Inquiring minds want to know

Has the pressure finally gotten through the protective bubble that surrounds this pampered fool? Have Cindy, Katrina, Rita, Sibel Edmonds made him cry? Or did the coke sniffing and boozing never really stop once the frat boy pretended to play president?

The investigating team here at piglipstick central has uncovered what could be an explosive photo. Has little boots gone off the deep end?

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Well, well, according to the UK observer, in the first ever appeal to the American public for foreign aid donations, (aside from taxes that is) the feds want us to pony up for reconstruction in Iraq. Grand total so far - $600. So where are all the warhawks and keyboard commandos in this charitable endeavor?

link - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1577750,00.html

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Inquiring minds want to know #2 ~~>

From Newsweek, as reported on MSNBC, at a photo op deep in the NORTHCOM bunker in Colorado:

The president didn't look all that relieved or happy, however. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep (he had been awakened all through the night with bulletins), and he seemed cranky and fidgety. A group of reporters and photographers had been summoned by White House handlers to capture a photo op of the commander in chief at his post. Bush stared at them balefully. He rocked back and forth in his chair, furiously at times, asked no questions and took no notes. It almost seemed as though he resented having to strike a pose for the press.

Now what would make you puffy, cranky and fidgity?

Inquiring minds want to know #3

Dang, I enjoy reading some blogs. On Xtians, Driftglass paints a vivid picture for you:
"These are creepy, ethically-desiccated homunculi who have peeled the flesh from the body of the Living Christ and turned his humane message completely inside-out in order to make drumskins for their dark little marching band."
Priceless.

Houston, we have a problem. God is being a dick again.

What Scott McClellan would sound like if truth ever emanated from his piehole:

"...the federal government has already set the machinery in motion to delivery vital disaster recovery services – including press conferences, focus groups, overnight polls and photo opportunities with selected grateful survivors – to the President just as soon as the storm has passed."

Whiskey Bar - http://www.billmon.org/

A long, cold winter

The gulf is bracing for another storm, this time the forecasts are for Rita to hit Texas in the Galveston area. If that happens, with just about all of the state's refinery operations located there, dust off those bicycles and pump up the tires. Cuz there just might not be any gas for a while.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/21/news/economy/rita_threat/index.htm



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Seen at AMERICAblog, an absolutely fascinating question - "Question: Would YOU let the passengers on that plane watch the live news coverage of their predicament from their seats?"

best response - "Only if you made sure they had mirrors so they could watch themselves watching themselves... "

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Endless fun - http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm

From "The Onion":

Halliburton Gets Contract To Pry Gold Fillings From New Orleans Corpses' Teeth
September 14, 2005 Issue 41•37

HOUSTON—On Tuesday, Halliburton received a $110 million no-bid government contract to pry the gold fillings from the mouths of deceased disaster victims in the New Orleans-Gulf Coast area. "We are proud to serve the government in this time of crisis by recovering valuable resources from the wreckage of this deadly storm," said David J. Lesar, Halliburton's president. "The gold we recover from the human rubble of Katrina can be used to make fighter-jet electronics, supercomputer chips, inflation-proof A-grade investments, and luxury yachting watches."

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You know, when opinion polls show that support for precious leader and the cabal is tanking, when subjugated Iraq is rising up to expel the invaders, when a hurricane exposes the criminality of the psychopaths in Washington, what would any thinking person conclude a terrorist would do? That's right - nothing. Let's see what happens in the next few months.
And always, sometimes the firefighters are the arsonists themselves.

Want fries with your gumbo?

In my hometown, just like in countless towns in this country, there's a main drag several miles long that's a paean to Amurrcan culture. Franchises blend into minimalls that fade to Hamburger Row in a happy faced billboard drive by blur. You can certainly get in your car and dutifully go about your business of buying your gewgaws and paying your bills, Doing the Stuff of an average day with a minimum of fuss and bother. With me it's a sense of relief to get it all done and get home to get on with more pleasurable activities. That's just me; I've always been a loner (well, except for my younger barfly social shmoozing). The awful inevitableness of this soulless, draining environment with it's detached, sterile atmosphere can get to you.



