The Best War Ever

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

The irony of what it means to be human

I love you but I cant give you what you need.
I hate you but I cant leave you.
Hurt me but dont kill me.
Truth is based on the lie of an honest man.
The lie is only more attractive if you wrap it in lies.

To be continued ......

And you know whats so odd, is that I have people telling me all the time is that somehow my life is "lacking in some way." Dont you get it ..... this is what makes me happy? You want vitriol? You want spewed anger? Keep talking ... keep listening .... how can you be a man .... how can you be a human .... how can you be a liberal ..... how can you be anything ..... you dont represent me .... you arent what you say .... you arent truthful .......

One word .....

WHATEVER

DeLay goes down

So yet another Republican has fallen under the wheels of their own bus. Tom DeLay was indicted today for 1 count of conspiracy along with two of his associates John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay's national political committee. Now for those of you who dont know what this means, the charge was based on the idea that $2.5 Million in corporate funding may violate a 1905 law which prohibits corporate money from being used to advocate the election or defeat of candidates; it is allowed only for administrative expenses.

Three people were named in the indictments handed up by a Travis County grand jury Tuesday. A summary of the charges:

--Jim Ellis, who heads U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority, is charged with money laundering, a first-degree felony. If convicted, he could face five to 99 years in prison or life in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

--John Colyandro, who heads Texans for a Republican Majority, is charged with money laundering and 13 counts of accepting unlawful corporate campaign contributions, third-degree felonies punishable by two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

--Warren Robold, a Washington-area Republican consultant, is charged with nine counts of making illegal corporate contributions and nine counts of accepting illegal corporate contributions, both third-degree felonies.

Corporate indictments

Eight corporations are charged with making illegal campaign contributions, a third-degree felony, and face fines of up to $20,000.

--Questerra Corp., a Charlottesville, Va.-based subsidiary of Meadwestvaco Corp., is accused of making two separate $25,000 contributions.

--Westar Energy, a Topeka, Kan.-based electric utility, is accused of making a $25,000 contribution.

--Diversified Collection Services, a San Leandro, Calif.-based debt collector, is accused of making a $50,000 contribution.

--Sears Roebuck & Company, an Illinois-based retailer, is accused of making a $25,000 contribution.

--The Williams Companies, a Tulsa, Okla.-based natural-gas company, is accused of making a $25,000 contribution.

--Bacardi U.S.A., a Miami-based subsidiary of the Bahamas-based liquor producer, is accused of making a $20,000 contribution.

--Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, a Tennessee-based subsidiary of CBRL Group that operates restaurants and stores, is accused of making a $25,000 contribution.

--The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care Corporation, an umbrella for some of the nation's largest nursing-home operators, is accused of making a $100,000 contribution.

Your Tax Dollars Hard At Work

The FBI is joining the Bush administration's War on Porn. And it's looking for a few good agents.

Early last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and, by extension, of "the Director." That would be FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

Mischievous commentary began propagating around the water coolers at 601 Fourth St. NW and its satellites, where the FBI's second-largest field office concentrates on national security, high-technology crimes and public corruption.

The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

Among friends and trusted colleagues, an experienced national security analyst said, "it's a running joke for us."

A few of the printable samples:

"Things I Don't Want On My Resume, Volume Four."

"I already gave at home."

"Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves."

Federal obscenity prosecutions, which have been out of style since Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration made pornography a signature issue in the 1980s, do "encounter many legal issues, including First Amendment claims," the FBI headquarters memo noted.

Applicants for the porn squad should therefore have a stomach for the kind of material that tends to be most offensive to local juries. Community standards -- along with a prurient purpose and absence of artistic merit -- define criminal obscenity under current Supreme Court doctrine.

"Based on a review of past successful cases in a variety of jurisdictions," the memo said, the best odds of conviction come with pornography that "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." No word on the universe of other kinks that helps make porn a multibillion-dollar industry.

Popular acceptance of hard-core pornography has come a long way, with some of its stars becoming mainstream celebrities and their products -- once confined to seedy shops and theaters -- being "purveyed" by upscale hotels and most home cable and satellite television systems. Explicit sexual entertainment is a profit center for companies including General Motors Corp. and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (the two major owners of DirecTV), Time Warner Inc. and the Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt hotel chains.

But Gonzales endorses the rationale of predecessor Meese: that adult pornography is a threat to families and children. Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called "a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general."

Congress began funding the obscenity initiative in fiscal 2005 and specified that the FBI must devote 10 agents to adult pornography. The bureau decided to create a dedicated squad only in the Washington Field Office. "All other field offices may investigate obscenity cases pursuant to this initiative if resources are available," the directive from headquarters said. "Field offices should not, however, divert resources from higher priority matters, such as public corruption."

Public corruption, officially, is fourth on the FBI's priority list, after protecting the United States from terrorist attack, foreign espionage and cyber-based attacks. Just below those priorities are civil rights, organized crime, white-collar crime and "significant violent crime." The guidance from headquarters does not mention where pornography fits in.

"The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's top priority remains fighting the war on terrorism," said Justice Department press secretary Brian Roehrkasse. "However, it is not our sole priority. In fact, Congress has directed the department to focus on other priorities, such as obscenity."

At the FBI's field office, spokeswoman Debra Weierman expressed disappointment that some of her colleagues find grist for humor in the new campaign. "The adult obscenity squad . . . stems from an attorney general mandate, funded by Congress," she said. "The personnel assigned to this initiative take the responsibility of this assignment very seriously and are dedicated to the success of this program."

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Would you trust this man with your kids?




Just some thoughts to share today:

"So please give cash money to organizations that are directly involved in helping save lives — save the life who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina." —George W. Bush, Washington D.C., Sept. 6, 2005

"I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." —George W. Bush, Poplarville, Miss., Sept. 5, 2005

"And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." —George W. Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown who resigned 10 days later amid criticism over his job performance, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005 (Read more stupid quotes about Hurricane Katrina)

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter) --George W. Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

"My thoughts are, we're going to get somebody who knows what they're talking about when it comes to rebuilding cities." —George W. Bush, on rebuilding New Orleans, Biloxi, Miss., Sept. 2, 2005

"Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don't buy gas if you don't need it." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 1, 2005

"It's totally wiped out. ... It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." —George W. Bush, turning to his aides while surveying Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One , Aug. 31, 2005

"The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it." —George W. Bush, on the probe into how CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was leaked, Washington D.C., July 18, 2005

"I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend." —George W. Bush, on visiting Denmark, Washington D.C., June 29, 2005

"I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a 'piece of work'?" —George W. Bush to Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005

"The relations with, uhh — Europe are important relations, and they've, uhh — because, we do share values. And, they're universal values, they're not American values or, you know — European values, they're universal values. And those values — uhh — being universal, ought to be applied everywhere." —George W. Bush, at a press conference with European Union dignitaries, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005

"You see, not only did the attacks help accelerate a recession, the attacks reminded us that we are at war." —George W. Bush, on the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005

"And the second way to defeat the terrorists is to spread freedom. You see, the best way to defeat a society that is — doesn't have hope, a society where people become so angry they're willing to become suiciders, is to spread freedom, is to spread democracy." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005

"It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth." —George W. Bush, on an Amnesty International report on prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2005

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

"We discussed the way forward in Iraq, discussed the importance of a democracy in the greater Middle East in order to leave behind a peaceful tomorrow." —George W. Bush, Tbilisi, Georgia, May 10, 2005

Man I want this job

You can be a total fuckup, resign and STILL get paid:

A congressional panel on Tuesday is expected to scrutinize the decision to keep ousted Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown on the federal payroll.

