Katrina's POLITICAL aftermath (keep the political discussions HERE)

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein

...CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, announced the hiring of DeLay’s chief of staff as a top Washington lobbyist. This news, and its timing, prompted Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy to tell the L.A. Weekly: “Time Warner aligning itself with the right-wing DeLay machine should send shudders [down] CNN and HBO. Clearly, TW wants DeLay insurance so it won’t have to face cable-ownership safeguards, à la carte rules and broadband non-discrimination policies.”

-new orleans is being re-evacuated due to the oncoming tropical storm/hurricane thing.

-george lakoff's Huffington Post on the political aftermath, with a little bit of John Roberts coverage for fun.

Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives.

also, you all know about Turd Blossom going off to North Dakota instead of actually doing the whole "cooridate the hurricane relief effort" thing for which he got appointed, right?

sidebar | posted September 23, 2005 (web only)
GOP Opportunity Zone
Naomi Klein


This is a list of "Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices," circulated by the House Republican Study Committee. Attributions included where available.

Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas. (Reps. Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado, Tom Feeney, Florida, Jeff Flake, Arizona)
Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone. (Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin)
Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations). (Rep. Todd Tiahrt, Kansas)
Immediate, first-year business expensing in lieu of depreciation for all assets, both personal property and structures (buildings) in the affected areas.
Allow net operating loss carry-backs for affected residents and businesses going back as many years as is needed to actualize the NOL.
For residents and businesses located or investing in the affected area, their 2005 and 2006 capital gains and dividends rate should be zero.
Individuals in the affected area should have a Section 911 (overseas earned income) exclusion that is uncapped.
Waive the death tax for any deaths in the affected area between August 20, 2005-December 31, 2005.
Provide limited liability protection for construction contractors who voluntarily provide services or equipment before a government contract is finalized. (Rep. Gary Miller, California, Rep. Tom Cole, Oklahoma)
Repeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations, such as NEPA, that hamper rebuilding. (Heritage Foundation)
Waive penalties for early withdrawals from tax-advantaged savings (like IRAs and 401k accounts). (Heritage Foundation)
Eliminate any regulatory barriers and other disincentives that block faith-based and other charitable organizations from engaging in the recovery and reconstruction process. (Orthodox Union, Heritage Foundation)
Increase the amount of rehabilitation tax credits by 30 percent in census tracts where the greatest poverty exists, and for smaller projects where raising capital for reconstruction is the most difficult, and where there is the most critical need for housing and neighborhood reinvestment. (Rep. Phil English, Pennsylvania)
Allow non-itemizers to deduct chartable contributions to disaster relief. (Rep. Ron Paul, Texas)
Give school-choice vouchers for displaced children. (Rep. Ted Poe, Texas)
Provide tax (and other such) incentives to lenders if they provide funding for school and other construction.
Reduce, suspend, or eliminate tariffs on Canadian lumber, Mexican cement, and other materials used for new construction.
Permit an additional advance refunding for all governmental bonds issued by or on the behalf of entities contained in the disaster area as declared by the president.
Eliminate the volume cap for private-activity bonds in the disaster area and permit the use of private-activity bonds for all transportation-related infrastructure in the disaster area.
Eliminate the income and home price limitation for mortgages funded by tax-exempt mortgage revenue bonds for a five-year period.
Allow a non-profit corporation to issue tax-credit bonds--which provide a return in the form of a federal tax credit--and allocate the proceeds for school rehabilitation and reconstruction.
Streamline the environmental hurdles to building new oil refineries. (Rep. John Shadegg, Arizona)
Make it easier for small refineries to increase capacity. (Kansas's Tiahrt)
Allow more offshore oil drilling. (Texas's Poe)
Pay the royalties for new offshore oil drilling to the local governments nearest to shore. (Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California)
Allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Temporarily suspend the gas tax. (Arizona's John Shadegg)
Permanently reduce the gas tax.
Waive or repeal gas formulation (e.g. oxygenation) requirements under the Clean Air Act and related regulations. (Heritage Foundation)
Encourage the production of renewable fuels (biodiesel, ethanol.)
Encourage private-market projects to recover usable energy from oil shale.
Strengthen the existing investment tax credit for Enhanced Oil Recovery (using modern technology improvements to extract oil from previously unavailable sources) in section 43 of the IRS Code.

