Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

That charming headline is for this story, the title of which still reads “Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting - White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials”

Fuckers.

(Via Susanhu on Booman)

The sheer audacity of staging a fake disaster relief effort for a photo op should be shocking. It should be, but it’s not. Here are the words of Senator Landrieu who, if you caught her this morning on This Week, is no longer handing out worthless platitudes to inept leaders:

“Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims — far more efficiently than buses — FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — deserve far better from their national government.

“Mr. President, I’m imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources — military and otherwise — necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding.”

Via Kevin Drum, who also has some interesting info on international coverage of the disaster.

Ok, after tonight there will be no more Coltrane on this site for a little while - I promise. Tonight’s track is Blues Minor which was recorded by on June 17, 1961 and is most recently released on the two disk set The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions. The personnel are John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner of piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, with Eric Dolphy conducting the orchestra. I’ve spent the last few days offering up tracks which convey loss and introspection, so I though I ought to switch things up a little. The tune itself, as the title suggests, is a minor blues (actualy a simplified modal minor blues) and is stunning from beginning to end. If you have the ears to hear, the emotion of this track can be overwhelming, but in a very different way than the other Trane tracks I’ve featured over the last few days.

As always, I encourage you to buy the Album if you like the tune. I’ve heard Alice Coltrane has a very good lawyer.

Click here to play or download.

Go to Google, type in the word “failure”, press “I’m feeling lucky” and enjoy.

I’m stealing this entire post from Holden at First-Draft. Sorry about that.

This is part FEMA’s Mission Statement which you can read on a PDF provided by the agency:

MISSION

Since its founding in 1979, the mission of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been clear: to prepare for, mitigate against, respond to, and help individuals and communities recover from natural and man-made disasters.

And FEMA’s stated goals:

GOAL 1. Reduce loss of life and property. [Failed]

GOAL 2. Minimize suffering and disruption caused by disasters. [Failed]

GOAL 3. Prepare the Nation to address the consequences of terrorism. [Failed]

GOAL 4. Serve as the Nation’s portal for emergency management information and expertise. [Failed]

GOAL 5. Create a motivating and challenging work environment for employees. [N/A]

GOAL 6. Make FEMA a world-class enterprise. [Failed]

I missed this entirely, but apparently Ted Koppel ripped FEMA director Michael Brown on Nightline on Thursday evening. AmericaBlog has a partial transcript. The most pertinent question from Koppel was “Here we are essentially FIVE DAYS after the storm hit and you’re talking about what’s going to happen in the next couple of days…. You didn’t make preparations for what was going to happen in the event that [a category four storm hit]. Why didn’t you?”

This question needs to be asked over and over again. What the hell happened? We are seeing improvements today with the implementation of a large scale airlift out the convention center area taking place. That’s terrific, but it should have begun on Monday evening or Tuesday morning at the latest. Today is Saturday and countless Americans are dead due to ineptitude on a scale hitherto unimaginable.

Be sure to read the interview, as it’s becoming quite clear that the political strategy taking shape is to lay all of the blame on local officials and the victims. I’ve seen this creeping up on various blogs over the last few days and I imagine that by the start of next week the spin will be in full force. People with no car, no money and no where to go, are going to be blamed for their own deaths because they couldn’t leave. They can’t, but they will.

We just lost a major American city. I’m afraid we’re about to lose what little is left of our soul.

If you haven’t read the now famous interview with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, I’ve put the etire transcript in the extended entry. Devastating, but worth a read. (via Booman Tribune)

Read the rest of this entry »

I burried this one last night, but it’s definately worth reading. CNN has collected a sample of what is either complete ineptness or outright obfuscation By HLS director Chertoff and FEMA driector Brown. Here’s just a little:

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: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.

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.

From here and from talking to the police officers, they’re losingcontrol of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of thepolice stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, verystrong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street.

The federal response:

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

Homeland Security Director Chertoff:Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the processof evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that areafflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performedmagnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormousresources 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 andpieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seenthem. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

It seems like some poorly written left wing parody being performed somewhere very far off Broadway, with spectacular song and dance numbers. It does, only it’s not. Halliburton has been hired for storm cleanup on the Gulf Coast. Savor and enjoy.

(Via Susie)

More Coltrane. I apologize for only giving you pieces from one artist over the last few days, but Coltrane speaks to me in a way the no other musician does. This is not to slight anybody else’s tastes. This is just me. Coming from a musical background, music is often where I land when I need something stable beneath my feet.

Coltrane wrote Alabama as a tribute to the victims of the racially motivated bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama which killed four young black girls in 1963.

From the liner notes:

If you have heard Slow Dance or After The Rain, then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that Alabama carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Theile asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians’ feelings. If that “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.

The track is actually two performances. The first is aborted, but includes the beginning of a solo. The second is a simple, but powerful interpretation of the head alone.

The album is Coltrane Live at Birdland. A wonderful album. Click here to play or download.

According to this post on the Free Republic the entire fucking disaster in NOLA is Clinton’s fault. To be sure, some of the commenters on the linked post express disdain at the suggestion, which is all well and good, but what the fuck? What the hell happened to these people? Read each and every comment. What the fuck?

(via ntodd)

I’m finding it very difficult to maintain emotional stability when thinking or writing about the disaster in the gulf. I go from tears to anger to rage to incoherance and then repeat the pattern until I sleep. This is nothing compared to what our fellow citizens in New Orleans are dealing with tonight. Most of us will never know such horror. That said, if anybody reading this feels alone in their own emotional nightmare, please don’t. Plenty of us are right there with you. Let’s take those awful feelings and do what we can to be sure that the phrase “never again” really means something.

