The Storm that Ate the GOP

In my continuing adoration of *most* things Mark Morford, his article today on the PR train wreck that is Katrina and the G.O.P. is here:

My favorite snippit:

Can you hear them? Hastert to DeLay to Frist to Santorum to Rove to Cheney to Bush himself, across the board and all down the snickering party line they keen, "It's not fair! We've been planning this regime, this overthrow for 40 years! We've worked so damn hard to drive a wedge into the culture and an ice pick into the heart of the nation, working like demons on meth to mangle this country's economy and sense of pride so as to boost corporate profits and lock down our wealth and empire!"

And now Katrina. And now a furious backlash we never predicted that could very well spell the death of our wanton free-for-all gluttony. Damn you, Mother Nature! Damn you, uppity female!

Warning, this column is pretty damn scathing, even for Mark.

Wither Bound Are We?

Last week I posted an article from the SF Chronicle in which San Francisco was told they would not receive refugees from the Gulf States because it was too far from their homes and refugees had refused to come this far west.

Now, however, we are hearing many stories of victims flow into camps across the United States as far away as Boston, or up in Maine...which is no farther than San Francisco is...and most of them had no idea where they were headed when they sat on the plane.

This article, in the UK Guardian, talks about a camp now set up in a National Guard training camp outside of Salt Lake City, UT.

A snippet:

Of Utah's 2.3 million population, just 0.8% classified themselves as African-American in the 2003 census. In Salt Lake City, that figure rises to nearly 2%.

Almost all of the evacuees who arrived in Utah were African-American. Mr Smiley, a Caucasian, was one of the very few exceptions milling around the camp. Like many refugees around the world, the evacuees from New Orleans will be highly visible in their new home. But unlike most refugees, they have remained inside their own country.

Add to that New Orleans's reputation as an easy living, hard drinking, party town and contrast it with Salt Lake City's fame as the home of Mormon morals, the town where drunkenness is illegal, and you have the recipe for at best confusion, and at worst, discord.

While Utah may be an unlikely destination for the homeless residents of New Orleans, for most of them it was also an unintentional destination.

"When we got on the plane they said, 'Welcome aboard, we are now flying to Lake Salt City'," said James Jernigan, an evacuee sitting in the sunshine at the camp. "I said, 'What? We're going the wrong way. I want to get off.' They said, 'No, you can't get off.'"

More on "The Irish Problem"

Once again, I think you can mark 99.9% of this up to a wide abyss of economic divide that is labeled "sectarianism" where we label ours "racisim".

If you want to know what's going on in Belfast, start with the murals.

Amid the blast bombs, petrol bombs and barricades of this sudden surge of loyalist violence, fresh graffiti appeared near the Albert Bridge Road.

A mural claiming double standards - namely that the Orange Order is banned from marching, while the IRA can - had been defaced. A local hand accused the Orangemen of cowardice, duplicity and of failing the community.

Across the road, more graffiti revealed divisions among loyalist paramilitary groups, street corners marking invisible boundaries of influence.

Updated with this bit: Quotes from the Orange's Grand Marshall...

5pm
Orangemen blame police for Belfast riots

Staff and agencies
Wednesday September 14, 2005

Orange Order leaders today denied responsibility for the Belfast riots, instead blaming police for the violence that erupted at the weekend after a contentious parade was re-routed.

Dawson Baillie, the Belfast County Grand Master of the Order, said: "As far as I am concerned the violence was started by the police. The violence I saw at the weekend from the police force was absolutely shocking."

Mr Baillie refused to condemn the violence, which involved petrol bombs, pipe bombs and blast bombs being hurled at police, but said he did not condone it.

Speaking at a press conference on the loyalist Shankill Road he said: "I don't accept any responsibility for calling people out on the streets to assist us. I feel entirely blameless."

Asked if he would do things differently if he had the weekend over again he said: "Not one thing."

Northern Ireland's chief constable, Sir Hugh Orde, said earlier this week he was holding the Orange Order "substantially responsible" for the rioting.

A Fatal Incuriosity

From Maureen Dowd, New York Times.

September 14, 2005
A Fatal Incuriosity
By MAUREEN DOWD

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.

Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.

At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.

Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.

As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."

President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
</blockquote

This just in...

A good friend of my Boss' has two daughters who lived in New Orleans Parish. They obeyed the mandatory evacuation. One went to a sister in law in Florida the other went to a sister in law in California.

Both lost everything in the flooding of New Orleans. They have both been informed that since they left and took up refuge with a family member they are INELLIGABLE for aid from FEMA for their displacement.

ZERO

ZIP

NADA

No help, no compensation, no financial aid when they are as much refugees as those evacuated to FEMA run camps.

NONE

We treat people so well...don't we.

But, Seriously Folks...

This from Michael Moore (my boss and I are both on his newsletter--have been for years).

