Today in the News:

KATRINA...
(to drive a few points home)
Wikipedia: Katrina; devastation; Evacuation; New Orleans; Mississippi; Waiting; American Red Cross; Salvation Army; Feed The Children; United Jewish Communities; Catholic Charities USA; United Methodist Committee on Relief; Noah's Wish; Humane Society of the United States; ASPCA; North Shore Animal League America; United Way; America's Second Harvest; Direct Relief International; Habitat for Humanity...

(0) NOW: What you don't know about Katrina and the Gulf Coast. NOW investigates why the devastation was so bad...

(0) This is an immense human tragedy, beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response. - Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security. - Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection against terrorist acts. How else to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency will no longer be responsible for disaster preparedness?...

(0) In early 2004, lovable, crushable clay animated figure Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live starred in an ad to alert people to the problems with the wetlands in Louisiana...

(0) but the people spreading the meme that the vast majority of who did not evacuate New Orleans did so because they simply chose to ignore the warnings are out of touch with reality. I just heard James Carville state that the Governor and Mayor did all they could, and that some people “just didn’t listen.” (They don't have cars, they don't have money, and public transportation shut down - they are poor, they HAD to stay)...

(0) Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."...
Thinking Big About Hurricanes: It's time to get serious about saving New Orleans (Check the date of that article. I'm sure I could find ones that go back as far as 1960's. This is not Bush's fault directly - but he's making excuses and lies just the same)...

(0) MSNBC's Countdown with Martin Savidge caught lotters in action at a Wal-Mart in N.O. What he didn't expect was that the police had joined in (What do you expect - they know they've lost everything just as much as the looters know it)...

(0) The Gulf Coast disaster is further taxing the National Guard, already stretched to a breaking point in Iraq...

(0) Relief workers confront 'urban warfare': Violence disrupts evacuation, rescue efforts in New Orleans (First there was looting, then there was looting of gun stores, then supplies ran out, now there is fighting. Had federal response been faster - this could have been avoided)...

(0) Mayor Ray Nagin: “They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn — excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed,”...

(0) When it comes to assessing the effectiveness of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, two divergent -- and incongruous -- views have emerged over more than three long days of misery (Well, to say this kind of response is 'magnificent' is to really set our standards low)...

(0) In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war...

(0) Desperate and hungry residents begged for help, corpses rotted along flooded sidewalks and bands of armed thugs thwarted fitful rescue efforts as Americans watched this city dissolve before their eyes on Friday...

(0) Frantic local officials blasted the federal and state emergency response as woefully sluggish and confused...

(0) Superintendent Compass said that the thugs repelled eight squads of 11 officers each he had sent to secure the place and that rapes and assaults were occurring unimpeded in the neighboring streets as criminals "preyed upon" passers-by, including stranded tourists...

(0) Nobody anticipated this disaster? It was identified by FEMA as one of the top three likeliest major disasters to strike America. (That link, one of countless stories, was from 2001, by the way.)...

(0) A doctor's story: New Orleans resident tells of the makeshift hospital he has set up ...

(0) The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates (God knows if I chose to be too poor to be able to leave a city, I should be blamed too, right? Asshole)...

(0) The Senate convened in special session Thursday night and approved a $10.5 billion disaster relief request from the Bush administration to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina...

(0) The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted Thursday after the facility came under sniper fire twice...

(0) We're now driving on Interstate 10, and there is just an incredible scene. It looks like people are actually living on the highway...

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THE WORLD IN GENERAL...
(We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.)
CNN.com; BBCnews.uk; International Herald Tribune; DayPop.com; Washington Post; CNN-money; ABC News; Slate (MSN); Alter.Net; PBS Newshour; Yahoo News; Wired News; Reuters; ABYZ News links.com (great for finding very localized news)...