Brown told congressional investigators Monday that he is being paid as a consultant to help FEMA assess what went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to a senior official familiar with the meeting.

Brown also said he wished he had pushed more forcefully -- and earlier -- for federal troops to be brought in to restore order in New Orleans, the official told CNN.

Brown's comments were made to investigators for Rep. Tom Davis, R-Virginia. Davis leads a House select committee probing the federal, state and local response to Katrina, and Brown is scheduled to appear before the panel Tuesday in a highly anticipated appearance.

Congressional aides told CNN that given all of the questions already raised about Brown's qualifications for the FEMA job, the decision to keep him on the payroll for about a month will be examined at Tuesday's hearing.

Brown resigned September 12 after two weeks of intense criticism of FEMA's response to Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 when it struck near the Louisiana-Mississippi state line August 29.

The storm devastated Mississippi beach towns and left most of New Orleans flooded when the city's protective levees failed at several points.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent agency, said last week that Brown would be paid for about a month for "transitional purposes." The spokesman, Russ Knocke, said he did not know how much Brown was being paid.

Brown's 2004 salary was $145,600, according to the Plum Book, a congressional reference guide to executive branch salaries.

Monday, September 26, 2005

As you may have heard

There was a little peace protest in DC this weekend, with over 100,000 citizens taking to the streets and wanting what we've wanted since day one, bring our troops home now. It still amazes me at this point that you can hear so many people that claim that myself and all of the people that stand at these rallies, that somehow we dont care about our troops, that somehow we dont believe in them or their mission. When their mission is built off of a lie (that is now a documented lie) how can they say that? I guess with the same fortitude that says that "if you dont support our President, how can you support our troops," which seems to be the purveying attitude of people who want to continue to believe that their children and loved ones are in harms way to somehow keep us safe from terrorism. Not to be outdone though, on Sunday, there was a pro-war, pro-Bush rally in DC as well. I think there were 400 people there. Now, lets do the math here, 100,000 on Saturday in DC alone (George Galloway said that there were 100,000 in London that day as well) so lets estimate a Quarter of a million people and thats a conservative number, so 250,000 - 400 = not enough to make me change my mind. I have been part of this for over 3 years now. I was at one of the first Anti-war protests in Dallas with about 100 of my fellow citizens, cried when Bush said that the bombing of Baghdad had started, was overwhemled when he claimed that 10 million people protesting were a "focus group" and here we are still waiting and still protesting. People have often asked me, if I feel that this is the right thing to do, I will look at them and say, how can it not be? Do you not honour the men and women serving in the military? How can I not, I dont want another of them to die in my name over a LIE. I may not be the most virtuous human being on the planet but I will say this, my heart and conscious are never wavering when it comes to support peace. People have accused me of Bush bashing to which I reply, give me a Democrat who lies about his reasons for invading a country, puts troops in harms way, slaughters thousands if not hundreds of thousands of citizens of another country and I will stand up and shout JUST as loud. This is not about what "party" you belong to but about whats right and wrong. Killing in the name of peace is not a place to start from.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

From ABC News

Sep. 23, 2005 - Saudi Arabia's foreign minister says the Bush administration did not heed some Saudi warnings on occupying Iraq and that he doesn't believe a new constitution and elections will solve the emerging nation's problems.

Prince Saud al-Faisal also said his country was still holding out the prospect of a peace treaty with Israel, but could have no diplomatic contact in the meantime, as other Arab and Muslim countries have had. He said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has not acted on opportunities for peacemaking after his withdrawal from Gaza.

"He does something and then immediately goes to the United Nations and makes a speech saying, 'I am not going to do this, I am not going to do that,'" Saud told The Associated Press.

"We are not establishing relations just for the heck of it," he added. "It would be false because we are in a state of conflict."

In a wide-ranging interview Thursday, Saud said he'd like to see oil prices drop about $20 a barrel from their current $60-plus range, but predicted a lack of refineries will keep consumer prices higher even if crude becomes cheaper.

On Iraq, the foreign minister expressed skepticism at Bush administration officials' predictions that the upcoming political events in Iraq would heal the country's divisions.

"Perhaps what they are saying is going to happen," he said. "I wish it would happen, but I don't think that a constitution by itself will resolve the issues, or an election by itself will solve the difficult problems."

U.S. policies in Iraq risk dividing the country into three separate parts: Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite, he cautioned.

"We have not seen a move inside Iraq that would satisfy us that the national unity of Iraq, and therefore the territorial unity of Iraq, will be assured," he said.

He also said the Saudis were skeptical of the outcome before the United States went to war in Iraq, but its concerns weren't always heeded.

"It is frustrating to see something that is clearly going to happen and you are not listened to by a friend and soon harm comes out of it," Saud said. "It hurts."

The foreign minister said his kingdom was not ready to send an ambassador to Baghdad because the diplomat would become an immediate target for assassination.

"I doubt that he'd last a day," Saud said.

At the United Nations, Iraq's foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said in an interview that neighboring Syria is largely to blame for the continuing violence in his country.

Syria, he asserted, is refusing to stop insurgents and foreign fighters from entering Iraq because it fears Iraq's effort to build a democratic nation in the heart of the Middle East and wants to see it fail.

"They and others are frightened really of this experiment to succeed. This is the bottom line. They don't want these values, these ideas to take root in a country like Iraq. This may affect them," Zebari said.

Saud, in the interview with the AP, also made clear that the kingdom's offer to Israel of peace with all Arab countries if it relinquished all the land the Arabs lost in the 1967 war remains on the table.

By withdrawing Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza, Saud said, Sharon seemed willing to turn from being "a general who wants to conquer territory" to making peace.

Instead, Saud said, Sharon is making demands of the Palestinian Authority that he knows cannot be met.

"The Palestinian Authority has been decimated by Mr. Sharon himself; they are weak because of what he did to them, and now he is insisting they disarm Hamas and (Islamic) Jihad," Saud said.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas does not have the troops to do it, Saud said.

Ministers from nearly a dozen Arab and Muslim countries, including Qatar, Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia, have met with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. Saud said his government would not follow their lead.

"We have not signed a peace treaty. How can you establish relations? How is that conceivable? How can it be trusted?" he said.

With oil prices rising amid disruption of Gulf Coast crude oil production and refining due to the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Saud rejected suggestions of an oil shortage and said prices should drop to $40 to $45 a barrel from over $65.

"The oil industry does not suffer from a lack of oil," Saud said.

He cited a lack of refineries in the United States and elsewhere and said Saudi Arabia had sought to help build a U.S. refinery, but had no takers.

