Too bad it took a Hurricane before our country figured this out...As I have been saying all along...

[reeds]

Poll: Majority now wants Bush to keep focus at home
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hurricane Katrina has made Americans heartsick.
They're depressed about the images of destruction and despair they see from the storm zone and they increasingly want President Bush to shift his attention toward home, a poll released Thursday found.

More than half of Americans now say it is more important for the president to focus on domestic policy — the first time since Sept. 11, 2001 that domestic matters have been viewed as a higher priority than the war on terrorism in polling by the Pew Research Center.

Two-thirds said the president could have done more to get relief efforts going quickly, according to the survey.

The slow-moving response to the hurricane appears to have shaken American confidence in the government's ability to deal with a major disaster. Four in 10 said the response to the hurricane has made them less confident about the government's ability to handle a major terrorist attack.

Almost six in 10 in the Pew poll, 58%, say they have felt depressed because of what's happened along the Gulf Coast. Pew polling indicates that at no point during the Iraq war has that high a percentage of people said they were depressed because of the war.

Despite those gloomy feelings, many people have found encouragement in the response to the storm — 59% saying what they've heard and read about the storm has made them more optimistic. Many from around the country have offered help to the evacuees.

People were divided on those who took things from homes and businesses after the storm — equally likely to say they were trying to survive or criminals taking advantage of the situation.

The Pew poll of 1,000 adults was taken Sept. 6-7 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[MavKikiNYC]

Four in 10 said the response to the hurricane has made them less confident about the government's ability to handle a major terrorist attack.

Does this mean that the other 6 in 10 felt as confident or more confident about the government's ability to handle a major disaster/terrorist attack?

[Drbio]

reeds revels in a tragic event yet again.

tool.

[LRB]

Too bad even a terrible tragedy like Katrina can't keep Reeds from using it to take cheap political shots.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: LRB
Too bad even a terrible tragedy like Katrina can't keep Reeds from using it to take cheap political shots.

What's more pathetic is that he gets the meaning of the survey response ass-backward.

[dude1394]

I really didn't want to weigh in. . It's like shooting ducks in a barrel.

[mavsman55]

[chumdawg]

Don't stick your heads in the sand, people. If you think this isn't bad news for the Repubs in '08, you're crazy.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: chumdawg
Don't stick your heads in the sand, people. If you think this isn't bad news for the Repubs in '08, you're crazy.

This will be relatively ancient history in '08. By then there will be other issues that will be pressing America's hot buttons. This is more likely to become a big issue in the '06 elections.

[MavKikiNYC]

Laura Bush Says Criticism of Husband 'Disgusting'

WASHINGTON (Sept. 9) - Laura Bush described as "disgusting" comments by rapper Kanye West and Democratic chairman Howard Dean blaming her husband for the disproportionate number of black hurricane victims.

Laura Bush, shown with Katrina victims on Sept. 2, responded forcefully to charges her husband doesn't care about black people. "I know what he's like and I know what he thinks and I know how he cares about people," she said.

"I think all of those remarks are disgusting, to be perfectly frank, because of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country," the first lady said Thursday in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks.

"And I know that. I mean, I'm the person who lives with him," she said. "I know what he's like and I know what he thinks and I know how he cares about people."

The president has faced sharp criticism over federal relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims, who are disproportionally black and poor.

On a nationally televised telethon Friday, broadcast live on NBC, West departed from the script to declare "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Earlier this week, Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told the National Baptist Convention of America, a black religious group, that race played a role in the hurricane casualty numbers.

Mrs. Bush said it was clear that poor people were more vulnerable when the hurricane hit.

"They lived in poorer neighborhoods. Their neighborhoods were the ones that were more likely to flood, as we saw in New Orleans. Their housing was more vulnerable," she said.

"And that's what we saw, and that's what we want to address in our country."

AOL POLL:

Do you think President Bush should be criticized for failings in Katrina relief efforts?

No 51%
Yes 49%

Do you think any of the mistakes officials made were rooted in racism?
No 72%
Yes 28%

Total Votes: 31,147

[MavKikiNYC]

September 9, 2005
Political Issues Snarled Plans for Military Help After Hurricane
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT
and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.

For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, <u>weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.</u>

<u>To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.</u>

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

<u>But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.</u>

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

<u>Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. </u>But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.

"I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

<u>In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. </u>"Nobody told me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then."

By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.

In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the Guard.

By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours, could not arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties.

In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states.

"I was there. I saw what needed to be done," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. "They were the fastest, best-capable, most appropriate force to get there in the time allowed. And that's what it's all about."

But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.

The call never came, administration officials said, in part because military officials believed Guard troops would get to the stricken region faster and because administration civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot looters. {Kikitorial comment: And you can be damned sure there would have been from the likes of Sharpton, Jackson, Waters, Pelosi and the rest of the vulturous crowd waiting to make a political feed on the corpses in Louisiana and Mississippi}

Louisiana officials were furious that there was not more of a show of force, in terms of relief supplies and troops, from the federal government in the middle of last week. As the water was rising in New Orleans, the governor repeatedly questioned whether Washington had started its promised surge of federal resources.