(0) A lush, atmospheric drama, 'The Constant Gardener' brings unprecedented exposure to crucial issues facing the Western pharmaceutical industry and all those who partake of it. Set mostly in a sun-dappled Kenya and based on a John le Carré thriller, the film is a fierce but flawed indictment of Big Pharma's complicity in African illness and poverty...

(0) The first cases of BSE or "mad cow disease" could have been caused by animal feed contaminated with human remains, says a controversial theory...

(0) At least three people were killed and 11 injured in an explosion outside a military barracks in the Dagestan region of southern Russia...

(0) The Venezuelan government is reported to be planning to insist that all private banks appoint two state representatives to their board...

(0) Nasa's robotic Mars rover sends back a panoramic image from the summit of a hill it spent 14 months climbing...

(0) Four men, including the head of a radical Islamic prison gang, were indicted on federal charges of plotting terrorist attacks against military facilities, the Israeli Consulate and synagogues in Los Angeles (Note: It was the work of the NY police that caught this home-grown plot, not the FBI, not the CIA - in fact, none of those other agencies could have tracked this)...

(0) The United States is poised to produce plutonium-238 for the first time since the end of the Cold War but it will be used for space missions, not weapons, officials said this week...

(0) Scores of detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have begun a hunger strike, human rights lawyers have said (Ironic that the defense department used '3 square meals' as an excuse to prisoner treatment)...

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OPINIONS, ANALYSIS, ESSAYS...
(To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.)
Reason.com; The Gadflyer; Jim Hightower; MIchaelMoore.com; Atrios; Joe Conason; Democracy Arsenal; Randi Rhodes...

(0) You must have missed Neil Cavuto's recent interview with WWII veteran Tom Mahoney. If you had seen it, I'm sure you would have already done everything in your power to destroy the old soldier--just like you tried to do to Cindy Sheehan...

(0) Cafferty:...I'm 62 and I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earth Quake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orlean...

(0) Markets can't create oil: U.S. needs a real national energy policy - The 20-year absence of improvements in the fuel efficiency of the nation's cars and trucks can be accepted as a rational response to consumer preferences. A faith in the power of markets to optimize the allocation of resources leads to a belief that any meaningful intervention in the self-balancing mechanism of supply and demand is futile at best, harmful at worst...

(0) If Homeland Security is unable to head the task of disaster relief when there was warning of the coming disaster - what can they do against a terrorist attack, which will come with no warning? More questions...

(0) Thus, offshoring companies are hiring Americans to teach foreign replacement workers to sound and behave like Americans. Yes, this means you could end up teaching the Indian or Pakistani or Russian who was given your job how to sound like you!...

(0) Homeland Security Flunks Its First Test (What has the Bush administration been doing for for four years?)...

(0) These paired quotes sum up the mixed reactions as well as any:
Young Iraqi man #1: "Nobody hates freedom, and if they bring freedom, nobody will hate them."
Young Iraqi man #2: "If they come as invaders, nobody will welcome them."...

(0) Via Pandagon, we get news of this bozo complaining that it took a day or two to ramp up to full wall-to-wall coverage of Katrina because of...anti-Southern bias among those Northeastern elitists! I kid you not (well then, maybe these people understand the south)...

(0) Public Opinion Watch: Workers Are Unhappy Campers - And It’s Not Just Workers: It’s a Nation of Unhappy Campers...

(0) Opportunistic shitheads are looting for profit, for all the fat lot of good it will do them. - But the looting began out of desperation...

(0) Just in case you missed the amazing performance of the Republican leadership yesterday...

(0) Katrina and its aftermath reminds us that although we Democrats believe our government is supposed to function for the Common Good, it has not -- and we have not fought hard enough for this ideal...

(0) I don't mean to pick on Armando, but has he learned nothing under Bush? There is no "next week" when it comes to getting answers and fixing accountability for failure under this president. Next week never comes...

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THE ENVIRONMENT...
(I am at two with nature.)
TruthOut.com-E; GreenPeace; Bush Greenwatch; NRDC; Sierraclub.org...