My Landlady is on her way down there with a tent, sleeping bag, food and more, to help humans and animals alike (she works as a dog walker/pet sitter and foster mom for two rescue agencies here in the bay--that's how I got my dork doggie).

From: "Michael Moore" <maillist@michaelmoore.com>
Date: September 13, 2005 11:30:56 PM PDT
Subject: We've Raised a Half-Million Dollars and Sent Over 50 Tons of Food and Water
Reply-To: maillist@michaelmoore.com


Friends,

Last week I closed my New York production office and sent my staff down to New Orleans to set up our own relief effort. I asked all of you to help me by sending food, materials and cash to the emergency relief center we helped set up on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain with the Veterans for Peace. We did this when the government was doing nothing and the Red Cross was still trying to get it together. Every day, every minute was critical. People were dying, poor people, black people, left like so much trash in the street. I wanted to find a way to get aid in there immediately.

I hooked up with the Vietnam veterans and Iraqi war vets (Veterans for Peace) who were organizing a guerilla, grass-roots relief effort. They were the same group that had set up Cindy Sheehan's camp in Crawford and now they had moved Camp Casey to Louisiana.

I have good news and horrible news to report. First, your response to my appeal letter was overwhelming. Within a few days, a half-million dollars was sent in through my website to fund our relief effort. This money was immediately used to buy generators, food, water, a mobile medical van, tents, satellite phones, etc.

Others of you began shipping supplies to our encampment. People in communities all over the country started organizing truck caravans to us in Louisiana. Twenty-two trucks from southern California alone have already arrived. A semi-truck from Chicago delivered ten tons of food. A group of friends in New Jersey got two 24 foot trucks, got their community to load them up with goods, and arrived in Covington tonight. Fifteen iMacs are inbound from California. One man gave us his pick-up truck and another donated truck is en route from Houston.

Your response to my appeal has been nothing short of miraculous. And it has saved many, many lives.

A number of you decided to just get in your cars and drive to our camp to volunteer to help. We now have had 150 volunteers here doing the work that needs to be done. Last night they unloaded twenty tons of food from a tractor trailer in under two hours. Each day more volunteers arrive. Everyone is sleeping on the ground or in tents. It is a remarkable sight. Thank you, all of you, for responding. I will never forget this outpouring of generosity to those forgotten by our own government.

My staff and the vets spend their 18-hour days delivering food and water throughout the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. What they have seen is appalling. I have asked them to post their daily diaries on my website (www.michaelmoore.com) along with accompanying photos and video so you can learn what is really going on. What the media is showing you is NOT the whole story. It is much, much worse and there is still little being done to bring help to those who need it.

Our group has visited many outlying towns and villages in Mississippi and Louisiana, places the Red Cross and FEMA haven't visited in over a week. Often our volunteers are the first relief any of these people have seen. They have no food, water or electricity. People die every day. There are no TV cameras recording this. They have started to report the spin and PR put out by the White House, the happy news that often isn't true ("Everyone gets 2,000 dollars!").

The truth is that there are dead bodies everywhere and no one is picking them up. My crew reports that in most areas there is no FEMA presence, and very little Red Cross. It's been over two weeks since the hurricane and there is simply not much being done. At this point, would you call this situation incompetence or a purposeful refusal to get real help down there?

That's why we decided not to wait. And we are so grateful to all of you who have joined us. The Veterans for Peace and my staff aren't leaving (and that's why we are hoping those of you who can't get to Covington will make it to the Veterans for Peace co-sponsored anti-war demonstration in DC on September 24: www.unitedforpeace.org.)

If you want to help, here's what we need in Covington right now:

Cleaning Supplies (glass cleaner, bleach, disinfectant, etc.)
Aspirin and other basic over the counter drugs.
Bottled Water
Canned Goods
Hygiene Supplies
Baby Supplies - Baby Food Formula, diapers #4, #5, Wipes, Pedialyte
Sterile Gloves
Batteries - All kinds, from AA to watch and hearing aid batteries.
Volunteers with trucks and cars
Self contained kitchens with generators, utensils, workers

Consider sending supplies in reusable containers. List the contents on the outside of the package so the folks in the warehouse can easily sort the items.

Clothes are not needed. If you go, keep in mind that you MUST be self-sufficient. Bring a tent and a sleeping bag. People are driving to Covington from across the country and often have extra room in their cars for you or for an extra box of supplies. For more information, go to the Veterans for Peace message board: www.vfproadtrips.org/katrina/.

Send supplies via UPS to:
Veterans for Peace
Omni Storage
74145 Hwy. 25
Covington LA

Thanks again for funding and supporting our relief efforts. It has been a bright spot in this otherwise shameful month.

Yours,
Michael Moore
mike@michaelmoore.com
www.michaelmoore.com