"We are adding barrels of oil on the market," Saud said. "The price of oil will go down." He predicted prices would decline significantly by next summer.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Pardon me ... is this your geek?

Most office workers find computer jargon as difficult to understand as a foreign language, a survey suggests.

Three quarters of workers waste more than an hour a week deciphering what a technical term means, the poll found.

Terms such as jpeg, javascript and cookies are among the problem words highlighted by firm Computer People.

The recruiter, which questioned 1,500 workers, says effective technology professionals "understand the need to tailor their levels of jargon".

The findings revealed that younger workers were just as likely to make a mistake over computer language.

It also points to problems which regularly leave workers baffled.

Just under two thirds had sent e-mails with large attachments which had blocked clients' systems.


JARGON PROBLEMS
An over-reliance on IT staff was admitted by 67% of office workers
Logging off instead of re-starting is a mistake made by 14% those surveyed
Some 44% of office workers feel it is their duty to improve their IT knowledge

More than one in four people are not sure what a firewall does, tempting them to turn it off.

Turning off firewall - software to protect computers against hackers - is the worst course of action to take, according to IT experts.

And a quarter of those surveyed had to ask for technical help to download information.

Mr Fletcher, managing director of Computer People, said: "We're finding that many clients are increasingly requiring professionals who have concise communication expertise as they recognise this improves company productivity in the long run."


(from the BBC web site)My comment is this is from the DUH no shit file.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Corporate Speak

So I was sitting at lunch today and was listening to all of the collective sounds around me. I kept hearing certain phrases over and over, things like "grow our business" and "working with our channels" and my personal favorite "he was seperated from his job," and I got to thinking, I think I may want to write the first "corporatespeak" dictionary.

Here is something to look at in the meantime

Bullshit

Well hell, someone beat me to it

This says it all

Micheal Brown bought votes in FLA

Michael Brown, the embattled head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, approved payments in excess of $31 million in taxpayer money to thousands of Florida residents who were unaffected by Hurricane Frances and three other hurricanes last year in an effort to help President Bush win a majority of votes in that state during his reelection campaign, according to published reports.

"Some Homeland Security sources said FEMA's efforts to distribute funds quickly after Frances and three other hurricanes that hit the key political battleground state of Florida in a six-week period last fall were undertaken with a keen awareness of the looming presidential elections,” according to a May 19 Washington Post story.

Homeland Security sources told the Post that after the hurricanes that Brown "and his allies [recommended] him to succeed Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of their claim that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes.”

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel uncovered emails from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that confirmed those allegations and directly implicated Brown as playing politics at the expense of hurricane victims.

"As the second hurricane in less than a month bore down on Florida last fall, a federal [FEMA] consultant predicted a "huge mess" that could reflect poorly on President Bush and suggested that his re-election staff be brought in to minimize any political liability, records show,” the Sentinel reported in a March 23 story.

"Two weeks later, a Florida official summarizing the hurricane response wrote that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handing out housing assistance "to everyone who needs it without asking for much information of any kind."

The records the Sentinel obtained were contained in hundreds of pages of Gov. Jeb Bush's storm-related e-mails the paper received from the governor's office under the threat of a lawsuit.

The explosive charges of mismanagement of disaster relief funds made against Brown and FEMA were confirmed earlier this year following a four-month investigation by Richard Skinner, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. Skinner looked into media reports alleging that residents of Miami-Dade were receiving windfall payments from FEMA to cover losses from Hurricane Frances they never incurred.

Hurricane Frances hit Hutchinson Island, FL, about 100 miles north of Dade County, on Sept. 5. Miami-Dade officials described damage there from heavy rain and winds of up to 45 mph as "minimal," according to the Post.

Indeed. A May 14 story in the Sun-Sentinel said: "Miami-Dade County residents collected Hurricane Frances aid for belongings they didn't own, temporary housing they never requested and cars worth far less than the government paid, according to a federal audit that questions millions in storm payouts.

Responding to those allegations, Brown held a news conference Jan. 11 blaming the overpayments on a "computer glitch” and said the disbursements were far less than the $31 million that was cited in news reports and involved 3,500 people. Moreover, to silence his critics who said that Hurricane Frances barely touched down in Miami-Dade, Brown cited a report by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to prove that there were legitimate hurricane conditions there and as a result that a bulk of the payments was legitimate.

But according to the Sun-Sentinel, NOAA had refuted the weather maps Brown claimed to have obtained from them. That report prompted Congressman Robert Wexler to send off a scathing letter to President Bush calling for Brown's resignation.

Bush rebuffed Wexler. However, the DHS' inspector general launched a probe to determine how widespread the problems were involving overpayments to Miami-Dade residents. In May, the inspector general released his report. What he found was damning.

"The review found waste and poor controls in every level of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's assistance program and challenges the designation of Miami-Dade as a disaster area when the county "did not incur any hurricane force winds, tornados or other adverse weather conditions that would cause widespread damage."

In identifying one of the overpayments, the inspector general's report said FEMA paid $10 million to replace hundreds of household items even though only a bed was reported to be damaged, the inspector general's report said.

"Millions of individuals and households became eligible to apply for [money], straining FEMA's limited inspection resources to verify damages and making the program more susceptible to potential fraud, waste and abuse," the report states.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, said during a committee hearing in May that Brown "approved massive payouts to replace thousands of televisions, air conditioners, beds and other furniture, as well as a number of cars, without receipts, or proof of ownership or damage, and based solely on verbal statements by the residents, sometimes made in fleeting encounters at fast-food restaurants.”

"It was a pay first, ask questions later approach," Collins said. "The inspector general's report identifies a number of significant control weaknesses that create a potential for widespread fraud, erroneous payments and wasteful practices."

But the most interesting charge against Brown is that he helped speed up payments in Florida and purposely bypassed FEMA's lengthy reviews process for distributing funds in order to help Bush secure votes in the state during last year's presidential election.

Bob Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, who was a top federal flood insurance official in the 1970s and 1980s and a Texas insurance commissioner in the 1990s, told the Post "that in the vast majority of hurricanes, other than those in Florida in 2004, complaints are rife that FEMA has vastly underpaid hurricane victims. The Frances overpayments are questionable given the timing of the election and Florida's importance as a battleground state.”

FEMA consultant Glenn Garcelon actions certainly lends credibility to questions raised by Hunter.

On Sept. 2, 2004, Garcelon, wrote a three-page memo titled "Hurricane Frances - Thoughts and Suggestions."

"The Republican National Convention was winding down, and President Bush had only a slight lead in the polls against Democrat John Kerry,” the Sentinel reported in its March 23 story. "Winning Florida was key to the president's re-election. FEMA should pay careful attention to how it is portrayed by the public, Garcelon wrote in the memo, conveying "the team effort theme at every opportunity" alongside state and local officials, the insurance and construction industries, and relief agencies such as the Red Cross.”

Gov. Bush received the memo Sept. 30, 2004 shortly before a swell of payments made its way to residents in Miami-Dade who did not sustain damage as a result of Hurricane Frances.