(0) California, New Mexico and Oregon sued the Bush administration Tuesday over the government's decision to allow road building, logging and other commercial ventures on more than 90,000 square miles of untouched forests...

(0) A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects’ proteins reveal...

(0) Shooting Down the Breeze: The promise of wind power has been impeded by species-protection scandals and a lack of public trust...

(0) An environmental group and a Christian prayer network have joined forces to sue the Bush administration over the fate of an endangered toad -- the same "hapless" amphibian at the center of a legal opinion by U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts...

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IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST...
(The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.)
Iraq Coalition Casulaty Count; Iraq Body Count; The Cost of War; Soldiers for the Truth; Iraq Daily; IraqMeter; Iraq Maps; Operation Truth...

(0) U.S. forces in Iraq suffered at least 74 combat deaths in August, more than in any month since November and the third-highest total for any month of the war, according to Pentagon figures...

(0) Thousands of people today attended the first funerals of the hundreds of Shia pilgrims killed in a stampede across a Baghdad bridge (as you may guess, Shia are blaming Sunni for the loss; not good)...

(0) Kurds get their way in Baghdad...

(0) The trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will start in the second half of October, a government official says...

(0) Thousands of Shias have marched in the southern Iraqi city of Basra to back the new constitution and to mourn 1,000 pilgrims who died in a stampede...

(0) Members of Pakistan's six-party Islamic alliance (MMA) walked out of parliament on Friday in protest at breakthrough talks between Pakistan and Israel...

(0) Pakistan and Israel - new friends?...

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NEO-CONS, CONSERVATIVES, AND BUSHIES, OH MY...
(We know that democracies do not forment terror or invade their neighbors [Bush - 5/18/2005])
OurCongress.Org; SmirkingChimp.com; ACLU; TruthOut.com; CCR; Daily Kos; Unknown News; FactCheck.Org; Media Matters for America; MotherJones.com; Air America Radio; Bush Watch; Democratic Underground; Disinfopedia.org...

(0) Bolton Voices Opposition to U.N. Proposals: White House Fears Effort Would Inhibit U.S. Authority (because nothing inhibits US authority more then accountability)...

(0) A controversial clause in the U.S. Patriot Act that allows authorities to search citizens' personal records faced its first public challenge in federal court on Wednesday as a library sought to lift a gag order on a FBI probe into its records. - The U.S. House of Representatives, ignoring protests from civil liberties groups, voted this summer to reauthorize 16 provisions of the act that expire at the end of the year, including the library clause...

(0) Supreme Court nominee John Roberts took shots at Congress while a Reagan administration lawyer, saying in documents released Wednesday that a congressman killed in connection with cult leader Jim Jones' massacre could be viewed as a "publicity hound" and that what Congress does best is "nothing." (Sounds like a man with lots of respect for our government, yeah?)...

(0) Noonan on New Orleans: "I hope the looters are shot" (It's like the whole deer hunting ideal: they should be shot because you don't want them to suffer by starving to death)...

(0) Miranda defends Sen. Orrin Hatch's part in a scandal where Hatch had been accused of improperly accessing thousands of Democratic memos regarding Bush judicial nominees; but Miranda is actually a partner in that crime...

(0) Rush Limbaugh once again referred to abortion rights advocates as "feminazis," claiming that they have "made every abortion, regardless of cost, mandatory."...

(0) A traitor to the nation stops to thank all those fools on the opposite side of camp casey for supporting the president. It's like Benedict Arnold just pointed to the people he likes, and they had no clue what was wrong with that...

(0) Cooper: "Does the federal government bear any responsibility for what is happening, should they apologize for what is happening now?" - Landrieu put on a happy face and thanked all the wonderful politicians for showing their support...

(0) Despite the widespread availability of video of Robertson's remarks and even an August 24 Foxnews.com article stating that "Robertson clearly mentioned assassination,", Rush, and FOX News are editing Robertson's remarks in playback to make it seem like he did not...

