Yellow Dog

Check out these news-stories on the so-called FREEDOM walk that is being sponsored by the military on 9/11:

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

"A 'Freedom Walk' on Sunday in honor of the military, from the Pentagon to the Washington Mall, is open only to those pre-registered - and the U.S. Park Police has warned that it will arrest anyone who shows up without a pass."

Threats of arrest if you don't register for the Freedom Walk? Hooray for Freedom!

From the Washington Post:

"Organizers of the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police.

The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and "sterile," said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense.

The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford.

One restricted group will be the media, whose members will not be allowed to walk along the march route. Reporters and cameras are restricted to three enclosed areas along the route but are not permitted to walk alongside participants walking from the Pentagon, across the Memorial Bridge to the Mall."

Okay, let's see if I've got this straight. The FREEDOM walk is not open to average citizens and will take place within a 4-foot high fenced area patrolled by cops on horses, motorcycles and circling in helicopters above (wonder how much that is costing the taxpayers). Anyone who tries to join in the FREEDOM walk will be arrested, and the media will have limited access to the event. Are we sure this is taking place in the US and not USSR?

I like Bill Maher's idea to do a "California-style" recall election of Bush. After all, recent polls show his approval rating at below 40% (38% in the latest Newsweek poll), which means that a majority of Americans might be more-than-willing to sign a recall petition. The rationale is easy: 3 strikes and you're out. And Bush has some pretty big strikes against him:

Strike 1: 9/11
To review, in the days leading up to 9/11, Bush was clearing brush on his ranch while ignoring urgent memos that said plainly and clearly, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the US." Not only that, but moments after the first tower was struck, Bush continued to read the book "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren before finally springing into action as commander in chief and flying all over the US before returning to Washington. In fact, it took him 3 days before he showed up at ground zero.

Strike 2: Iraq
It's a quagmire. It's costing thousands of innocent lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. And it was all based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the US. Evidence from the British Intelligence Agency indicates that Bush was discussing war plans as early as 2002 and saw 9/11 as his opportunity to strike. The gullible, Fox-news watching portion of American society bought this link between Iraq and 9/11, even though there is absolutely no evidence of such a connection. Now, thanks to our presence in Iraq, terrorism is on the increase.

Strike 3: Hurricane Katrina
Thanks to Bush installing unqualified cronies at FEMA, the response to this disaster was a miserable failure. While people were dying, Bush was again on vacation (notice a recurrent theme here?) and was off making political appearances. Days later, he finally showed up to tour the region, complete with movie set "food shelters" set up just for the cameras, along with firefighters he removed from their rescue work so that they could appear in photo ops with him (reminiscent of his "Mission Accomplished" PR stunt on the aircraft carrier). While we still don't know the number of dead, estimates range from 10,000-40,000.

Three strikes. He's out.

This article by Tim Dickinson lays out, in sickening detail, Bush's unprecedented assault on the environment.

Read this and weep:

Since President Bush was sworn in for a second term, he has not only continued his unprecedented assault on the environment -- he's intensified it. In recent months, the administration has opened up millions of acres of pristine land to developers, allowing them to log and mine without leaving behind "viable populations" of wildlife. It allowed the import of methyl bromide, a cancer-causing pesticide that was due to be banned this year under an international accord signed by Ronald Reagan, and it scrapped plans to regulate lead paint in home-renovation projects, placing millions of children at risk for brain damage. And on August 8th, taking advantage of solid Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Bush signed into law his long-stalled energy bill, a grab bag of industry favors that provides $10 billion in oil, gas and coal subsidies while exempting Halliburton and other polluters from environmental laws.

"In the eyes of this administration," says Marty Hayden, legislative director of Earthjustice, the legal arm of the Sierra Club, "Ronald Reagan was an environmental extremist."

Indeed, Bush has undone more environmental progress in the last eight months than Reagan dreamed of in his full eight years in office. "Their goal is to take us back to where we were in the Eisenhower administration," says Buck Parker, Earthjustice's executive director. "Back to a time when the energy industry had free rein, citizens had no input and there were no environmental laws to be enforced."