A couple of weeks before Gov. Bush received the memo from Garcelon, Orlando J. Cabrera, executive director of the Florida Housing Finance Corp. and a member of the governor's Hurricane Housing Work Group, said in a different memo to Gov. Bush that FEMA was allocating short-term rental assistance to "everyone who needs it, without asking for much information of any kind," the Sentinel reported.

In addition, "standard housing assistance," of up to $25,600, Cabrera wrote, is "liberally provided without significant scrutiny of the request made during the initial months; scrutiny increases remarkably and the package is far more stringent after an unspecified time."

The DHS audit report found that, under Brown, FEMA erroneously distributed to Miami-Dade residents:

* $8.2 million in rental assistance to 4,308 applicants in the county who "did not indicate a need for shelter" when they registered for help. In 60 cases reviewed by auditors, inspectors deemed homes unsafe without explanation, and applicants never moved out.

* $720,403 to 228 people for belongings based on their word alone.

* $192,592 for generators, air purifiers, wet/dry vacuum cleaners, chainsaws and other items without proof that they were needed to deal with the hurricane. Three applicants got generators for their homes, plus rental assistance from FEMA to live somewhere else.

* $15,743 for three funerals without sufficient documentation that the deaths were due to the hurricane.

* $46,464 to 64 residents for temporary housing even though they had homeowners insurance. FEMA funds cannot be used when costs are covered by insurance.

* $17,424 in rental assistance to 24 people who reported that their homes were not damaged.

* $97,500 for 15 automobiles with a "blue book" value of $56,140. In general, the report states that FEMA approved claims for damaged vehicles without properly verifying that the losses were caused by the storm.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Wal Mart are at it again

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Lawyers representing about 116,000 former and current Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) employees in California told a jury Monday that the world's largest retailer systematically and illegally denied workers lunch breaks.

The suit in Alameda County Superior Court is among about 40 cases nationwide alleging workplace violations against Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. Wal-Mart, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million that contains similar allegations to California's class action. The company also is accused of paying men more than women in a federal lawsuit pending in San Francisco federal court.

The workers in the class-action suit are owed more than $66 million plus interest, attorney Fred Furth told the 12 jurors and four alternates.

"I will prove the reason they did this was for the God Almighty dollar," Furth said in his opening statement.

Nine jurors must side with the plaintiffs to prevail. Millions of dollars also are sought to punish the company for the alleged wrongdoing.

The case concerns a 2001 state law, which is among the nation's most worker friendly. Employees who work at least six hours must have a 30-minute, unpaid lunch break. If they do not get that, the law requires they are paid for an additional hour of pay.

The lawsuit covers former and current employees in California from 2001 to 2005.

Wal-Mart declined to give an opening statement, reserving its right to give one later. Its lawyers also declined comment.

In court documents, the Bentonville, Ark., company claims that workers did not demand penalty wages on a timely basis. Wal-Mart adds that it did pay some employees their penalty pay and, in 2003, most workers agreed to waive their meal periods as the law allows.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based company also says some violations were minor, such as demanding employees punch back in from lunch and work during their meal breaks. In essence, workers were provided a shorter meal period than the law allows.

The case does not claim that employees were forced to work off the clock during their lunch breaks.

The lawsuit was brought in 2001 by a handful of San Francisco-area former Wal-Mart employees, and took four years of legal wrangling to get to trial. During that time, Wal-Mart produced internal audits that plaintiffs' lawyers maintain showed the company knew it was not granting meal breaks on thousands of occasions.

That 2000 audit was given to top-level executives, according to evidence submitted to jurors Monday.

One company document called results of the audit "a chronic problem." A one-week review of company policies showed thousands of instances in which workers were not given a meal break in accordance with the law, according to the documents provided to the jury.

"This is Wal-Mart auditing Wal-Mart," Furth said.

On Tuesday, as many as three plaintiffs are expected to testify in a trial that will last weeks.

Several lawyers representing out-of-state Wal-Mart workers in class action lawsuits were in the gallery. Karin Kramer, a lawyer suing Wal-Mart on behalf of 50,000 Washington state company workers, said suing Wal-Mart is a gargantuan task.

"They can afford and do fight you on every single issue," she said.

Shares of Wal-Mart rose 14 cents to close at $44.01 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Toxic Stew anyone?

They swam, they dogpaddled, they floated, they waded.

Up to the knees, the waist, the chest and above the head.

In abyssal New Orleans, there was no escape from water. It deluged homes, lapped at rooftops, turned streets into channels, fire escapes into cataracts and entire neighbourhoods into lagoons.

It engulfed and drowned.

It seeped into one's pores, sloshed over the top of hip-waders, splashed into every body cavity, penetrated surface skin cuts and abrasions, introducing an unspeakable scramble of bacterial contaminants into the system.

Neither newspaper reports nor TV footage can accurately capture the ugliness of that water: brown, brackish, greasy, infused with feces and sewage, the carcasses of dead animals and bloated human remains. Reeking so strongly of oil, chemicals and rotting garbage that it stung the eyes, made the throat contract and gag.

The salt of Lake Pontchartrain — actually an inlet bay connected to the Gulf of Mexico — mixing with the salt of tears.

Every night during the time I spent in New Orleans, before relief convoys arrived, I used a facecloth and precious bottle of spring water (looted) to scrub my feet, applying antibiotic ointment (looted) on the scrapes and rashes and weird boils that resulted from wading shoeless in the bilge. Shoeless because both sandals and sneakers had quickly shredded with immersion.

This — the stuff that eats leather and canvas — is what people were living in, struggling through, in search of food and potable water, those who either stayed by stubborn choice or lacked the wherewithal to leave when levees were breached; Lake Pontchartrain surging over the pitifully feeble buffer, natural barriers and sponging wetlands destroyed long ago by coastal development and sluicing designed to protect ships.

Even now, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck and with 22 repaired pumping stations suctioning millions of gallons a day out of the city — 40 per cent of which remains submerged — the dangers contained in that water have not subsided. And the sediment, the sludge, the "bacterial soup" left behind in a metropolis rendered a massive, pestilent, disease-breeding swamp, might actually be even more toxic than the receding floodwaters that are dropping by about 30 centimetres a day.

The relatively rapid dehydrating of New Orleans is in itself remarkable, given that there is no natural egress for water. Every drop of rain that falls on the city either evaporates or must be pumped out.

New Orleans is methodically wringing itself dry and should emerge completely from its subaqueous state within a fortnight.

But the health effects of an ocean of dirty water are only beginning to be fathomed. Some symptoms arising from contamination — even simple contact with poisonous water, not the drinking of it, which killed countless abandoned dogs — can take two weeks to appear.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — a department that, under the Bush administration, is dimly viewed by many environmentalists — has been taking daily water samples at sites in and around New Orleans, testing for biological pathogens and more than 100 chemical pollutants, including pesticides, industrial chemicals and metals.

Sewage-related bacteria and lead from "unknown sources" are just two of the contaminants found to be at wildly elevated levels thus far. The cistern that New Orleans has become is rife with Staphylococcus aureas (staph) and E. coli, though not, as far as can be determined to this point, the more lethal E. coli strain (O517, enterohemorrhagic) that "contributed" to the deaths of six people in Walkerton, when that Ontario town's water supply became contaminated five years ago.