Which is why I've been thinking a lot about what kind of city will be built on the memory of Nawlins. David Freedman, the general manager of WWOZ called it " the last largest bastion of incipient, instinctive resistance". It was a city of unique, charming culture that I'll wager a whole lot of people wish they'd had visited before now.

Boosh's corporate cronies were given the sweetheart contracts to "rebuild" the city while people were still dying in their attics and rotting corpses floated in the streets. A lot of the evacuees aren't going to return and the Supremes' ruling about eminent domain from several months ago came just in time for the city to sieze a whole lot of property. When Halliburton begins to "rebuild", just what kind of city is going to emerge? I'd say it's going to be hurried, claptrap construction except for the sky boxes at a new stadium and the plush suites at the new casinos. Bottom line housing for the new underclass and top of the line luxury in the new hotels. A centuries old spirit washed away by the water and replaced with a hollow, spiritless Chamber of Commerce Smile.

I wish I had visited.

Service Corporation International

Remember them? It was called funeralgate and it sort of exploded in the news in 1998 when little boots was governor of Texas. According to it's website "SCI is the largest provider of funeral, cremation and cemetary services in North America".

It began as a usual tawdry tale of influence peddling and campaign contributions, unlicensed activities and political intrigue. Bush, of course, was chin deep in all the muck. Then it emerged that SCI had, um, unusual methods of disposing bodies.

According to Raw Story: "...The Menorah Gardens cemetery chain, owned by SCI, desecrated vaults, removed hundreds of bodies from two cemeteries in Florida and dumped the gruesome remains in woods frequented by wild hogs, investigators discovered in 2001. In one case, a backhoe was used to crack open a vault, remove corpses and make room for more dead bodies."
"Some vaults designed to hold one body each had 67 sets of human remains stuffed inside, investigators discovered. SCI was among the companies ordered to pay settlement fees to family members."

I'm sure the family members and all the thousands of affected people in New Orleans will be thrilled to hear that governor Blanco has signed a formal contract with Kenyon International, a subsidiary of SCI, to handle the dead from Katrina. One wonders how much pressure there was from sockpuppet to help out his old buddies.

It indeed looks as though the levees were blown up in New Orleans. There were three spots which disintigrated, flooding 80% of the city. The storm wasn't the problem, nor was the tidal surge. Engineers have said that if water came over the top it would be spillage, not a catastrophic collapse, and these were concrete floodwalls that supposedly gave way while earthen berms that surround the city remained intact.

The residents heard muffled explosions (hate to link to this racist cretin but go with the news source you have, not with the news source you wish you had) - http://www.halturnershow.com/EarWitnessVideo.html">boom

There are a lot of reasons why the city was flooded, some more conjectural than others, but the city was indeed flooded. 1. Operation kill the niggers - for a long time due to factors not relevant to the situation at hand the city's population became increasingly black and increasingly poor. Sort of in the way for 2. Upscaling and gentrifying the city - developers and especially the gambling interests have been drooling to get on with their plans. 3. Psy -Op on the American people - Waiting those excruciatingly long days after the disaster to make the situation as bad as possible, then blaming it on local governments assures that in the event of new crises the people will scream in unison for the feds to show up. 3A. Added bonus - local governments are democratic. 4. Trial run for martial law - encircle the city with cops and military, media not allowed, hide the dead, and outsource the dirty work of pacifying the people with mercenaries from groups like Blackwater.("There are a lot of lessons we want to learn out of this process in terms of what works.
I think we are in fact on our way to getting on top of the whole Katrina exercise." –Vice President Dick Cheney, Sept. 10, 2005) 5. Operation inflate the poll numbers - worked big time after 9/11 but Rove must be off his game as the obvious deliberate mismanagement was siezed on by the media.

Or all the above.

Who's YOUR regional FEMA chief?
After our national trauma down in the gulf I got curious to see just who the regional FEMA director was for my region. Mine is region X according to the official site - http://www.fema.gov/regions/x/regx.shtmRegion X is Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska, about a third of the American landmass.

