I was out of the house and couldn’t watch Bush’s speech. Before I read about it, read about what the media thought of it, read about what people blogged about it, and read the comments on the blogs from people who wrote about it, I need to watch it.
I downloaded a video of the speech from the Political Teen.
Thoughts and comments on the way.
UPDATE: Yikes.
77 year-old song-writer adds his two bits to the “blame the president for Katrina” pile.
Singer/song-writer BURT BACHARACH has attacked US President GEORGE W BUSH for his handling of the Hurricane Katrina rescue operation.
The WALK ON BY star insists America had adequate warning of the horrific disaster which rocked Louisiana and left New Orleans submerged, and yet Bush continued to fund the war against terror instead of protecting his people.
Bacharach, 77, recalls reading newspaper articles months before the hurricane, warning “that (New Orleans) would be engulfed, that people would drown, that bodies would be floating down the road.
“Instead of pushing the funding up, they took most of it away to fight this stupid war, and that’s unforgivable.
“I think Bush is just about the poorest president we’ve ever had. You’d have to go back before I was born to find a worse one.”
Wow, that’s front page news. And for goodness’ sake, Dionne Warwick made “Walk On By” famous. No one cares about the writer of the song. She sang it. She’s the star, OK?
I can hear the staffers at the White House right now…
STAFFER: “Uh, Mr. President? As you know, lots of famous people have made statements about the lack of an expedient response to Hurricane Katrina. Politicians too, from the right and left side of the isle. Well, we thought you might want to know about the latest statement. It’s serious sir. Please, you might want to sit down. Mr. President, Burt Bacharach has gone public with his thoughts.”
BUSH: “Oh no, not Burt! If I’ve lost Bacharach, I’ve lost the country.”
PFFT!
That’s what it cost me to fill up my Toyota Pickup this morning. It used to be that I could barely fit $13 worth of gas in the tank. Not anymore. Today? $32. Ouch.
So, I get to looking at what this guy is doing and I’m ready to buy a car with his engine NOW.
Yep, it’s what you’re thinking. Vegetable oil. The car runs on VEGETABLE OIL! He’s got a freakin bottle of Wesson and he’s filling his tank up. Cool!
Oh, wait a minute, that’s not Wesson…the kind you need costs $3.50 per gallon.
What kind of stupid idiot is this guy? What a dumb idea! I get to fill my tank up with vegetable oil so the interior of my car smells like the theatre lobby at the cinemaplex AND I get to pay more per gallon than I do at my local Shell station?
Nevermind. Go back to your lives, citizens.
That’s what Michael Brown, the former FEMA director told his boss Michael Chertoff, on August 29th as the severity of Katrina became clear. According to Brown, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an “out of control” situation.
“I can’t get a unified command established.”
One day later, Brown asked the White House to take control of the response effort.
He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré of the Army as the Pentagon’s commander of active-duty forces began to turn the situation around.
In his first interview since being fired as FEMA director, Brown focused most of his criticism at Blanco.
Governor Blanco said Wednesday that she took responsibility for failures and missteps in the immediate response to the hurricane and pledged a united effort to rebuild areas ravaged by the storm, adding, “at the state level, we must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again.” A spokesman for Ms. Blanco denied Mr. Brown’s description of disarray in Louisiana’s emergency response operation. “That is just totally inaccurate,” said Bob Mann, the governor’s communications director. “Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him.”
As Mr. Brown recounted it, the weekend before New Orleans’s levees burst, FEMA sent an emergency response team of 10 or 20 people to Louisiana to review evacuation plans with local officials.
By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help.
“Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?” Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.
“Mike, you want me to call the mayor?” the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Mr. Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.
He said, she said, they said, he said again, she said again…
Given what we know about Mike Brown and his ability to fabricate, I have to suspect that a lot of this is about covering himself from the flak that will eventually fly.
There’s going to be a whole lot of this finger pointing/blame stuff going on now that the recovery effort is winding down and rebuilding is ramping up. My hope is that a commission is established to investigate what when wrong and when it went wrong. The group should not include any active or inactive politicians though. The investigation would be a repeat of the 9/11 Commission findings, which ended up tainted by partisan politics. A Katrina Commission should include retired military generals who won’t have any reason to look at the events through political eyeglasses.
We’ll see.
There must be a bunch of 7th graders working at Reuters these days. What else could explain this?
MORE: Editor & Publisher has background. Looks like the juvenile in question is staffer Rick Wilking, who apparently has nothing better to do.
STILL MORE: The story behind the story. Wilking isn’t to blame here, his editor is.
Some of us are REPUBLICANS, and then some of us are (R)epublicans.
Senator Arlen Specter, (R)epublican, tries but fails to snag Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in a line of questioning around Roe v. Wade.
The first question out of the box in the Senate Judiciary Committee came from the panel’s chairman, Arlen Specter. Media reports of Roberts’ answers have focused on his admission that Roe v. Wade is a long-standing precedent, but they have not focused on his comments setting up reasons for overturning the 1973 decision.
During his questioning, Specter sought to lay the groundwork for regarding Roe v. Wade as a Supreme Court decision that shouldn’t be overturned because a generation of Americans have come to regard it as part of their lives.
“People have ordered their thinking and living around Roe,” Specter said. “For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships in reliance on the availability of abortion.”
“Would you agree with that,” Specter asked?
Roberts didn’t take the bait. He said that, while precedent is important, new facts and information could provide a basis for the Supreme Court to overturn a bad precedent-setting decision like Roe.
