already there. FEMA and Homeland Security, federal version, had no idea of what was really going on, they thought things were fine... and they weren't attempting to find out what was going on. That's a sin. When Blanco asked for a number of troops out of her ass (according to Newsweek, so take it as you will) Bush had more important things to worry about, like his speech the next day on Iraq at a fundraiser. I do understand Rumsfield's hesitancy to send in National Guard (again, according to Newsweek) because they were kids trained to shoot first ask questions later (not an exact quote, but it shows a little wisdom...... as well as something supremely sad about Two Americas that somebody would actually fear that the Guards would turn a rescue mission into a shooting gallery; instead, we have the Guards not doing anything at all -- according to the police chief they sat around and played cards. or slept. or wondered aloud to reporters why they were there (?????? so much disease and people asking for help, and they wonder why they're there, instead of why they aren't being allowed to help? there's another disconnect there.. which I may not be allowed to discuss here in the spin zone. the lack of compassion isn't just from the top)). I'm one of the few who like Rumsfield, and think he's being used as a patsy when it comes to Iraq. He's a good soldier, who does what he's told, and sometimes that means taking a rap for shit. But I don't really know that much about him, he might just be a bootlicking piece of pond scum like the rest:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.response/

The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version

Friday, September 2, 2005; Posted: 5:17 p.m. EDT (21:17 GMT)

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views from the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.

But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say:


Conditions in the Convention Center

FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. -- 2:11)

Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin's angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)

CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you.


Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.


Uncollected corpses

Brown: That's not been reported to me, so I'm not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I'm just not going to speculate.

Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, 'People are dying in front of us' -- 4:36 )

Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy -- that's how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I'm like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just -- I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He's dead.


Hospital evacuations

Brown: I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It's gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's over 200 patients still here remaining. ...We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly ... where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells -- 4:45 )

Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty rough.(Mayor's video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix -- 1:03)


Violence and civil unrest

Brown: I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that.

CNN's Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they're losing control of the city. We're now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn't safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire -- 2:12)

The federal response:

Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.

Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there.

Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.



Security

Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty's rant on the government's 'bungled' response -- 0:57)

Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.


Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.


Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

[Risa]

Doesn't that last part just choke you up?

Security

Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty's rant on the government's 'bungled' response -- 0:57)

Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.


Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.


Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

To Brown, the bad people weren't those addicts and gang bangers shooting up at decent (if poor) people. The real bad people cause problems by doing this:

"There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face"

Doesn't that just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? A bad person is someone who contradicts the official line. A bad person is someone who says 'that's not what's going on here!'

Instead of finding out why that 'bad person' is saying such things in the first place, and investigating where the disconnect is from what you're saying from your comfy little room, and their stance out in the middle of it; Brown -- Chertoff -- Bush -- and Cheney up in Wyoming doing his thing, and Rice up in New York buying shoes and taking in Broadway days into the flooding, who knew his closest circle goes on vacation the same time he does? :? but they're not as important as Brown, Chertoff, Bush in this one -- Brown, Chertoff and Bush the last of whom it has always been said if he wasn't concerned about it, he didn't want to hear about it so don't bring it to him.

Like Clinton warning about Osama bin Laden, while the Bush administration had it's eyes on the Iraqi prize. Or the general who was forced to 'resign' because he didn't give the administration the numbers they wanted to hear for an invasion into Iraq.

A former clinton assistant and senior advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, claims this:

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/interna ... 55,00.html

...When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service....

Why is the park service distributing religious materials? :? nevermind, getting farther afield. anyway. The rest are alarming, if true. Are they? If they are true, they show a pattern.

That pattern would come into play, perhaps, for what happened to those who tried to 'do the wrong thing' (according to Brown) as opposed to the 'right' thing (never give Bush any news he doesn't want to hear).

[Risa]

State and local failure was to NOT let in the Red Cross and Salvation Army when they were waiting at the gates of New Orleans to help...and were turned away.

Looking at previous hurricanes, look at the response. It takes a few days for the feds to get there. The folks on the ground right away have always been the non profit big guys like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. They take care of the ground help like water and medical til the feds get there. This was not allowed to happen in New Orleans and people died because of it.

If it's all about the state and local......... what this man is saying in this opinion piece is true. don't let the truth get sucked down the memory hole:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne ... e_for_.htm

Making the Case for Willful Neglect

After doing everything it could to do nothing at all to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration is now scrambling madly to "investigate" itself so as to cover its tracks and obfuscate its gross and willful negligence in preparing for and responding to the single worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

by Ken Sanders

As has been the case for the entirety of his appointed reign over the United States, whether it was Iraq, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo, and now Hurricane Katrina and its horrific aftermath, President Bush is truly dissembler in chief. After doing everything it could to do nothing at all to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration is now scrambling madly to "investigate" itself so as to cover its tracks and obfuscate its gross and willful negligence in preparing for and responding to the single worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Bush and his craven cadre sulk before the cameras, feigning innocence and ignorance, proclaiming that the unquantifiable levels of devastation and destruction wrought in the Gulf Coast was somehow unpredictable....