The Star brought back five water samples from New Orleans — scooped up at city hall, the Iberville projects and points along Canal St. — for testing at a Toronto lab.

The results found E. coli levels between 5,600 and 42,000 per 100 ml of water and staph levels ranging from 9,800 to 32,000 per 100 ml of water.

These findings are consistent with results released by the EPA, which reports that E. coli levels remain "much higher" than its own recommended levels "for direct contact."

To put the results in more significant context, it should be noted that Toronto's board of health posts no-swimming advisories for the city's public beaches when E. coli levels reach 100 per 100 ml because of the health risk.

To repeat, in New Orleans — as determined by the Toronto lab analysis — those levels are far above 40,000.

Even using the EPA's own guidelines, the floodwaters in New Orleans contain E. coli and other coliform bacteria up to 109 times its safe swimming limit.

Most vulnerable are children because their immune systems are still developing. This would suggest dangers far more pronounced than the EPA has been indicating.

Yet the agency maintains that the amounts of chemicals and bacteria found in the water would pose a substantial risk to children only if they were to drink a litre of floodwater every day.

There is no keen sense of urgency in the reports the EPA is posting almost daily on its website. In fact, its assessments seemed designed to assure rather than alarm, although the agency admits it hasn't tested for — and has no immediate intention to test for —the most lethal pathogens, such as vibrio cholera, Shigella, E. coli 0157 or Salmonella, because "it would not be useful at this time."

Explaining this decision, the EPA argues that these pathogens would be difficult to grow in the laboratory, "especially in highly contaminated water surfaces"; that one pathogen "will not predict" the risk from other pathogens; that finding pathogens in standing water will not affect how "imminent risk" is presented to the public or "how decisions are made"; and that wastewater from a large population "is expected to contain enteric pathogens, therefore, identifying the presence of fecally contaminated water will give a broader risk perspective than detecting specific pathogens."

The impenetrable language is as murky as the water in a city where nothing clean is yet coming out of the taps. What it boils down to — and boiling does not remove chemical pollutants from water, by the way — is, I think, that the potential findings of tests for the really bad pathogens might present a skewed picture of the real dangers and cause unnecessary panic.

In sum, the water must not be ingested — and who would, save for the sorry animals? Nor should it be used for bathing because that could bring on abdominal cramps, fever, vomiting and diarrhea. Contact with an open wound or abrasion can cause fever, redness and swelling.

"See a doctor right away if possible," the advisory suggests.

Oh, that's useful.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also on the ground, and has for the past three weeks been administering tetanus shots. (The EPA contends that mass inoculation is not required, although its own staffers are injected for tetanus and the like before hitting the ground.)

Infectious disease experts warn of health outcomes that routinely arise from any hurricane: hepatitis A, diarrhea and intestinal problems caused by drinking polluted water or eating spoiled food, and infections from open cuts.

The morass of New Orleans and environs also presents an ideal breeding ground for dysentery and such mosquito-borne diseases as West Nile fever, which is why military aircraft were spraying the city for mosquitoes last week — another laggard response to the catastrophe.

Further, humans need to worry about bites from rats and venomous snakes indigenous to the area, such as water moccasins and cottonmouths, which might easily be swimming in the wards adjacent to more rural areas.

What's known is that five people have died from post-Katrina contact with bacteria-infested seawater — specifically Vibrio vulnificus, which can be lethal to those already suffering from immune deficiencies, including AIDS patients and those on dialysis. Oddly, none of those casualties were in Louisiana. Four deaths occurred in Mississippi and one individual died after being evacuated to Texas.

Another major concern, as the water drains, is the contamination that can arise from mould.

There are still gas leaks that crews haven't been able to cap because the sources are underwater. Officials are warning of gas explosions and carbon monoxide poisoning from improper use of generators.

Decaying hazardous chemicals can also be tossed into the malevolent mix of emerging dangers.

There are at least five oil spills in the New Orleans area and 121 sites with known chemical contamination. At minimum, three of the city's poisonous "Superfund sites" — meaning they made the list of the nation's worst toxic sites — were flooded, including a landfill where residents dumped garbage for decades. That one remains underwater and inaccessible.

Hazardous waste railcars — like the freight train that derailed and forced an evacuation of Mississauga in 1979 — still lie submerged.

Sediment samples — contaminants from the polluted water settling into the soil — have been difficult to analyze because they're so laden with petroleum products.

"We are still in the early days of going around and visually inspecting," EPA administrator Stephen Johnson told reporters a few days ago. "We will then begin to do a more detailed analysis."

The water — and the muck it's leaving behind — contains lead from paint and batteries; officials aren't even certain of the oozing sources. High levels of hexavalent chromium, which is used in industrial plating, and arsenic, used in treating wood, have also been found, the EPA reports.

Five thousand of what those in the business call "orphan containers" — barrels of medical waste, gas cylinders, petroleum byproducts intended for safe elimination — have been recovered so far, Johnson said on Wednesday.

Human waste, animal waste, factory waste: all of it stirred into a noxious cocktail.

Two decades ago, New Orleans — a city awash in booze and most famous for its Hurricane rum concoction — took first place in the annual Drinking Water Test Challenge held by the American Water Works Association.

Now, you can't even wash away the dirt with it.

Friday, September 16, 2005

I promise .... this is my last post today

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."


E-mail sent to various U.S. Attorney's offices:

SUBJECT: Have you had any cases involving the levees in New Orleans?

QUESTION: Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps' work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.

District: __________
Contact: _________
Telephone: ________

Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said Thursday she couldn't comment "because it's an internal e-mail."

Shown a copy of the e-mail, David Bookbinder, senior attorney for Sierra Club, remarked, "Why are they (Bush administration officials) trying to smear us like this?"

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups had nothing to do with the flooding that resulted from Hurricane Katrina that killed hundreds, he said. "It's unfortunate that the Bush administration is trying to shift the blame to environmental groups. It doesn't surprise me at all."

Federal officials say the e-mail was prompted by a congressional inquiry but wouldn't comment further.

Whoever is behind the e-mail may have spotted the Sept. 8 issue of National Review Online that chastised the Sierra Club and other environmental groups for suing to halt the corps' 1996 plan to raise and fortify 303 miles of Mississippi River levees in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The corps settled the litigation in 1997, agreeing to hold off on some work until an environmental impact could be completed. The National Review article concluded: "Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain."

The problem with that conclusion?

The levees that broke causing New Orleans to flood weren't Mississippi River levees. They were levees that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain levees on the other side of the city.

When Katrina struck, the hurricane pushed tons of water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city to the north. Corps officials say the water from the lake cleared the levees by 3 feet. It was those floodwaters, they say, that caused the levees to degrade until they ruptured, causing 80 percent of New Orleans to flood.

Bookbinder said the purpose of the litigation by the Sierra Club and others in 1996 was where the corps got the dirt for the project. "We had no objections to levees," he said. "We said, 'Just don't dig film materials out of the wetlands. Get the dirt from somewhere else.' "

If you listen to what some conservatives say about environmentalists, he said, "We're responsible for most of the world's ills."

