Here is what our very own Jim McDermott has to say about Bush's presidency
Rep. Jim McDermott: One Nation – Two Countries

And here is what Bush was doing.

Don't fuck up my guitar man

I am so infuriated by the federal government's "response" to this tragedy. And I am absolutely out of my head about the total and utter lack of planning. What the fuck are we thinking not having a tight, detailed, and complete plan in place BEFORE this happened??? It's not as if we just learned four days ago that the Gulf Coast is at risk of major hurricaines, that it holds the poorest of the poor of our nation, or that New Orleans is a sinkable city.

I heard Michael Chertoff, "head" of Homeland Security, on NPR's All Things Considered today, and all he did was give excuse after lie after excuse about why the 2000 people in the New Orleans convention center haven't been served, why there are people in that city and other cities who haven't seen food since the hurricaine, etc. All I have heard from him and other federal officials are excuses and blame-- blame placed on the people they should be helping.

This whole thing is just another nauseating example of the bandaids-only approach our country insists on using in every situation-- national emergencies, education, crime, drugs, healthcare, everything. Right now we're supposed to be happy that tens of thousands of National Guard troops are being sent in to restore order and stop the looters. Fuck that. Fuck that. If there had been bus convoys getting people out of the city BEFORE the hurricaine hit, if the levees had been strengthened to Level 5 years ago when the funds were requested, if an emergency plan had been in place, the Guard wouldn't be trying to restore civility with rifles. They would be passing out food and water and cleaning up the cities.

Thanks for the tips on what to do, Benny G. I wish I'd heard this same thing from the President.

Now, Louisiana and Mississippi have never been the models of progress and oppulence that New York City has been and continues to be, but I am struck by the stark contrast here.

On September 11th, an arguement could be made that no one could have seen that coming on that particular day to New York City. The response to it was amazing, the City did a great job of keeping itself together when everything around it seemed to be falling apart. Help came in immediately from other states as had been negotiated years earlier and the Feds got engaged quickly in appropriate areas. How did this happen so easily? Practice. They practiced responding to events of that nature and when it actually happened, people had some idea of what their role was, who they needed to speak with, and where they needed to go. They didn't practice what they'd do when New Orleans drowned, or when I-10 was ripped in half in Pensacola, or any of the myriad of natural disasters that always seem to catch governments unaware. Why do we treat these differently than terrorist threats or attacks from another country?

Another stark contrast I noticed was the response to the people in the Trade Center, they were heros, they were good Americans, they were deserving of our respect. Well they also had a fairly high collection of people who had money, who had power, and were white. The response to the people of New Orleans? They should have evacutated and they shouldn't have built the city anyway. The people in the Convention Center, for the most part, had nowhere else to go and no means to get there. They appear in the pictures to be predominantly black and from their stories predominantly poor. I would hope that is only a sad conincidence but something tells me that there's a lot more to it than that.

So i might let my parents give me a christmas present. Does that make me a bad person?

Apparently the American people are paying attention.

So I was wrong when I said they didn't practice for this, according to FEMA they had a tabletop excercise about just this scanario two years ago and live practice for this last year. That makes this even more sinful that it took them 5 days to get their act together.

I've been seeing a lot of people who are starting to say, but what about the city, what about the state? Aren't they culpable too? The Mayor and the Governor do bear responsiblity for the conditions in the Superdome, they should have had some sort of command and control in there. Even if the hurricane hadn't caused the levee to break, you can't put 20,000 people in one place where the power will probably go out and they might be stuck for a couple of days with no law enforcement, and apparently no plan to get them food and water. That is inexcusably bad planning by the local authorities.