A little digging on the director, John Pennington, brought up some interesting stuff. He was a 4 term state rep in Washington, then resigned for health reasons.Then, according to the Seattle Times: Just before his appointment, Pennington received a bachelor's degree in business administration from California Coast University in Santa Ana, Calif., which at the time was an unaccredited correspondence school. In testimony before Congress last year, investigators for the General Accounting Office identified California Coast as a diploma mill. [...] GAO special agent Paul DeSaulniers told The Seattle Times this week that his investigation showed that California Coast University sold degrees for a flat fee.

Shit!

So we are supposed to put our trust in a man with zero crisis management who got a "degree" by mail order. And his boss, Michael Brown, who was effectively removed from hurricane relief for you know what, was fired from his position as a horse fluffer for a now defunct organization. After padding his resume.

And we're surrounded by volcanos.

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I've come across a truckload of articles, essays and screeds that deal with the catastrophe that was New Orleans. Up until this advanced stage of my life I could count on a mix of political viewpoints that went over the top trying to salvage a position here, gain some advantage there. Until now with the thousands dead in the gulf. There is no spin that will work to minimize what happened and who's responsible. All the levels of government share some onus but the buck stops at the top.

Two of the best essays I've found:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25956
http://www.globalnewsmatrix.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=2542

Something tells me that the official count of the dead from the gulf storm is going to be a lot different than estimates up to now. New Orleans is locked down tight with tens of thousands of national guard, cops and Blackwater mercs.

Couple that with a de facto ban on media reportage and one gets a sneaky suspicion that black tuesday might still be champ of the dead victim numbers. I mean look at the mileage the bushistas got for the last 4 years from endlessly chanting 9/11 in our ears. Somehow the PR machine short circuited for Katrina and this World Class Fuckup stood naked in the daylight for the world to see. Can't use that botched relief job to propel Little Boots to sainthood, hurricane season only lasts so long, so the storm can't be seen as a worse disaster to knock the luster off the Big Event that's been used to bring us hell on earth.

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The dead haven't even been counted, shit there are probably even people still trapped in their attics and the rapacious scumbags have awarded no bid reconstruction contracts to, (drumroll please!) Halliburton! Who would have guessed?

A joke that should be shared around every water cooler - http://www.livejournal.com/users/cargoweasel/316274.html

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Invictus at Blah3 shows how we should never point fingers, but has one pointed nonetheless, guess which one - http://www.blah3.com/article.php?story=20050908124921652&mode=print

Back at ya, from little boots - http://www.freepressinternational.com/bush.098267.victory.salute.8716209.html

FEMA is the problem

Reports are everywhere that Fema, either due to supreme incompetence, or worse, is hampering rescue efforts, humanitarian help and firefighting. And after the feds took days to show up post Katrina they've entered the city like it was Fallujah.

1000 firefighters kept in Atlanta to hand out fliers - http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3004197

From Wayne Madsen: "Team Bush" still refusing international aid. Russian rescue crews on four cargo planes with helicopters on board sit idle at an airport near Moscow waiting for green light, Cuba has 1500 doctors with 26 tons of medical supplies and Bush is refusing them entry to U.S., Venezuelan disaster rescue teams wait for a "go," Dominican Republic crews with hurricane recovery experience wait and wait and wait. It's the same scene at airports around the world. Meanwhile, FEMA turned back 8 buses from Washington, DC that were to bring 400 evacuees to the DC Armory which has been stockpiled with just about every need. The Bush regime has finally reached the crescendo of evil.
And why is FEMA so incompetent? It was turned into a political patronage agency by Bush for Bush's campaign lickspittles. This from a disaster recovery specialist with inside contacts at FEMA

Frequencies are being jammed - http://crawfordpeace.nfshost.com/node/1833

There is even info to defeat the jammers - http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Jammers.htm

Fema turned away a rescue convoy - http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=8034

Fema waited until AFTER the storm hit - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090705Z.shtml