In 1977, the corps wanted to build a 25-mile-long barrier and gate system to protect New Orleans on the east side. Both environmental groups and fishermen opposed the project, saying it would choke off water into Lake Pontchartrain.

After litigation, corps officials abandoned the idea, deciding instead to build higher levees. "They came up with a cheaper alternative," Bookbinder said. "We didn't object to raising the levees."

John Hall, a spokesman for the corps in New Orleans, said the barrier the corps was proposing in the 1970s would only stand up to a weak Category 3 hurricane, not a Category 4 hurricane like Katrina. "How much that would have prevented anything, I'm not sure," he said.

Since 1999, corps officials have studied the concept of building huge floodgates to prevent flooding in New Orleans from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.

Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2001 listed a hurricane striking New Orleans as one of the top three catastrophic events the nation could face (the others being a terrorist attack on New York City and an earthquake in San Francisco), funding for corps projects aimed at curbing flooding in southeast Louisiana lagged.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has said the White House cut $400 million from corps' requests for flood control money in the area.

In fiscal 2006, the corps had hoped to receive up to $10 million in funding for a six-year feasibility study on such floodgates. According to a recent estimate, the project would take 10 years to build and cost $2.5 billion.

"Our understanding is the locals would like to go to that," Hall said. "If I were local, I'd want it."




****So who will accuse me today of being a Bush hater .... I wonder?

Think that DIebold is hack proof?

EXCLUSIVE! * A DIEBOLD INSIDER SPEAKS!
DIEB-THROAT : 'Diebold System One of Greatest Threats Democracy Has Ever Known'
Identifies U.S. Homeland Security 'Cyber Alert' Prior to '04 Election Warning Votes Can be 'Modified Remotely' via 'Undocumented Backdoor' in Central Tabulator Software!


In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.

Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it.

"Diebold threatened violators with immediate dismissal," the insider, who we'll call DIEB-THROAT, explained recently to The BRAD BLOG via email. "In 2005, after one newly hired member of Diebold's technical staff pointed out the security flaw, he was criticized and isolated."

In phone interviews, DIEB-THROAT confirmed that the matters were well known within the company, but that a "culture of fear" had been developed to assure that employees, including technicians, vendors and programmers kept those issues to themselves.

The "Cyber Security Alert" from US-CERT was issued in late August of 2004 and is still available online via the US-CERT website. The alert warns that "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could [sic: allow] a local or remote authenticated malicious user [sic: to] modify votes."

The alert, assessed to be of "MEDIUM" risk on the US-CERT security bulletin, goes on to add that there is "No workaround or patch available at time of publishing."



"Diebold's upper management was aware of access to the voter file defect before the 2004 election - but did nothing to correct it," the source explained.



A "MEDIUM" risk vulnerability cyber alert is described on the US-CERT site as: "one that will allow an intruder immediate access to a system with less than privileged access. Such vulnerability will allow the intruder the opportunity to continue the attempt to gain privileged access. An example of medium-risk vulnerability is a server configuration error that allows an intruder to capture the password file."

DIEB-THROAT claims that, though the Federal Government knew about this documented flaw, originally discovered and reported by BlackBoxVoting.org in August of 2004, they did nothing about it.

"I believe that top Government officials had an understanding with top Diebold officials to look the other way," the source explained, "because Diebold was their ace in the hole."

But even DIEB-THROAT -- who says "we were brainwashed" by the company to believe such concerns about security were nonsense -- was surprised to learn that an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was well aware of this flaw, and concerned enough about it to issue a public alert prior to the election last year.

"I was aware of the Diebold security flaw and had heard about the Homeland Security Cyber Alert Threat Assessment website, so I went there and 'bingo,' there it was in black and white," the source wrote. "It blew me away because it showed that DHS, headed by a Cabinet level George Bush loyalist, was very aware of the 'threat' of someone changing votes in the Diebold Central Tabulator. The question is, why wasn't something done about it before the election?"

The CEO of North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, Inc., Walden O'Dell has been oft-quoted for his 2003 Republican fund-raiser promise to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." O'Dell himself was a high-level contributor to the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign as well as many other Republican causes.

"A very serious problem...one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election"

The voting company insider, who has also served as a spokesperson for the company in various capacities over recent years, admits that the "real danger" of this security vulnerability could have easily been exploited by a malicious user or an insider through remote access.

"I have seen these systems connected to phone lines dozens of times with users gaining remote access," said DIEB-THROAT. "What I think we have here is a very serious problem. Remote access using phone lines eliminates any need for a conspiracy of hundreds to alter the outcome of an election. Diebold has held onto this theory [publicly] for years, but Diebold has lied and has put national elections at risk. Remote access using this backdoor means that one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election."

The ability to connect to the system remotely by phone lines and the apparent lack of interest by Diebold to correct the serious security issue in a timely manner -- or at all -- would seem to be at odds with at least one of their Press Releases touting their voting hardware and software.

In an October 31, 2003 Press Release as part of a publicity blitz to "sell" the new voting machines to the voters in the state of Maryland, Diebold Election Systems President Thomas W. Swidarski is quoted as follows in a section titled "Security Is Key":



Diebold has fine-tuned its computerized system so that it meets stringent security requirements. “We have independent verification that the Diebold voting system provides an unprecedented level of election security. This is crucial to maintaining the integrity of the entire voting process,” Swidarski added.


Attempts by The BRAD BLOG to get comment from Swidarski were passed to one of the Vice-Presidents at Diebold who has not returned our voice mail message.

We did, however, hear back from Diebold Spokesperson David Bear of the PR firm Public Strategies. He was referred to us by several different Diebold offices as "the man to discuss voting machine issues with."

Bear claimed to have never heard of the Cyber Alert issued by US-CERT and when told of it, refused to acknowledge it as anything more than "an unverified allegation."

"One of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known"

Our source expressed emphatically that future democratic elections in the United States are at stake and feels that the problem will not be corrected until Congressional action forces the company to do so.

"In my opinion Diebold's election system is one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known, and the only way this will be exposed is with a Congressional investigation with subpoenas of not just Diebold officials but Diebold technicians."

If our experience in discussing the matter with Bear, the man Diebold referred us to for all matters concerning voting machines, is any indication, then DIEB-THROAT may be correct. Even a Cyber Alert Bulletin issued by an official arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security more than a year ago was not enough to phase Diebold. At least not enough to even inform their public spokesperson about the matter, apparently.

"I don't know anything about it," Bear claimed when we asked about the Cyber Alert, and he refused to acknowledge there were anysecurity concerns about Diebold's Voting Machines or its GEMS Central Tabulator software.

Over and over, by rote, he repeated in response to our questions: "The GEMS software has been used in hundreds of elections and there's never been a security issue."

Bear says that "Diebold machines have never lost a single vote," but beyond that could not speak to the vulnerability issue since, he said, "I don't know what vulnerability they're referencing."

We sent the link to the US-CERT Cyber Alert to Bear, but have not yet heard back from about it. He did, however, send us a copy of the well-worn Caltech/Massachusetts Institute of Technology report [PDF] analyzing the 2004 Presidential Election which, Bear pointed out in his Email, "concludes that the most improvement [in vote-counting and integrity over 2000] occurred when counties/states changed to touch screen systems."

