by TChris

Fifty-four Senate Republicans, evidently afraid of the truth, killed Sen. Hillary Clinton's proposal for an independent investigation of the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina. A public outcry for accountability didn't deter Senate Republicans from protecting the Bush administration from scrutiny.

The Senate vote is hardly likely to be the last word on whether to create an independent commission or as an alternative a special congressional committee to investigate Katrina. The 9/11 Commission was established in 2002 after resistance from Republicans and the White House, and opinion polls show the public strongly supports the idea. In a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll taken Sept. 8-11, 70 percent of those surveyed supported an independent panel to investigate the government's response to Katrina. Only 29 percent were opposed.

This is just unbelievable:

Two Loyola University students attending classes at Boston College after their school was shut down by Hurricane Katrina were stabbed on a Boston street early Wednesday morning. Joseph Vairo, 19, was in serious condition at a hospital after being stabbed twice, Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said. An unidentified 20-year-old was treated and released.

by Last Night in Little Rock

CNN.com last night posted this story: 'People making decisions hesitated' / More officials' jobs may fall to Katrina response criticism with a video link to who knew what and when before Katrina struck.

And Michael Brown's magnanimous resignation is not the first.

Update: Never Mind, Positions have been filled.

From the Southern Center for Human Rights: Volunteer criminal defense attorneys and paralegals are needed this weekend in Louisiana:

When the levee broke in New Orleans, about 7000 men, women, and children were locked up in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) and other area jails. After 2 days of chaos and rising water, people who were locked up were shoved onto
buses and scattered to 35 facilities throughout the state. They were sent without papers, and the OPP computer system is underwater. Many of the folks now sitting in DOC custody were in OPP waiting for bond, serving 5 day sentences for public drunkenness, waiting to be processed in/out, etc. They are now locked down in Louisiana's DOC, a notoriously mean-spirited bureaucracy that has very little capacity to reconnect families or even verify information that would allow these folks to be released & reunited with their families.

The owners of the New Orleans nursing home where 34 elderly and infirm patients died have been charged with negligent homicide.

Mable Mangano and her husband, Salvador Mangano Sr., surrendered to Medicaid fraud investigators in Baton Rouge on Tuesday and were being held in a parish prison. The Manganos declined an offer from St. Bernard Parish authorities of buses to evacuate the residents of their facility, and they did not use a contract they had with an ambulance service, the state said.

The couple has been released on bond. Their lawyer says they were faced with a Hobbsian choice:

The nursing home owners had to make a difficult decision between evacuating the patients, many of them elderly and on feeding tubes, or keeping them at the home and weathering the storm, [Lawyer Jim Cobb said. "If you pull that trigger too soon those people are going to die," he said. Three people from another nursing home had died during the evacuation ahead of the hurricane.

But the Attorney General of Louisiana says:

by Last Night in Little Rock

Still defending the Administration's argument that race had nothing to do with the Katrina debacle, Secretary of State Condalezza Rice, who was watching "Spamlot" in NYC in front row seats, buying expensive shoes the next day on Fifth Avenue, and getting tennis from a NYC tennis pro while NOLA flooded, hedged her bets on CNN.com today.

by TChris

The president who never accepts blame uttered some surprising words today:

President Bush said Tuesday that "I take responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina ...

Of course, the president hedged his acceptance of responsiblity:

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.

Given the efforts of Bush supporters to deflect blame to state and local officials, or to the victims of Katrina, it isn't clear that Bush believes the government he oversees was remiss in any significant degree. Still, he acknowledged the obvious: "Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," including, presumably, the government he was elected to run.

Don't miss Arianna today on how the GOP intends to turn Katrina to their benefit:

Two weeks in, Katrina has turned into an all-you-can-eat-right-wing-policy buffet.

And, as is so often the case with these tireless champions of crony capitalism, the main course at this opportunistic smorgasbord is “privatization”. And the target du jour is FEMA. The subtext is that the Katrina debacle somehow proves that disaster relief is no business for the government and should be turned over to the Halliburtons of the world (after all, they’ve done such a great job supplying our troops and reconstructing Iraq, right?).

Of course, FEMA’s Katrina failures have far less to do with some inherent big government bugaboos than with the way Bush and the partisan hacks he installed there turned a successful, widely-praised cabinet level agency (one that then-Gov. George Bush took time to praise in a debate with Al Gore in 2000) into a denuded and incompetently managed after-thought.

by Last Night in Little Rock

As previously reported here, the NRA was slow to speak out about confiscation of guns in NOLA. They did today:

National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre slammed New Orleans authorities Monday for seizing legal firearms from lawful residents. "What we’ve seen in Louisiana--the breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of disaster--is exactly the kind of situation where the Second Amendment was intended to allow citizens to protect themselves, " LaPierre said.

"When law enforcement isn’t available, Americans turn to the one right that protects all the others--the right to keep and bear arms," LaPierre said. "This attempt to repeal the Second Amendment should be condemned."

Usually, the NRA is right on this kind of thing. It took them as long to swing into action as the Bush Administration.

by Last Night in Little Rock

"I rarely read the [news] stories, and get briefed by people who... probably read the news themselves." --George W. Bush to Brent Hume on FoxNews (September 21, 2003)

[Via Presidential (Mis)Speak: The Very Curious Language of George W. Bush]

Apparently nobody in the White House paid attention to the news until they were hammered for the monumental FUBAR they call "Katrina disaster relief." If FEMA and anybody in the government watched CNN, FoxNews, or MSNBC, they would have learned all they needed to know to at least do something in time. Remember, Saddam Hussein knew more about the 1991 Gulf War from CNN than his own intelligence services. The Bush White House isn't that smart.

Another sad statistic. 45 bodies of patients have been recovered from Memorial Hospital in New Orleans.

by Last Night in Little Rock

CNN just reported Michael Brown resigned as head of the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency.

Al Franken said today that if Brown were smarter, he would be on suicide watch.