Regardless of false expectations about Katrina's power, Brown promised on August 28 that "FEMA has pre-positioned many assets including ice, water, food and rescue teams to move into the stricken areas." According to Brown, National Guard troops had already been deployed to Mississippi and Louisiana to "assist law enforcement in evacuations." Additionally, Brown assured the public that "FEMA's Urban Search & Rescue
(USAR) and Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs) are also staged for immediate response anywhere in the region." Immediate? Anywhere? In fact, it was days after Katrina left the Gulf Coast for dead before any of those allegedly pre-positioned assets were distributed. As for the National Guard, they didn't even begin to be deployed until September 1.

In what is perhaps the most glaring example of the Bush administration's malfeasance in dealing with Katrina's aftermath, on August 29 Brown ensured that no other agencies could fill the vacuum left by FEMA.

Watching as Katrina laid waste to everything in its path, and without a response from FEMA, fire and emergency services departments from neighboring communities attempted to respond to the Gulf Coast's cries for help. In response, Brown ordered all outside agencies "not to respond to counties and states affected by Hurricane Katrina" without first being requested and "lawfully dispatched" by FEMA.

Lawfully dispatched? Tens of thousands of people were suffering and dying and the Bush administration started a pissing contest over jurisdiction.

When FEMA finally did "lawfully dispatch" nearly 1,000 firefighters to New Orleans on September 5, it forced them to sit through 8 hours of training on such matters as sexual harassment. Once fully trained, the search-and-rescue and haz-mat certified firefighters and paramedics were finally ready to do their jobs and help those in need. Instead, FEMA relegated them to handing out fliers. Fifty firefighters were assigned to walk and stand, in full firefighting gear, next to President Bush as he toured devastated areas, spewing empty platitudes. His flight suit must have been at the cleaners.

So determined was the Bush administration not to help those suffering in the Gulf Coast that between August 29 and September 4, FEMA repeatedly barred the delivery of aid to the region. It turned away three Wal-Mart trailers loaded with bottled water. The Coast Guard was barred from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel. The Red Cross wasn't allowed to deliver food to New Orleans.

Now Bush promises to lead the investigation into his administration's despicable mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Like the prior inquiries into Bush's handling of 9/11, the administration's manipulation of prewar intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD, and the administration's sanctioning of torture and abuse at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it is assured that Bush will emerge blameless.

On paper, anyway.

It is NOT entirely the state's fault.

It sure as hell isn't the locals (specifically, the chief of police of New Orleans -- though a case could be made for his neighboring parish sheriff who refused to allow any evacuees to escape because he didn't want a replay of 'looting' in New Orleans, and his little bedroom community didn't have any supplies for the evacuees anyway.

Am I allowed to discuss what that sheriff's refusal was code for?

Anyway, because of him, we had people living on an overpass, while dead bodies floated beneath.

He's the only local I can think of that I think of with pure disgust.

But most of the locals on the ground were doing what they could with what they had, particularly think the chief of police of New Orleans, who had to deal with 2 suicides, desertion, his men and women being shot at without no backup whatsoever, dwindling supplies,

and once the calvary arrived,

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... 0903215815

Guardsmen 'played cards' amid New Orleans chaos: police official

New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley launched a bitter attack on the federal response to the disaster though he praised the way the evacuation was eventually handled...

The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did not anticipate the collapse of the city's police force.

But Riley said that for the first three days after Monday's storm, which is believed to have killed several thousand people, the police and fire departments and some volunteers had been alone in trying to rescue people.

"We expected a lot more support from the federal government. We expected the government to respond within 24 hours. The first three days we had no assistance," he told AFP in an interview.

Riley went on: "We have been fired on with automatic weapons. We still have some thugs around. My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard.

"The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep.

"For 72 hours this police department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat and played cards. I understand why we are not winning the war in Iraq if this is what we have."

Riley said there is "a semblance of organisation now."

That's not all on Blanco. Not by a mile.

[Tom In VA]

Nagin failed to execute the plan. Bottom line.

Blanco, failed to be decisive in her asking the fed for help. Bottom line.

The behemoth sloth like Fed bureaucracy was failed for one reason .... it's a behomoth sloth like bureaucracy.



Your apologetics for Nagin, are transparent.


You spot it you got it. You see racism, more than likely you're a racist.

[tough love]

RACK Roach



A Switch Hook Weedless, and my Son netted it into the boat all by himself.