DIEB-THROAT was taken aback, but not wholly surprised, when we shared the comments from Bear denying knowledge of the "backdoor" security vulnerability in the GEMS software and his contention that there was nothing more than "allegations."

The vulnerability, and the ability to "manipulate votes" occurs because the GEMS software uses the public Microsoft Access database software to store vote totals in a separate data file. And, as DIEB-THROAT explained, Access is "full of holes. There are so many ways to get into it."

Because GEMS uses the Access database, "you can enter and manipulate the file without even entering into GEMS," our source said in response ot Bear's denials.

"GEMS sits on top of this database and it pretty much feeds information down to the database from GEMS. It's almost like you're on the first floor of your house and all of your operating equipment is in the basement so that anything that happens on the first floor ends up downstairs. Well, downstairs has a wide open door to it. So we're dumping all the votes downstairs and that's wide open to the rest of the computer system."

"A culture of fear"

In trying to understand why the U.S. Homeland Security Department's Cyber Alert didn't force Diebold to make fixes, patches or corrections quickly available for their software prior to -- or even since -- the '04 election, DIEB-THROAT repeated over and over that Diebold was simply "not concerned about security".

"They don't have security solutions. They don't want them...They leave security policy issues up to the states. They've known about this for some time. They don't really care," the source said, comparing the security flaw to "leaving the front door at Fort Knox open." It's just "blatant sloppiness and they don't care."

The versions of the GEMS Central Tabulation software listed on the US-CERT site are 1.17.7 and 1.18 and DIEB-THROAT says the same versions of the same software are still in use by States around the country and haven't had any fixes or patches applied to correct the problem.

Diebold spokesman, Bear, was unable to confirm whether or not Diebold had updated its GEMS software in any way since the US-CERT Cyber Alert was released telling us only that "There's different versions of the software for different needs" and that he didn't know if patches, fixes or corrections were ever released by the company.

"There's always an evolution," Bear said. "Before any software can be used it's federally qualified and then certified by the states...Where different versions are running, I just don't know."

"They're still at that same version number," DIEB-THROAT said. "A lot of our customers still have it and there's not been any patch....They really don't care about this sort of thing. They really don't. People may find it hard to believe...in other words [the company says] 'we'll give you a machine to vote on and the rest is up to you."

"This is a very profit motivated company," the source continued, "they don't care what happens after the sale. Once they have the contract they've got the customer tied up pretty good."

Initially DIEB-THROAT claims to have been "brainwashed" by the pervasive "company line" at Diebold, that all of the talk about security concerns and the possibility that someone could hack the vote was the talk of "conspiracy theorists". Apparently that was -- and is still is -- "the company line." But after one of Diebold's head technicians who works out of their McKinney, Texas facility confirmed the gaping security hole in the software to our source, it was understood that these concerns were for real.

"Up until his confirmation, I had heard it through the grapevine, as rumors and such, but he confirmed it for me. The lead technician who worked on the software, who has a Phd in mathematics and so forth, was saying that 'this problem exists!'"

So why hasn't that technician, or anyone else from within the company spoken out until now?

"This is a culture of fear. Really. Only because we were good friends did [the head technician] confide in me that these were problems that needed to be fixed," DIEB-THROAT said.

"They all knew..."

In regards to possible remote access to the GEMS Central Tabulator by modem via phone lines, a way that hackers could easily and simply change the vote total information in the Access database, Diebold's official spokesman seemed to be similarly in denial even today.

When we asked Bear whether or not the Central Tabulator is still accessible via modem in their machines, he first denied that it's even possible, telling us "the Central Tabulator isn't accessable via modem."

When we pressed about whether or not there are still modem capabilities in the machines and software they sell, Bear admitted, "There is a modem capability, but it's up to a jurisdiction whether they wish to use it or not...I don't know of any jurisdiction that does that."

"Oh, boy. Such lies," DIEB-THROAT said in response. "There are several jurisdications that use [the modem capabilities] in the machines...Probably one of the most robust users of modems is Prince Georges County in Maryland. They've used it in every election. I believe they started in 2000. And Baltimore County used them in the November election in 2004. Fulton County and Dekalb County in Georgia may have used them in 2004 as well."

While we were unable to hear back in response to messages left with Election Officials at several of those offices prior to the publication of this article, a review of "Lessons Learned" after the November 2004 Election conducted by the Maryland state Board of Elections obtained by The BRAD BLOG, confirms that modems were used to access the GEMS Central Tabulator to send in information from precincts on Election Night.

We are still reviewing the complete document, but amongst the findings in the report is that "the GEMS system froze several times during heavy modem transmitting periods requiring the system to be rebooted, which generated delays and prohibited BOE from receiving polling places' transmissions."

As well, the report concludes, "Modem lines testing in polling place still problematic; need better coordination with school system."

It also says that "7% of voting units deployed failed on Election Day" and that an additional 5% "were suspect based on the number of votes captured." The BRAD BLOG hopes to have a follow-up article in the coming days which looks in more detail at the full Maryland state Board of Elections report and the alarming rate of failure for Diebold Touch-Screen voting machines.



When we asked our source if they had any evidence to show that the security flaw described by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security was actually exploited in the 2004 election, DIEB-THROAT told us only: "I wouldn't say I have evidence that it was exploited....only that it was known. To the feds, to state officials and to Diebold. They all knew. In spite of the gap they moved forward as normal...As if it didn't exist."

Hey Ho Its F**king Friday

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast roped-off regions here. If we did not have the services of an off-duty law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on the air. As we are about to do.

From Brian Williams on MSNBCs web site.

If you feel sick .... there may be a reason why

The FBI and New Jersey officials have started a hushed but intensive search for three missing lab mice reportedly infected with deadly strains of plague.

The mice were discovered missing from separate cages at a bioterrorism research facility in Newark more than two weeks ago, but the incident was only confirmed Wednesday by the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger.

The research lab, located at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is operated by the Public Health Research Institute, a center for infectious disease research.

The mice reportedly were infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis that causes bubonic and other forms of plague.

Scientists, however, said with modern antibiotics, plague can be treated if quickly diagnosed and is not the scourge that wiped out a third of Europe during the 14th century.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and a critic of the government's rapid expansion of bio-terrorism labs, said federal guidelines call for only minimal security at such laboratories -- a lock on the lab door and a lock on the sample container and cage.

"You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities," Ebright told the newspaper.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

To put THIS to rest

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report Tuesday afternoon asserting that Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government, RAW STORY has learned.

The report, which comes after a request by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, unequivocally concludes that she did.

"This report closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability," Conyers said in a statement. "The Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time."
Advertisement

The report found that:

* All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, "[t]he declaration of an emergency by the Presidet makes Federal emergency assistance available," and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that several additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;
* The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that "[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state";
* The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that "Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005...that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]" and "Governor Blanco's August 27,2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination...that 'the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster."