Source: House Republican Study Committee

and some of them won't really help at all, aside from just attacking environmental laws

The blogger advocates violence towards the shop owner but creates a sympathetic killer to justify it. We must not assume a gang comes in and does the killing, in turn keeping both the potential starving baby or the man from getting water (or frankly anyone). We must write the killing scene with a shameless appeal to emotion. I am personally just SHOCKED that someone from the left resorts to outright violence and murder and uses the voice of the downtrodden to justify it. This guy was just a n00b though because if he really wanted to make the murder seem justified he would've made her a black mother who had just watched her other child die at the hands of a bigoted redneck (Dubya?) earlier in the day. Poor Stossel obviously didn't think of the left's penchant for revolutionary violence when forming his argument. PWNED Stossel, PWNED.

Stossel is also strawmanning. Everyone recognizes that prices have to go up in connection with supply and demand, we just don't want gas companies taking advantage of the public's fear and misinformation.

LOL

Did you even read the article? Having third parties create artificial prices only leads to the costs being shown in other areas. In this case it is the government putting roofs on prices, which hurts supply. The late-1970's oil crisis had the government controlling gas prices and that meant long lines at gas stations (which ironically meant wasting gas in idling cars) and many gas stations running out of gas. President Carter said it would be inevitable that gas would reach $2 a gallon soon and that the American people would need to make proper adjustments and submit to more government power in order to maybe get out of the bad situation (where does that sound familiar?). (At this point gas was around $1.50). When Reagan was elected he notoriously made an executive order stopping any and all government price control and gas was down to $0.86 in months. By 1986 we had cut the price of a barrel in half and by 1993 gasoline was at an all-time low in American history.

Why don't you take a look at President Carter's energy policy yourself?

http://www.mnforsustain.org/energy_speech_president_carter.htm

"Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century."

LOL

"Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn't a box of Cheerios they buried last week."

Sept. 26, 2005
6:44 p.m.
(CBS) — CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina.

He suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had gotten a bum rap because many people incorrectly believe it serves as something of a federal rapid-response force.

"FEMA is a coordinating agency, we are not a law enforcement agency," he said.

"It is inherently impractical, totally impractical, for the federal government to respond to every disaster of whatever size in every community across the country," Brown said.

"It breaks my heart to think about the disasters we respond to as FEMA and to think about the disasters that we also don't respond to," he added.

[....]

Democrats, who want an independent investigation not under the control of majority Republicans, largely boycotted the hearing.

One, he said, was not having more media briefings.

Inarticulate screams and grunts could not express my contempt, much less words.

On August 29, the day of the storm, Brown exchanged e-mails about his attire with Taylor, Melancon said. She told him, "You look fabulous," and Brown replied, "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?"

An hour later, Brown added: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god," according to the congressman.

I said it last week, but I just *loved* how he ended up on the Administration's p.r. effort for Harriet Miers -- and even made a statement about how great she was etc. -- the evening before she dropped out. So appropriate.

By Alan Levin, USA TODAYFri Nov 4, 7:49 AM ET

Flood-ravaged Louisiana can't pay the $3.7 billion that the U.S. government says is its share of hurricane relief, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Thursday.

"You can't squeeze $3.7 billion out of this state to pay this bill. Period. That would be difficult for us on a good day," the spokeswoman, Denise Bottcher, told USA TODAY.

Staffers for the governor "about fell over" Wednesday night when they received the Federal Emergency Management Agency's estimate of the state's costs for hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said Mark Merritt, a consultant working for Blanco.

FEMA projects that it will spend a total of $41.4 billion in Louisiana, about $9,000 per resident. Federal law requires state and local governments to pay a portion of disaster relief costs. That share can be as much as 25%. The $3.7 billion estimate is roughly 9% of FEMA's projected costs in Louisiana.

The $3.7 billion represents just under half of the $8 billion the state spends per year and comes as the extensive flooding around New Orleans has severely undercut tax revenue. The state is in the midst of heavy cost-cutting to whittle down a projected $1 billion shortfall.

Congress would have to enact legislation to forgive Louisiana's debt, FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said. President Bush has waived certain state and local costs, such as debris removal, but he is bound by law to collect the $3.7 billion from Louisiana, she said.

Mississippi and Texas, also hit hard by this year's hurricanes, have not received FEMA's projected costs.

The issue of a state's obligation to pay disaster relief costs occasionally creates controversy. On rare occasions, FEMA has threatened to report local governments to the U.S. Justice Department because federal money wasn't reimbursed.

The bulk of the money Louisiana must pay will go toward paying for personal property lost in the storms. FEMA pays up to $26,200 per household for uninsured losses. Blanco's office estimates that 60,000 households in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish alone will qualify for the payments. FEMA this week began notifying people that they will receive money.