A review of the damage already done in the second term reveals that the Bush administration has gutted environmental protections across the country, from Alaskan rain forests to the Gulf of Mexico:

1) Fouling The Air: Nowhere is the administration's contempt for the environment more evident than in its about-face on mercury, a potent neurotoxin that causes brain damage in as many as 600,000 children a year. The Clinton administration, declaring the pollution a "threat to public health," ordered coal plants to slash their mercury emissions by ninety percent by 2008. But in March, the EPA implemented a new rule -- entire sections of which were drafted by industry lobbyists -- that allows three times the emission of the Clinton rule and delays implementation of the cleanup until 2030. "I don't think what the EPA is doing is pro-business," says Attorney General Peter Harvey of New Jersey, one of thirteen states suing to overturn the rule. "I think it's anti-humanity."

2) Drilling The West: The administration is approving so many new permits for oil and gas drilling -- more than 6,000 last year alone -- that it can hardly keep pace with the paperwork. "The Bush policy is drill, drill, drill at all costs," says Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico. "Those of us who want to protect sensitive ecosystems have no voice in this debate."

3) Polluting The Water: Even as oil and gas interests get permission to drill on wild lands, the energy bill exempts most of the industry's 30,000 annual projects from the Clean Water Act -- allowing petrochemical runoff from well pads to bleed into creeks, rivers and aquifers.

4) Logging The Forests: Mark Rey -- the former timber lobbyist now in charge of the Forest Service -- bragged to a gathering of timber executives last December that the administration would double the amount of logging on public lands in its second term. By May, it had scrapped the Clinton-era regulation known as the "roadless rule," which placed nearly a third of all national forests off-limits to industry. The Forest Service has already mapped roads into 34 million acres.

5) Killing The Fish: The energy bill lifts a twenty-five-year moratorium on oil exploration off the East Coast, allowing industry to conduct a new "inventory" of oil and gas reserves -- a maritime version of shock and awe that will pummel the ocean floor with massive acoustic waves and disrupt marine sanctuaries.

6) Nuking The Future: The energy bill grants up to $6 billion in tax credits to new nuclear plants -- subsidies traditionally reserved for windmills and other green energy sources.

Public outrage has forced the administration to give up a few of its wildest schemes: "blending" raw sewage into drinking water, for example, or exempting 20 million acres of wetlands from the Clean Water Act. But most of Bush's efforts to gut the nation's environmental protections are so incremental, they go unnoticed by the public -- even when they have far-reaching consequences.

Bush is the Toxic Texan, but this time he's taking down more than Texas--the whole US--with his stinking, polluting, pro-business and anti-humanity policies. Sickening (literally).
RollingStone.com: A Polluter's Feast: Politics

"... I went to Florida a few days after President Bush did to observe the damage from Hurricane Andrew. I had dealt with a lot of natural disasters as governor, including floods, droughts, and tornadoes, but I had never seen anything like this. I was surprised to hear complaints from both local officials and residents about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handling the aftermath of the hurricane. Traditionally, the job of FEMA director was given to a political supporter of the President who wanted some plum position but who had no experience with emergencies. I made a mental note to avoid that mistake if I won. Voters don't chose a President based on how he'll handle disasters, but if they're faced with one themselves, it quickly becomes the most important issue in their lives."
-- Bill Clinton, My Life (p. 428)

The War in Iraq is making us less safe, and not just because terrorism is on the increase since the war began, but because we are stretched thin in terms of troops and machinery and are left vulnerable when disasters (like Hurricane Katrina) hit at home:

From CNN: "Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that 'arguably' a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

'Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear,' said Blum."

This CNN story notes how Al Gore, with no press attention or staged photo ops, helped airlift 270 Katrina evacuees from New Orleans. It's a pretty remarkable story:

On September 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

"The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute -- food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and ... corpses outside," Simon wrote.

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights. He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore's cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.

About 140 people, many of them sick, landed in Knoxville on September 3. The second flight, with 130 evacuees, landed the next day in Chattanooga.

This is the mark of a true leader--someone who ACTS instead of trying to act like he cares by touring the region days after the fact.

CNN.com - Gore airlifts victims from New Orleans - Sep 9, 2005

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Here's Barbara Bush on the evacuees who were herded into the Houston Astrodome when their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina:

"So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them," she said.

Here she is again when asked about whether the media should cover the human toll of the Iraq War:

"Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many?" she said. "It's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Wouldn't want to offend Barb's "beautiful mind" with ugly realities like homelessness and death, particularly when all of this death and destruction is due to her own son's dangerous, destructive, and brainless policies.

Bush family Katrina comments draw scrutiny - Yahoo! News

Ouch. Mark Morford nails our "Rich man's CEO President" for executing his job requirements perfectly:

"Maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.

Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest.

Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.

