Disney on Parade - New York Times From Maureen Dowd today:

All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?">Disney on Parade - New York Times: "All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?"

  ¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments   

  Bush Pledges Have Typically Been Incompletely Kept In a speech where the President had no where to go but up --given that he ignored the catastrophe in its early days so that he could rest up before a speech and guitar lesson in San Diego after Gov. Blanco begged him to send every bit of help he could-- Bush came out with a credit card and a promise.

But Bush has made promises before and not delivered. New York didn't get the monies promised after 9/11. Troops still don't have enough armor in Iraq. No Child Left Behind is still an underfunded mandate.

And Bush's recovery plan is no WPA ala FDR; it's a private enterprise free for all. Remember, this is the administration that two years into occupying and rebuilding Iraq via Halliburton still can't manage to get beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad.

I really hope I'm wrong and that things go well and that money isn't skimmed and scammed by the groups represented by loyal republican lobbyists. And I really hope that enterprize zones do the trick. I really hope plans to relax environmental rules to clean and rebuild from what is a major environmental disaster work (Even though the logic of that makes no sense.).

But I'm deeply skeptical.

Bush has so far proven incompetent at every turn on every major initiative: No Child under funded; Iraq an understaffed quagmire bleeding money to a private firm with its own private army; our nation's emergency response system weakened and made inefficient after 9/11, not strengthened; our standing in the world and the mystique of America as a can-do nature imploded, making us more inviting to a terrorist attack abroad, but more significantly at home; and another $200 billion worth of debt about to be settled onto the shoulders of my children and any children and grandchildren they might have.  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments   

  More on Bush's and Republican Party's Negligence From Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times :

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Bush can stay up late to order a federal court to intercede in a state matter with the clear intent that the court keep a brain-dead alive just so he can score points with his fundamentalist base, but when New Orleans is drowning and the Governor of Louisiana asks him to send everything he can --to in effect do everything he can-- he goes to bed.

This is leadership? This is compassion?

Bush on signing the Schiavo bill:

In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. This presumption is especially critical for those like Terri Schiavo who live at the mercy of others

And what was going on in New Orleans? What happened to his "presumption in favor of life"? He slept on it and tip-toed around states' rights niceties, niceties that didn't matter a whit when he tried to save an already dead woman.

Hmm. Maybe now we're seeing photo-ops of Bush in action because there are enough dead people to be saved.  ¶ 9:21 AM 0 comments   

  Poverty Rates Go Up

• The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003.
• In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.
• From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

But don't worry. Bush wants to eliminate the death tax next. And privatize social security. That'll fix everything.

So what if his economic and tax policies, which benefit the rich, have lead more Americans into poverty.

Maybe he can take a drop from his mother's cold heart and build enough Astrodomes to warehouse the poor.

Oh wait. That's what prisons are for.  ¶ 2:43 AM 0 comments   

  Bush Blew It Newsweek's Evan Thomas analyzes the President's wretched and inept response to Katrina.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

Utterly disgraceful and inexcusable.  ¶ 9:03 PM 0 comments