All Together Now...

If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it then your face will surely show it.
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands (clap clap)

or maybe a little Sam & Dave:

Don't you ever feel sad,
Lean on me when times are bad.
When the day comes and you're down,
In a river of trouble and about to drown

Just hold on, I'm comin',
Hold on, I'm comin'

UPDATE: The homicidal scumbag still doesn't think anything went wrong.

Treated Like Animals? If Only

From a Katrina survivor:

"I would rather have been in jail," Janice Jones said in obvious relief at being out of the [Superdome]. "I've been in there seven days and I haven't had a bath. They treated us like animals."

Not quite, Ms. Jones:

Thousands of people are feared dead in the rubble of storm-shattered New Orleans, but at the New Orleans zoo only three of its 1,400 animals died in the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. The famous Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had a disaster plan for the animals that worked better than the city's plan for humans.

So there we have it: in planning for a catastrophic disaster, our society chooses to save zoo animals and to kill human beings. Make no mistake, this is not a disaster but a crime.

Perhaps that zoo director would have done a better job as head of FEMA than that horse show commissioner. But in Bushland, no one can ever screw up, so it doesn't really matter who's in charge.

Reality and Its Discontents

We know about politically-motivated photo-ops, but this is unconscionable. Kos sums it up: "This is absolutely the most fucked up thing ever done by this president, in a long list of fucked up things."

Marjorie Cohn reminds us:

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

Eli at leftiblog notes that even the Wall Street Journal suggested Cuba as a model for disaster preparedness.

If only Fidel had been in charge instead of FEMA.

Castro conquered Ivan.
Bush was bitch-slapped by Katrina.
No wonder he refuses to face Cindy.

For Bob Denver - RIP, little buddy

The "us" in the U.S.

BushCo's response to Katrina speaks for itself. The question of whether the type of racism on display is deliberate or not is irrelevant. What's worse: treating certain people as inferior or as invisible? In any case, it could not be any clearer that Americans who live in poverty and have dark skin are not considered truly American.

On September 2, Bush stated that "now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world." That part of the world? I didn't know that BushCo's efforts to turn the clock back to the 19th century involved reversing the Louisiana Purchase.

In April 2004, Bush, while justifying his democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun policy, said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

As Robert Jensen notes:

It appears the president intended the phrase "people whose skin color may not be the same as ours" to mean people who are not from the United States. That skin color he refers to that is "ours," he makes it clear, is white. Those people not from the United States are "a different color than white." So, white is the skin color of the United States. That means those whose skin is not white but are citizens of the United States are ...? What are they? Are they members in good standing in the nation, even if "their skin color may not be the same as ours"?

This is not simply making fun of a president who sometimes mangles the English language. This time he didn't misspeak, and there's nothing funny about it. He did seem to get confused when he moved from talking about skin color to religion (does he think there are no white Muslims?), but it seems clear that he intended to say that brown people -- Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East, whatever the category in his mind -- can govern themselves, even though they don't look like us. And "us" is clearly white. In making this magnanimous proclamation of faith in the capacities of people in other parts of the world, in proclaiming his belief in their ability to govern themselves, he made one thing clear: The United States is white. Or, more specifically, being a real "American" is being white. So, what do we do with citizens of the United States who aren't white?

What do we do with them?
We let them drown.

These are the Bush Family Values.

Happy National Preparedness Month

There's irony and then there's irony:

National Preparedness Month is a nationwide effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. National Preparedness Month 2005 is being co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross. Throughout September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross will work with a wide variety of organizations, including local, state and federal government agencies and the private sector, to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote individual involvement through events and activities across the nation.

Look here -- and note the blonde-haired white girl, looking all safe & comfortable. Hmm... I didn't see many blonde-haired white girls in the Superdome, so... Hey, job well done, Homeland Security!
This call, however, puzzled me:

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Oh, wait, I get it: no Red Cross = more dead people = fewer living people, making the evacuation, when they finally got around to it, that much easier! Brilliant!
Yes, die Heimat is in the good hands of Michael Chertoff, who, days after Katrina hit, had no idea that thousands of people were in the New Orleans convention center -- and has the balls to blame the media [UPDATE], the local government, and the impoverished residents who could not evacuate. Un-fucking-believable. I guess he now qualifies for a promotion in this Bush administration.
BTW, if you were wondering, VP Dick Cheney has been hard at work -- making sure the cleanup and rebuilding contracts go to Halliburton. Sound familiar?
Krugman, once again, nails it:

Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?
***
[The Bush administration's contempt for FEMA] reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility

Put another way, under BushCo, government is indeed a force for good, but "good" is defined in terms of the wealthy white Christian male in the mirror.
As Mike Whitney writes, the poor & black

were left to face the rising waters and the government neglect without any prospect of real assistance. When you can't buy your way out, you're left to rot; that's how the "invisible hand" of the free market operates. The message is clear: if you have nothing, you are nothing.

New slogan for the GOP: "If You're Brown, It's Trickle Down or Drown"

Good Fucking Question

Atrios on BushCo's handling of the Gulf Coast disaster:

The emergency preparedness for a medium scale biological or chemical attack, or the "dirty bomb" scenario, would be exactly identical to the kind of preparedness you'd have for a natural disaster of this type. Sure, some of the complications would be different in the various situations, but the basic needs - mass evacuation, temporary shelter, the provision of safe food and water, medical care - would be the same.

Haven't they done fucking anything in 4 years?

This is what you get when an administration is filled with incompetents.
It could not be more obvious that those in power don't really give a damn about the fate of poor black folk -- they're too busy destroying the lives of other darker-skinned people.
More here and here.

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