George W. Bush Still Rocks! / Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly

FEMA Director Michael Brown, a political crony of Bush's who has no prior qualifications (except campaigning for Bush) and has now been discovered to have lied on his resume, has finally been removed from his position overseeing hurricane relief efforts. Of course, he will still be working in Washington and won't be completely out the picture. For that to happen, Bush would have to admit that his following statement regarding his buddy "Brownie" (enough already with the frat-boy nicknames!) was wrong, and we all know Bush never admits mistakes.

Bush, on Tuesday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

CBS News, on Friday: "Brown Plucked from Katrina Duty"

Breaking World News: CBSNews.com

Remember when Republicans passed the bankruptcy law that was a give-away to banks and financial institutions? The fact that bankers praised the bill while consumer groups balked should tell us someting. Thanks to the fat cat Republicans, the law goes into effect on Oct. 17 and will have repercussions for those people whose lives have been disrupted by Hurrican Katrina.

From the Washington Post:

Katrina's victims "will be the first guinea pigs through the bankruptcy system," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and critic of the new law. "Some of these people will be able to persuade the courts that the new laws have as yet unseen flexibility, but it costs time and money to litigate those questions. Survivors of a disaster have neither."

Bradford W. Botes, a bankruptcy lawyer whose firm has several offices in the South, said that initially most Katrina victims will not even be thinking about bankruptcy.

But in four or more months, he said, when creditors start demanding payments and when the victims have yet to find jobs or jobs that pay what they were making before the storm, bankruptcy will seem like an attractive option, Botes said.

It's not just Katrina's victims who will consider bankruptcy, Botes said, but also consumers facing higher gasoline and heating bills. "If they are already on a tight line, that will push them over," he said.

What kind of morally bankrupt administration would institute policies that have increased the poverty level over the past four years (while giving tax cuts to the richest Americans) and then cut off all financial safety nets for struggling Americans? The same administration that is probably relieved that the tens of thousands of dead in New Orleans won't be able to file for bankruptcy. Sickening.

FEMA notified the wrong city of Charleston about a planeload of Katrina evacuees about to arrive. The plane landed in Charleston, West Virginia, but FEMA notified Charleston, South Carolina, to be prepared for the arrival. Well, who could've possibly known that there would be TWO cities named Charleston in the U.S? I guess that's why we've been using those funny 3-letter airport codes--since about 1930.

I give up.

Knoxville, Tennessee, is expecting 550 evacuees to arrive today. I hope Knoxville, Iowa, is ready.

Rue McClanahan:

September 4, 2005

Dear President Bush:

Please show the world that America cares about people and their beloved dogs, cats and other animal companions by immediately directing federal authorities involved in evacuations from New Orleans to stop forcing residents to leave their animals behind.

One elderly woman who had stayed in her water-logged home for five days, soley because the only companion she has left in the world, her dog, could not get out, has been ordered out without her dog. Her world is no world at all now. A child was crying so hard his heart seemed about to break, because his dog was turned away from the bus he was boarding. Helicopter and boat crews sent in to the flooded areas are giving ultimatums to residents to choose between vital medicines and their animals. Abandonment is illegal, this is America. We surely have the wherewithal to rescue both and preserve the image of ourselves as a caring nation?

I beg you to pick up the phone and order federal authorities to start evacuating people with their animals. They cannot be left to starve to death in these United States.

Thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Rue McClanahan

HelpingAnimals.com > Features > Help Protect Animals When Natural Disasters Strike > Open Letter to Mr. Bush From Rue McClanahan

It appears that the Dept. of Homeland Security has discontinued posting "preparedness tips of the day" on its website in order to make room for self-congratulatory press releases which list the highlights of FEMA's response. There are Highlights!
Stop focusing on the dead poor people, Media!

Highlights of United States Government Response to the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina


For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 4, 2005
Contact: 202-282-8010

The federal effort to save lives, sustain life, and support recovery and law enforcement operations in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina continues around the clock. The following facts highlight some of the important activities as of 4 p.m.:  

Lives Saved 17,000
Citizens Evacuated 35,000
Shelters 499
People housed in shelters 135,000
National Guard personnel 35,000
U.S. Coast Guard personnel 4,000
FEMA responders 5,000
MREs provided (meals) 4.8 million
Water provided (liters) 11 million

I'd like to add:

Incompetent Bush-Crony Appointees Named "Michael" who should be FIRED: 2



Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff


By the way, the preparedness tips have been ongoing at a special website coordinated by the Red Cross and Dept. of Homeland Security, ironically named www.ready.gov