Merritt is a former FEMA official who now works with former FEMA director James Lee Witt, an adviser to Blanco on hurricane recovery. Merritt said the scope of the disaster far exceeded anything envisioned when the relief agency was created. He called the costs "astronomically unprecedented."

Before Hurricane Katrina, the largest FEMA disaster was the Sept. 11 attacks. FEMA spent $8.8 billion for relief in New York after Sept. 11, which equaled less than $500 per resident of the metro area, Merritt said.

"A disaster of this magnitude ... has never happened on this scale in U.S. history," Merritt said.

White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: January 25, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. Mr. Rapuano has given briefings to the committees, but the sessions were closed to the public and were not considered formal testimony.

"The White House and the administration are cooperating with both the House and Senate," Mr. Duffy said. "But we have also maintained the president's ability to get advice and have conversations with his top advisers that remain confidential."

Yet even Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president's staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.

"I completely disagree with that practice," Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

According to Mr. Lieberman, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cited such a restriction on Monday, as agency lawyers had advised him not to say whether he had spoken to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or to comment on the substance of any conversations with any other high-level White House officials.

Nevertheless, both Ms. Collins and Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican who is leading the House inquiry, said that despite some frustration with the administration's response, they remained confident that the investigations would produce meaningful results.

Other members of the committees said the executive branch communications were essential because it had become apparent that one of the most significant failures was the apparent lack of complete engagement by the White House and the federal government in the days immediately before and after the storm.

"When you have a natural disaster, the president needs to be hands-on, and if anyone in his staff gets in the way, he needs to push them away," said Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican and member of the House investigating committee. "The response was pathetic."

Even before the House and Senate investigations began, Democrats called for the appointment of an independent commission, like the one set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to investigate the response to the most costly natural disaster in United States history. The 9/11 Commission, after extensive negotiations, questioned Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and received sworn testimony from Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser.

"Our fears are turning out to be accurate," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said Tuesday. "The Bush administration is stonewalling the Congress."

Mr. Duffy, along with officials from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, said that although not every request had been met, the administration had provided an enormous amount of detailed information about nearly every aspect of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Department of Defense, for example, has provided 18 officials for testimony, and 57 others have been interviewed by Congressional staff members, said Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman. It has also turned over an estimated 240,000 pages of documents.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said his agency, which oversees FEMA, had been similarly responsive, providing 60 officials as witnesses and producing 300,000 pages of documents.

But the White House and other federal agencies have been less helpful, members of the investigating committees said, particularly the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is the subject of the sole subpoena issued so far.

"We have been trying - without success - to obtain Secretary Rumsfeld's cooperation for months," Representative Charlie Melancon, Democrat of Louisiana, said in a letter to Representative Davis on Monday. "The situation is not acceptable."

Mr. Davis, in a written response to Mr. Melancon on Tuesday, said he felt that the Pentagon, after the subpoena, had largely honored the committee's requests.

The Congressional investigations began in September, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, flooding New Orleans, devastating much of the rest of the region and causing more than $100 billion in damage.

Both of the committees are rushing to try to complete their investigations - the House by Feb. 15, and the Senate by the middle of March - in part because of the approaching Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1.

The separate action this week by the Bush administration to oppose an effort to create what would have been called the Louisiana Recovery Corporation evoked great disappointment among state officials.

Mr. Baker's bill would have bought out owners of ruined homes, offering them at least 60 percent of their pre-storm equity, while also giving mortgage companies 60 percent of their loans on damaged properties. The bonds needed for the project would have been paid off by selling developers federally acquired land.

"The Baker bill as a tool was very efficient in terms of helping people sell out, or clear title to the land," said Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "We're going to have to go back to the drawing board and do the best with the tools we have."

Donald E. Powell, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator, said in a statement that the government was prepared to help victims in other ways.

"We share the common vision, the common objective of Congressman Baker, to assist uninsured homeowners outside the flood plain," Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell's spokeswoman, D. J. Nordquist, said the administration was open to discussion if the community development money turned out to be insufficient.

xpost

Republicans get blowjobs. Maybe they don't always humidor their conquests or inspire accusations of sexual battery or drown them in cars after a night of binge drinking, but they get head. Although maybe they have to pay for it.

As for lowering the standards, they were so low to begin with that I can no longer even fake shock. I'm kind of waiting for something more exciting, like a rape charge or a murder coming out fo this bunch. You know, something that the citizenry might actually care about. Of all the wacky, law-skirting stuff that the previous administration (not to mention the previous Democratic-led House or Senate), at least they had Bill Clinton to bring a semen stain to the front page. I'm not going to find "stonewalling" the least bit interesting until it involves Jenna Bush and the Chicken Ranch.