(0) In the GOP ownership society, if everything you own has been destroyed, well, then, House Speaker Hastert says you're screwed...

(0) As kos points out, in the aftermath of Katrina, the GOP will focus on more tax cuts for the rich. However, this is what some Democrats are working on, bankruptcy relief...

(0) Yes, that's right... the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the "Judges and Stewards Commissioner" for the International Arabian Horses Association... a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray...

(0) FEMA is directing Katrina donations to none other than the Rev. Pat Robertson (so, your donations can go to a program that works to replace government programs with Robertson's special brand of bigoted Jesus banter)...

(0) Neo-con pundits have nothing to do with actual religious philosophies. Ann Coulter is the first casualty as conservatives begin to understand this...

(0) NY Times advanced Bush administration's dubious suggestion that FEMA is "better prepare[d]" to handle hurricane crisis than before 9-11 - In fact, as noted in recent news reports by the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal and in a Washington Post op-ed, the Bush administration reduced FEMA's status after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by folding the agency into the Department of Homeland Security, which likely hampered the agency's ability to respond to natural disasters like Katrina...

(0) Coulter: New York Firefighters aren't really New Yorkers (Oh Ann, don't ever visit Manhattan, you won't survive a single night there)...

(0) Hannity, Coulter falsely suggested Ariz. paper dropped Coulter's column to "keep conservatives out" - In fact, the Star made clear that Coulter was dropped because her "shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited" commentary was unpalatable to even its self-identified conservative readers. And rather than "keeping conservatives out," the Star replaced Coulter's column with that of another conservative: Fox News host Tony Snow -- a fact Coulter and Hannity neglected to mention (pft - like Arizona is some liberal shelter state or something)...

(0) Conservatives spout -- and media repeat -- falsehoods, myths, empty banalities about Roberts nomination...

(0) Notice the nicely positioned Coast Guard helicopters in the background, not rescuing people and delivering supplies...

(0) Witness list for Roberts hearings released...

(0) Smerconish falsely claimed that new Air Force religious guidelines prohibit members from praying at official event - In fact, the guidelines do not affect voluntary prayer or religious conversations between those of equal standing; they do, however, discourage and restrict activities which create the impression of an official or leadership endorsement of prayer or religion (Okay, claiming victimhood that does not exist, after being part of an effort to victimize homosexuals and other religious institutions, should automatically make you a 'whine-little-bitch')...

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HUMOR...
(I came from a disadvantaged home. They were Republicans.)
Get Your War On!; Doonesbury.com; DubyaSpeak.com; The WhiteHouse.Org; ToStupidTooBePresident; The Daily Show; The Onion...

(0) An Open Letter To My Editors At Unconfirmed Sources...

(0) We are too busy getting ready to kill people in Iraq to help just now. Call me in five years...

(0) Doonesbury: 1,100 murders in Philly?...

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Wrap up: I love that several liberal groups and conservative groups are recommending the same relief agency links (with the exception of Pat Robert's scam fund).

I hate that ever face the Bush administration has put in front of a camera has told the media that everything is fine; only to be told by reporters that this is not true; to which the Bush-heads dodge all questions with the "we understand people are upset when we don't help them and say we have" line - like that's any excuse.

I love that the media is acting just as outraged and asking several hard questions of the federal authorities.

I hate that people are looking at racial differences when the problem of cultural gaps in this disaster are clearly financial differences.

I love the attention this is getting, and the acknowledgment that finally - there is something worse than 9/11.

I hate that all the other worldly events taking place are suddenly being forgotten. 1,100 Iraqis dead in an instant is nothing to shy away from.

I love that many are making an effort to donate shelter to those that escape. That is by far, the most generous and helpful form of aid the people will receive.

I hate that pundits are trying to excuse federal lack of response with accusations that the people who were stuck to ride out the storm and devastation were simply too stupid to leave. That's no excuse even if that excuse were true.

I love it when Bush abruptly changes his tune...