“Whether or not particular precedents have proven to be unworkable is another consideration on the other side — whether the doctrinal bases of a decision had been eroded by subsequent developments,” Roberts said.
“For example, if you have a case in which there are three precedents that lead and support that result and in the intervening period two of them have been overruled, that may be a basis for reconsidering the prior precedent,” Roberts explained.
Specter, who backs abortion, then tried to trap Roberts by getting him to say new facts and information hasn’t made the Roe precedent one that should be reversed.
“I feel the need to stay away from a discussion of particular cases,” Roberts said.
Again, Specter asked, “Well, do you see any erosion of precedent as to Roe?”
Roberts declined the trapping question a second time: “Well, again, I think I should stay away from discussions of particular issues that are likely to come before the court again.”
Later, Roberts said providing a “jolt” to the court is sometimes necessary when a bad decision has stood for too long.
And in my opinion, a review of that ruling is overdue.
I think the most incredible statement from Specter is this one:
“People have ordered their thinking and living around Roe,” Specter said. “For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships in reliance on the availability of abortion.”
Does this statement have any basis in reality? Yes, unfortunately, it does, but this is hardly a compelling reason for the court to keep its hands off of Roe. I’m surprised Specter decided to use this to frame his question.
But forget about the framing…the statement alone is amazing. Who knew Arlen was an advocate for free love? No responsibilities, no consequences. The convenience of abortion availability is what counts I guess. Guilt? Regret? Yeah, well maybe, but the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture anti-depressants have solved that problem, right Arlen?
The cheapening of human life can be…chilling.
Visit any one of a number of MSM news sites or left-leaning political blogs and you’ll think that George W. Bush is in the tank. He’s washed up. He’s a looooooser. Hurricane Katrina was the nail in the coffin and he is (along with the entire GOP) going down.
Funny, that’s not what I see in the latest Gallup Poll. Ankle Biting Pundits posted the results today and adds a few notes too.
GALLUP POLL RESULTS:
Initial Response (total good)
44% (good) George W Bush
39% (good) Residents of New Orleans
38% (good) State and local officials in Louisiana
36% (good) FEMA/federal agencies
NOTE: The President’s INITIAL response to Katrina was rated higher than ANY of the other options — Does anyone remember reading this anywhere . . . nuf said?!Recent Response (total good)
58% (good) George W Bush
59% (good) Residents of New Orleans
57% (good) State and local officials in LA
56% (good) FEMA/federal agenciesFederal Government:
Despite the Mediacrats best efforts, Gallup discovered that 60% of repondents still had confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle natural disasters and 63% had confidence in the government’s ability to handle terrorist attacks.The President’s Job Approval:
46% approve
[UP from last week’s 45% and last month’s 40% . . . similar to Rasmussen’s 47% approval (50% likely voters) and certainly much higher than the BOGUS ratings recently published by AP, Newsweek and ABCNews/WashPost]The Blame Game:
49% of Americans say the media are spending too much time trying to affix blame
48% say the same about Democrat leaders in Congress
31% say the same about Republican leaders in Congress
[Not all Americans are brain dead sheeple!]
I’ve been reading how many claim that Bush would have never taken responsibility for the Feds lackluster initial response to the Hurricane unless the polls told him to. Now, if we were talking about Bill Clinton, I’d agree wholeheartedly. That man wouldn’t comb his hair until he read a poll that showed over 50% approval for placing his part on the left.
While I have no doubt that many in the White House do read polls and attempt to act on them, I don’t believe that Bush makes a final decision based solely on a popularity percentage. There are a lot of things he wouldn’t have done as president if he was strictly poll led.
I think most Americans know that Bush is the type of guy to admit fault when he truly believes he’s to blame. This drives the Left crazy because he won’t admit to the things they think are his fault.
So, why did he take the blame this time? First of all, Bush felt bad about what happened in New Orleans. He was embarrassed by the lame response of FEMA and other federal departments. With all the talk of fighting a war against the terrorists and never letting 9/11 happen again, he couldn’t deny the fact that his homeland security muscle wasn’t in the shape he thought it was. In other words, his credibility was shaken.
The U.S. continues to be more vulnerable than Bush would like, and it is his responsibility to patch the weak spots. How often has he looked into the camera and said his number one job as president is to keep Americans safe? Hurricane Katrina put the fear of God back into him, forcing the question, “what if the U.S. had been hit with nuclear terrorism instead of a natural disaster?”
He didn’t like the answer. That’s why he stood up in front of the American public yesterday and did the right thing. He told everyone he didn’t like what saw, and he’ll work to fix it.
I don’t believe the Gallup Poll had anything to do with his speech yesterday. I think it accurately reflects what most Americans feel about George W. Bush. He’s genuine, he’s sincere, and (like it or not) he means what he says.
Others: Junk Yard Blog – “Bush needs to defend himself and not try to win over the Left” | Bill Quick – “I see this meme setting in among those spinning pro-Bush regarding his apology for the performance of the feds in the Katrina NOLA fiasco. Unfortunately, it’s B.S.” |
If you don’t understand what all the hubbub is about, Ace provides a brief primer that will bring you up to speed. I know of a few people who will be ‘live-blogging’ this tonight. I won’t be, since I’m on PDT and will still be at the day job.
The Carnival of the Vanities turns three years old today. Congratulations Silflay.