The Guardian:

George Bush arrived last night in the ravaged Gulf coast region amid mounting criticism of his handling of the crisis and a prediction by one senator that the death toll in Louisiana alone could top 10,000 people.

As thousands of people sat on the streets of New Orleans, having spent their fourth day waiting to be rescued, the city fell deeper into chaos, with gangs roaming the city and corpses rotting in the sun.
…
At the increasingly unsanitary convention centre, the crowds swelled to about 25,000 as people sought food, water and attention, while dead bodies lay in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets both inside and outside the centre. At the city’s Charity hospital, the dead were stacked up on the stairways. New Orleans airport was transformed into a huge field hospital, with fleets of military and coastguard helicopters ferrying the sick for treatment.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, broke down in tears on Thursday during an interview on local radio, saying that federal officials “don’t have a clue what’s going on”.

“I keep hearing that this is coming, that is coming,” he said, referring to federal aid. “And my answer to that today is … where is the beef?

“Let’s figure out the biggest crisis in the history of our country,” he continued. After September 11, he said, the president had been given “unprecedented powers” to send aid to New York.

The same response should be applied in this case, too, he said. “Get off your asses and let’s do something.”

Tommorow is day five. Never again.

Go read.

As you might have guessed, I’m not much of an Andrew Sullivan fan, but I found a letter he published from one of his readers to be pretty powerful, so I’m reproducing it here.

I’ve considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn’t be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I’m probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.

But after watching what’s happening in New Orleans-an American city that I’ve loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can’t ever vote for these people again.

Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.

And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, “Right on,” because some of that money’s bound to fall on my head.

Well, something else would fall on my head first.

I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that’s the job. We have A and B teams and I’m a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I’ve drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.

Here’s what these people would do for me.

They would leave me there to die.

Look at the facts. There’s no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it’s flammable.

In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that’s no choice at all.

I’m not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I’m talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can’t tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they’re piling up bodies in the street median.

We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.

A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, “All the people who weren’t bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things.”

There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they’ve lost everything, have no guidance, and don’t want to be shot by a looter.

There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.

In the UNITED STATES.

Some people say that you can’t hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, “I want you to make sure this never happens again,” it was not meant to be specific to “no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss.” It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could.

And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we’re sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that’s all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it’s obvious that they can’t.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

No. It wouldn’t. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I’d be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.

But one thing sure would have been different.

They wouldn’t have had a whole week to sort it out and know what’s coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, “Hey, what if…”

And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.

I’ve had it. I’m done. And if the other bunch of assholes can’t figure out that what’s important is that babies don’t starve to death here (and I’m not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm’s way, we’ll get rid of them too. And so on.

Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one’s in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor’s performance, or bragging that we’ve sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that “we had no idea the levees would break.”

Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.

No more.

CNN has published a page of the disconnect between the nonsense being spouted by Brown and Chertoff and reality. It’s quite a list. Fucking amazing. There are no words.

I found this idea in the comments section over at Scott’s blog. I’m going to call today. Until I can physically volunteer in NOLA, I’ll do this:

“Our local area Red Cross is a national call center for victims of the hurricane and is receiving hundreds of calls each day. The callers are devastated and asking for our help to guide them to shelters and other critical services.

The call center needs experienced operators and data processors to staff the call center from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM seven days a week. The call center is at 23rd and Chestnut Streets. The Red Cross will provide parking, food and training. There are two training sessions scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, September 2. Call 215-299-0495 to volunteer.”

I hope they’ll take me, I talk on the phone and type for a living, so I think that qualifies me. I just feel helpless watching the news and crying about it. So this sounds like a good option until the relief effort is ready for on-site volunteers.

Update 3:50 PM 9/2 - I called the red cross number for the national call center. The trainings were today 9-12 and 1/4, both of which I missed. They provide this web address for more volunteer opportunities.

Go read Matt’s latest post, entitled Wake up you Clueless Fucks about official Washington’s complete and utter disconnect from the humanitarian disaster happening in New Orleans. Senators are actually walking around the Capitol talking about tax breaks and eliminating the estate tax. What the fuck?

Be sure to read the whole thing, but I want to highlight this paragraph about Bill Frist’s suggestion that what survivors of this tragedy really need is a hug.

No, Senator Frist, you self-congratulatory, faith-based, myopic bastard, they more than hugs. They need food and water. They need billets of supplies airlifted and dropped. They need medical supplies. They need troops to provide safety. And they need it not now, but FOUR FUCKING DAYS AGO.

Four days lost, countless lives lost and destroyed due to ineptitude, but the fuckers have time to talk about tax cuts and pause for photo-ops with rescue workers and rescue equipment.

Update:Matt changed his post a little, so the bit I exerpted now reads:

No, Senator Frist, they need more than hugs and self-congratulatory boasts about how much money has been approved. They need food and water. They need billets of supplies airlifted and dropped. They need medical supplies. They need troops to provide safety. And they need it not now, but FOUR FUCKING DAYS AGO.

I like them both, so they’re both staying.

Just when you thought that the government response to the refugee situation in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast couldn’t get any more pathetic, some asshole decides to comendeer a few coast guard rescue helecopters for a photo op.

Do you have blood? I’ll bet you do. Albert points out that the American Red Cross is collecting money and blood. There are quite a few guidelines as to who can donate, so be sure to look them over before you make the trip. The local chapter is at 23rd and Chestnut. Get to work.