Preventable deaths continue - "Offers of foreign aid worth tens of millions of dollars -- including a Swedish water purification system, a German cellular telephone network and two Canadian rescue ships -- have been delayed for days awaiting review by backlogged federal agencies, according to European diplomats and information collected by the State Department.
Since Hurricane Katrina, more than 90 countries and international organizations offered to assist in recovery efforts for the flood-stricken region, but nearly all endeavors remained mired yesterday in bureaucratic entanglements, in most cases, at the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/06/AR2005090601994.html

Seemingly clueless tyrants

I guess there's going to be more endless talk about how this administration is oblivious and distant, unresponsive to crises and always playing catch up. When Katrina hit, Precious Leader was AWOL as usual, Kindasleazy was hitting the highlife in New York and Cheney was nowhere to be seen. Very reminiscent of 9/11 when Bush did his bunny hop around the nation and the total silence just after the tsunami.

Ah, but there's a method to this madness.

It's true that these royals lead isolated, compassed lives. Hey, what is the cost of a loaf of bread anyway? Indifference to their fellow human beings is the norm, empathy doesn't exist in their world except as a photo op. Detached, bored with having to stand in front of cameras, it's high comedy to see them struggle to both appear sincere and not look at their watches.

To me there are several dynamics that enable them to be smug and arrogant and so seemingly uncaring as the world lurches from one flaming disaster to another. Now watch this drive!

They're not really in charge of much.

Oh, they get to order their immediates around and get to schedule some stuff and look all important when the cameras are rolling. Reporters scibble while listening to the World According to Von Rumsfeld, Kindasleazy can flit around the globe and gladhand while doing her lecture thing and Ashcroft got to sing! But the people we see are just the visible side of a monstrous, hidden agenda that this entire foul smelling government pays obeisance to. They can breeze along because they're safe in the knowledge that they ain't pulling the Big Strings. They're there when all this manufactured shit hits the fan and are content to stand back and allow it to unfold.

Enter the spin machine.

Always going to be people who see through the bullcrap, always going to be people who couldn't give a flip, always going to be bobble headed true believers, and we all live in the World of Spin. The administration can absolutely count on spin and propaganda to offset their failures, to burnish their images, to disappear things, to make stuff look ok. Little Boots could eviscerate a puppy in prime time tomorrow and by Saturday he'd be a champion of animal rights. They know this. It's how those thousand points of lies just faded away and why, we've always been at war with Eurasia!

And oh, our minuscule, easily manipulated attention spans. Blase attitudes amongst our Betters count for nought when the Next Big Thing occurs. Especially when it has all these cool explosions. Meanwhile we all just reel and stumble along trying to keep our lives together while the monsters in Washington can afford the luxury of unconcern.

Hey! Another white woman is missing!

Planning for, and then protecting the welfare of American citizens seems to be too much effort for the criminals in Washington, but they excel at propaganda and damage control. "White house enacts a plan to ease political damage" - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05bush.html?pagewant...

Little boots is due to make the disaster worse by showing up later on today. Blah3 exposes the fraud - http://www.blah3.com/article.php?story=20050903214041794

Make the disaster worse how, you might ask? This is from the NOLA Times - Picayune:
Saturday, September 03, 2005Bush visit halts food deliveryBy Michelle KrupaStaff writerThree tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said. The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea. “We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.
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Can't people in this country see a pattern in this administration's response to criticism? Of course, like in the Times article above, their first reaction is to blame someone else, in this case the state and local officials. But then the attack poodles, minions, stooges and assorted water carriers dredge up the tired refrain that criticism is politicizing the issue at hand.
"Shut up - can't you see that criticizing bush is hampering the war on terror?" "Shut up - you critics are giving comfort to the enemy!" "Demoralizing the troops!" "Politicizing a trajedy!"
Well screw it, this is politics. This is the politics of life and death. The conservative's fundamental view of government is that it should be limited. They believe in privatizing and doling out responsibility to state and local governments. Then I have a question - why are we paying for a big, bad Department of Homeland Whatever? A disaster of this magnitude is overwhelming for smaller agencies and the DofHW with Chertoff at the helm was a decided no-show. Why did Bush's bloated bureaucracy fail in it's mission?