Well, that takes care of that

via ellid

DeLay points to local officials
House cancels hearings; joint panel to look at Katrina response

Tempers flared Tuesday during a contentious closed-door meeting between House members and Cabinet secretaries in charge of directing Katrina relief efforts. A Republican representative stood up and said, "All of you deserve failing grades. The response was a disaster," CNN was told by lawmakers emerging from the meeting.

But DeLay countered that assessment later in a news conference by saying that the onus for responding to emergencies fell to local officials.

"It's the local officials trying to handle the problem. When they can't handle the problem, they go to the state, and the state does what they can to, and if they need assistance from FEMA and the federal government they ask for it and it's delivered," DeLay said.

[...]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California told media afterward that she was upset with the Katrina rescue effort and felt that Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), should shoulder much of the blame, and lacked the credentials to do his good job.

"Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, brings nothing to the table for the level of competence and accountability," Pelosi said. "He should not continue in that job unless we want a continuation of the shortcomings that we have had in the response."

Accountability? What is this accountability of which you speak? Sure Katrina would've been laid at Clinton's feet had he still been in office, but let's all pretend to forget that and recognize that King George the Lesser is completely free of any responsibility for the federal response to the hurricane. As are his GOP cronies, and as long as they control at least two branches of the government, who's to say otherwise?

via Pandagon
Oh and proving once and for all that John Stossel is one of the most odious people on the planet:

Consider this scenario: You are thirsty -- worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that's open, and the storeowner thinks it's immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won't charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can't buy water from him. It's sold out.

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an "outrageous" price -- say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's "exploitation" that saved your child.

Of course the other people who didn't have the $20 all lost their kids, but fuck 'em, they're poor. As we can see, if you've got money you deserve to live and therefore price gouging is actually a good thing. It's all a matter of perspective, you see.

Jesse sums it up nicely:

Except that you're defending gouging, genius. The people in the most need have to wait the absolute longest for relief, and a gouger's market is premised on very few suppliers soaking up the market for the most amount of money. It's explicitly premised against competition - hence the reason why the first gouger hoarded. You can't have fifty gougers in a market, but according to Stossel, you can't have a market without gougers. The only solution for Stossel, then, seems to be for you to artificially pay people more than they or their goods are worth to compel them to keep selling something, despite an overwhelming lack of motivation to do so.

Remember, folks - in event of national emergency or disaster, it's your job to conspire with vendors to make sure you overpay for vital goods and services. Otherwise, you're a communist.

*sigh*

And if anyone can explain to me why Tim Graham equates the gay marriage bill that just passed with a "shred-the-Bible bill", I'd really like to know. I won't, however, deduct points from those of you who would prefer not to read his latest screed. Oh, and if you can also explain to me why allowing a group to have the same rights as everyone else is somehow "forcing" their lifestyle on the entire nation ("Embrace the GAY or Else!"), I'd appreciate that too.

(no subject)

For those interested, Think Progress has posted a Katrina timeline, one hopes a few of the t.v. talking heads will stumble upon it and use it to refute GOP spin, but we shall see.

And you'll just love this:

FEMA puts firefighters to work -- as props for Bush

From all across the nation, local fire departments have sent firefighters -- many of them trained in emergency medicine and search-and-rescue techniques -- to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency requested the help. But when the firefighters arrived in Atlanta, loaded down with the firefighting gear FEMA told them to bring, they were sent to a hotel to wait. Some of them have been waiting for three or four days now. Some have been assigned to sit through an eight-hour class on topics that included sexual harassment. And some have been dispatched to the disaster area to work as human props behind George W. Bush as he toured the destruction.

We've said this before lately, and we'll say it again: We're not making this up.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, "Hundreds of firefighters who volunteered to help rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina have instead been playing cards, taking classes on the Federal Emergency Management Agency's history and lounging at an Atlanta airport hotel for days. 'On the news every night you hear [hurricane victims say], "How come everybody forgot us?"' said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa. 'We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer.'"

Well, not just drinking beer. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that FEMA put a team of 50 firefighters on a flight to Louisiana Monday morning. Their mission: Stand beside Bush as he toured the devastation -- just possibly not the best use for highly trained emergency workers, and a job we thought was obsolete in the digital age anyway.

[...]

On Monday, the Tribune says, some firefighters began to take off their FEMA-issued T-shirts in protest. A FEMA spokesman responded by questioning the firefighters' willingness to help in a time of need. "I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak told the Tribune.

Heh

via Billmon's Whiskey Bar

If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ("Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!") and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States.

And then the Cheney administration would have to go find some other tropical storm -- somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably -- to declare war on. And that would trigger a long, tedious debate about whether the Indian Ocean had anything to do with the flooding of New Orleans, or whether Cyclone Saddam (or whatever) was secretly storing up lighting bolts in the Bay of Bengal for a sneak attack that would electrocute millions of Americans in their sleep.

Then the neocons would have to cook up some phony intelligence reports showing that tornados spawned by Saddam and Katrina met secretly over the Prague Airport and plotted to blow away Biloxi. And Condi Rice would have to go before the UN Security Council and recite a CIA fantasy script about the Indian Ocean's secret thunderbolts of death, and the chemical weapons trailers hidden in the eye of Cyclone Saddam.

Then Dick Cheney would have to go on Meet the Press and promise Tim Russert that Operation Cyclone Liberation would be a piece of cake, because the waves in the Indian Ocean would greet us as liberators, allowing our troops to walk on water. And then we'd have to have another big argument about how many meterologists it would take to occupy a cyclone, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would say 500,000 and the neocons would say 5 -- until Bush fired the head of NOAA and give his job to an intern from the American Enterprise Institute.

Then the boys at the National Security Council would have to draft a whole new national security strategy, claiming an exclusive U.S. right to preemptively invade any ocean that might conceivably produce a Category 3 or above hurricane, and convert it into a peaceful, ripple-free lake of democratic capitalism.

Then Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton would have to line up and explain that they, too, are in favor of invading every ocean in the world -- but only if Bush agrees to quadruple the size of the U.S. Navy and equip every Marine with an armored aqualung. And Tom Friedman would have to write a column for the New York Times arguing that it is both possible and desirable to create peaceful, pro-Western cyclones that will accept Israel's right to exist, because the oceans are flat.

But worst of all, we'd have to listen to Shrub strut and shout about how he's going to "smoke Katrina out of her seahole," and "bring the evildoer to justice" -- only to turn around a few months later and explain that he isn't really concerned about hurricanes any more, now that the entire U.S. miltary is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Then John Kerry would make a big stink about how the administration is ignoring the real weather war, and Bush would get all pissy and defensive the way he does, and deny he ever said any such thing.

Then Kerry would get pissy and demand that Bush dump even more troops into the Indian Ocean, and Bush would get even more defensive, and babble some feeble lie about how he relies on his generals to tell him how many troops they need to dump into the Indian Ocean in order to make sure we fight the cyclones there instead of in New Orleans. And then media would bend itself over backwards pretending that Shrub actually has a freaking clue about what's going on outside his own head.

Jon Stewart is god

Good lord have I missed the Daily Show, the Ed Helms report on Hurricane Katrina in particular had me absolutely howling. If you missed it:

The alphabetical list of disasters that the administation has faced and will face in the near future:


Ed Helms says:...through the President's leadership, he'll end up building a billion dollar damn in Arkansas.

Stewart: Why would he build a damn in Arkansas?

Helms: His plan will be to fight the water over there, so we don't have to fight it over here.

I for one welcome our new rodents of unusual size overlords. And hey, if we survive that we get to look forward to the clash of American forces versus Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters!