Yearly Archives: 2005

“The results are not acceptable”

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On day five of this horrific crisis — but only three days after this picture was taken — Bush holds a press conference.

While people at the Convention Center are STILL DYING, Bush praises the
head of FEMA who didn’t know this time yesterday that people were even
there.  "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

Yesterday, on Good Morning America, Bush pretended that everything that could possibly be done was being done.

That didn’t stick long.

So the pose for today is the exact opposite: outrage.

"The results are not acceptable," he says.

I have to say I agree.

Nero, part 3

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Decisions, decisions.  Here’s the complex choice of responsibilities Condi Rice had to face today:

I guess it all depends on what you consider important.

Shopping for shoes?

Or rushing back to Washington to help in every possible way while citizens are DYING, seeking out all the aid and assistance possible?

Shopping for shoes.  Obviously.

More specifically, shopping for designer shoes in expensive boutiques, using the Secret Service to protect you from a
citizen begging you to rush back to Washington to help in every
possible way while citizens are DYING, seeking out all the aid and assistance possible.

Nero, part 2

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President Bush, this morning, on Good Morning America:

    "I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

Read the links (some lifted from Dan Froomkin’s fine Washington Post piece):

Or.

And as this earlier post pointed out, and which bears repeating until there is some accountability:

Money for the levees was slashed by the Bush administration, over the
repeated screams of New Orleans safety officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to help pay for the invasion of Iraq.

UPDATE: Crooks And Liars has the video of Bush claiming no one saw this coming.

Compare with, in a final example, Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, believe it or not, proving otherwise in a must-see spot recorded for a Louisiana save-the-wetlands campaign in 2004.  (Warning: watching this, which must have been darkly funny in 2004 and doubtless will be again in another 50 years, made me physically shake with sadness and anger.)

New Orleans as a casualty of the war in Iraq

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Horrible.  Unthinkable.  But read the article.  (I’ve added emphasis to a few lines below.)

When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995
killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban
Flood Control Project, or SELA.

 


Over
the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying
out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping
stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in
crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic
Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans
continued to subside.

 

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward
SELA dropped to a trickle. The [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that
the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security
— coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for
the strain.


And this was reported at the time.  Not as a partisan thing.  Just as a public safety issue.

At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from
2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the
lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.


In early 2004, as
the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed
spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for
Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004,  Walter Maestri, emergency
management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the
Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the
president

MSNBC: But who will save the helpless Wal-Mart corporation?

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MSNBC right now.

Showing a 15-second clip of people looting a Wal-Mart.  Running the clip over and over and over.

Outrage from host Rita Cosby and her two guests, who are going on and on about the need to apprehend, crack down, and punish these people, all of whom clearly live in the devastated area and who are making off with $14 pairs of pants.

Meanwhile, people in New Orleans are f*cking DYING.

I guess it’s too bad for them they don’t look more like Natalee Holloway.

UPDATE: I’ve seen more and similar footage.  I’m sure there are people grabbing TVs somewhere, although in a flooded wasteland with no electricity, this would be a strange move indeed.  But mostly I’m seeing people with armloads of clothes and sacks of food.

You want looting?  Try Halliburton.  Try $9 billion in Iraq funds missing.

Not enough, "news" people?  Try last year’s shifting of New Orleans’ disaster prep funding to Bush’s war in Iraq.

It’s just too bad none of these came with footage of poor black people we’re supposed to be outraged at.