The full report will be available soon on the House Democrats' Judiciary website

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

From the Washington Post

Amid a slew of stories this weekend about the embattled presidency and the blundering government response to the drowning of New Orleans, some journalists who are long-time observers of the White House are suddenly sharing scathing observations about President Bush that may be new to many of their readers.

Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?

Maybe not so much.

Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.

Maybe it's Bush's sinking poll numbers -- he is, after all, undeniably an unpopular president now. Maybe it's the way that the federal response to the flood has cut so deeply against Bush's most compelling claim to greatness: His resoluteness when it comes to protecting Americans.

But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere.

An emperor-has-no-clothes moment seems upon us.

Read All About It

The two seminal reads are from Newsweek and Time.

Evan Thomas's story
in Newsweek is headlined: "How Bush Blew It."

For the rest of this story go here

Distractions while watching the confirmation hearings

Wonkette's Tips to Make John Roberts's Confirmation More Interesting

*•* Figure out which senators aren't wearing make-up.
*•* Go through box of crayons trying to approximate the exact shade of Roberts dreamy blue eyes.
*•* Turn off sound, do voice over giving senators funny voices or accents.
*•* Turn off sound, start "Dark Side of the Moon." Freaky, huh?
*•* Miniputt!
*•* Put ten glasses of water on your coffee table, one containing poison: close your eyes and re-arrange them. Every time Specter says, "let him finish," drink one.
*•* Translate the hearings for your cat ("And then the senator asked 'meow meow meeeow meow meoooow.'").
*•* Count your yawns per hour; now, can you double that the next hour?
*•* Assfuck -- while you still can.
*•* Prank call the committee members' offices, asking "Is your democracy running?"
*•* Watch them with a gerbil in your trousers.

The new head of FEMA

is R David Paulison and for those of you who dont remember who he is, let me refresh your memory with the following story from 2003:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Americans have apparently heeded the U.S. government's advice to prepare for terror attacks, emptying hardware store shelves of duct tape.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after U.S. Fire Administrator David Paulison described a list of useful items, stores in the greater Washington, D.C. area reported a surge in sales of plastic sheeting, duct tape, and other emergency items.

These items, Paulison said, can be helpful after a biological, chemical or radiological attack.

A Lowe's hardware store in Alexandria, Virginia, said every roll of duct tape has been sold. Another Alexandria Home Depot store reported sales of duct tape tripled overnight.

"Everything that was on that newscast, we are selling a lot of it," said Rich Pierce with a Home Depot in the D.C. area.

In his advisory, Paulison recommended that households have on hand three days worth of water and food; an emergency supply kit for both home and automobile; radios with extra batteries; and plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal windows and doors.

With concerns growing about al Qaeda's interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, Paulison cautioned that aid after an attack could be hard to come by, at least initially.

He said that in the first 48 to 72 hours of an emergency, many Americans will likely to have to look after themselves.

If an attack occurs, Paulison said, households should tune in to local media outlets and not evacuate unless they are told to do so.

President Bush's Homeland Security Council raised the national threat level from yellow to orange on Friday. Orange indicates a "high" risk of terrorist attack, and yellow indicates an "elevated" risk.

The level was raised in part because of a high amount of "chatter" being intercepted by intelligence agencies.

When the Department of Homeland Security urged Americans on Monday to take steps to prepare for a possible attack, it said the advice was intended not as a "dire" warning but as cautionary advice.

Monday, September 12, 2005

The last word on Michael Brown

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.
And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.
The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.
The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.
``I look at FEMA and I shake my head,'' said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response ``an embarrassment.''
President Bush, after touring the Big Easy, said he was ``not satisfied'' with the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation.
And U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch predicted there would be hearings on Capitol Hill over the mishandled operation.
Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.
Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.
``We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. ``This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.
Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.
``He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.
Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.
The White House last night defended Brown's appointment. A spokesman noted Brown served as FEMA deputy director and general counsel before taking the top job, and that he has now overseen the response to ``more than 164 declared disasters and emergencies,'' including last year's record-setting hurricane season.

Does anyone else remember growing up in the 80's?

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of pre-emption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies.

The "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," which was last updated 10 years ago, makes clear that "the decision to employ nuclear weapons at any level requires explicit orders from the president."

But it says that in a changing environment "terrorists or regional states armed with WMD will likely test U.S. security commitments to its allies and friends."

"In response, the U.S. needs a range of capabilities to assure friend and foe alike of its resolve," says the 69-page document dated March 15.

A Pentagon spokesman said Saturday evening that Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has issued a statement saying the draft is still being circulated among the various services, field commanders, Pentagon lawyers and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, .

Its existence was initially reported by The Washington Post in Sunday editions, which said the document was posted on a Pentagon Internet site and pointed out to it by a consultant for the Natural Resorces Defense Council.

The file was not available at that site Saturday evening, but a copy was available at http://www.globalsecurity.org.

"A broader array of capability is needed to dissuade states from undertaking ... courses of action that would threaten U.S. and allied security," the draft says. "U.S. forces must pose a credible deterrent to potential adversaries who have access to modern military technology, including WMD and the means to deliver them."

It says "deterrence of potential adversary WMD use requires the potential adversary leadership to believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective."

It says "this will be particularly difficult with nonstate (non-government) actors who employ or attempt to gain use of WMD. Here, deterrence may be directed at states that support their efforts as well as the terrorist organization itself.

"However, the continuing proliferation of WMD along with the means to deliver them increases the probability that someday a state/nonstate actor nation/terrorist may, through miscaluation or by deliberate choice, use those weapons. In such cases, deterrence, even based on the threat of massive destruction, may fail and the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary."

It notes that U.S. policy has always been purposely vague with regard to when the United States would use nuclear weapons and that it has never vowed not to be the first to use them in a conflict.

One scenario for a possible nuclear pre-emptive strike in the draft would be in the case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."

The Bush administration is continuing to push for development of an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, but has yet to obtain congressional approval.

However, the Senate voted in July to revive the "bunker-buster" program that Congress last year decided to kill.

Administration officials have maintained that the U.S. needs to try to develop a nuclear warhead that would be capable of destroying deeply buried targets including bunkers tunneled into solid rock.

But opponents said that its benefits are questionable and that such a warhead would cause extensive radiation fallout above ground killing thousands of people. And they say it may make it easier for a future president to decide to use the nuclear option instead of a conventional weapon.

The Senate voted 53-43 to include $4 million for research into the feasibility of a bunker-buster nuclear warhead. Earlier this year, the House refused to provide the money, so a final decision will have to be worked out between the two chambers.

How Bush blew it

From Newsweek Sept 19th Edition

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina—like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11—was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge—and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.

Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.

Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.

But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. "Max Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the city—about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the Gulf Coast.

As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "Holy God," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.

At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."

Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse."

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."

Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officers—the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge you.")

At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.

Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.

The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters—but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.

In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—FEMA—was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."

According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."

A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over—if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.

free web counters

Powered by Blogger

Get Thunderbird!

Web browser

Blogwise - blog directory

Blog-Watch - The Blog Directory

Blogarama - The Blog Directory\

Find Blogs in the Blog Directory

Subscribe in Bloglines

Rate Me on BlogHop.com!