"We needed equipment," Ms. Blanco said in an interview. "Helicopters. We got isolated."

Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.

In a separate discussion last weekend,b[/b] the governor also <u>rejected</u>a more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana National Guard.[/b]

Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon in August streamlined a rigid, decades-old system of deployment orders to allow the military's Northern Command to dispatch liaisons to work with local officials before an approaching hurricane.

The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time Hurricane Katrina reached full strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later when Mr. Bush ordered 7,200 active-duty soldiers and marines to the scene.

After the hurricane passed New Orleans and the levees broke, flooding the city, it became increasingly evident that disaster-response efforts were badly bogged down.

Justice Department lawyers, who were receiving harrowing reports from the area, considered whether active-duty military units could be brought into relief operations even if state authorities gave their consent - or even if they refused.

The issue of federalizing the response was one of several legal issues considered in a flurry of meetings at the Justice Department, the White House and other agencies, administration officials said.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice Department lawyers to interpret the federal law creatively to help local authorities, those officials said. For example, federal prosecutors prepared to expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like anti-carjacking laws that can be prosecuted by either state or federal authorities.

On the issue of whether the military could be deployed without the invitation of state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit within the Justice Department that provides legal advice to federal agencies, concluded that the federal government had authority to move in even over the objection of local officials.

This act was last invoked in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots, but at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson of California, and has not been invoked over a governor's objections since the civil rights era - and before that, to the time of the Civil War, administration officials said. Bush administration, Pentagon and senior military officials warned that such an extreme measure would have serious legal and political implications.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said deployment of National Guard soldiers to Iraq, including a brigade from Louisiana, did not affect the relief mission, but Ms. Blanco disagreed.

"Over the last year, we have had about 5,000 out, at one time," she said. "They are on active duty, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That certainly is a factor."

By Friday, National Guard reinforcements had arrived, and a truck convoy of 1,000 Guard soldiers brought relief supplies - and order - to the convention center area.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security say the experience with Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated flaws in the nation's plans to handle disaster.

"This event has exposed, perhaps ultimately to our benefit, a deficiency in terms of replacing first responders who tragically may be the first casualties," Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for domestic security, said.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has suggested that active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if front-line emergency personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon's leadership remains unconvinced that this plan is sound, suggesting instead that the national emergency response plans be revised to draw reinforcements initially from civilian police, firefighters, medical personnel and hazardous-waste experts in other states not affected by a disaster.

The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local "first responders," including civilian police and the National Guard.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said, "The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe.""

Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this article, and Eric Lipton from Baton Rouge, La. David Johnston contributed reporting.

[LRB]

WASHINGTON (Sept. 9) - Laura Bush described as "disgusting" comments by rapper Kanye West and Democratic chairman Howard Dean blaming her husband for the disproportionate number of black hurricane victims.

What's perfectly clear is that Kanye West and Howard Dean don't give a rat's @$$ about poor black people except as disposable pawns to advance their own political purposes and/or career. Their shameless exploitation of the poor black victims has thrown yet another roadblock in the way of reducing racism in America and has in fact hindered those victims in recieving the timely aid that they need. I'm sure the KKK is extremely happy about their actions.

[LRB]

Kiki my understanding was that Bush asked for control and Blanco refused to cede the control. Sounds like she wasn't putting the people's safety over policitics when she admitted that state resources were woefully inadequate to restore order but law and common sense was preventing sending federal troops into a lawless combat zone without legal authority to defend themselves.

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: LRB

What's perfectly clear is that Kanye West and Howard Dean don't give a rat's @$$ about poor black people except as disposable pawns to advance their own political purposes and/or career. Their shameless exploitation of the poor black victims has thrown yet another roadblock in the way of reducing racism in America and has in fact hindered those victims in recieving the timely aid that they need. I'm sure the KKK is extremely happy about their actions.

I do not agree with what Kayne West said, yet I do not agree that his comments were self interested and meant to "advance {his} career". To denigrate him in that way is not accurate, he just has a different opinion (however misguided it may be) that deviates from ours. It is not "shameless" and in no way "hindered those victims in recieving the timely aid that they need".

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: chumdawg
Don't stick your heads in the sand, people. If you think this isn't bad news for the Repubs in '08, you're crazy.

Maybe. Maybe not.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, September 6, 2005 3:23 p.m. EDT
A Political Tempest?

It was inevitable, we suppose. Less than a week after hurricane Katrina, the first poll came out to measure its political impact. The results, which ABC News released Sunday, will be highly disappointing to the Angry Left: 55% of those polled do not blame President Bush for the storm's devastation, and although 67% think the federal government wasn't "adequately prepared," 75% say the same thing about state and local government. John Podhoretz's interpretation is right on the money (capitalization his):

Once again we see the gigantic divide in this country--not between Right and Left, but between people who live and breathe politics and those for whom politics are only an incidental part. You need to look at the world through political glasses to assume that THE key aspect of a natural disaster is the response or lack thereof of the authorities--whether they be local, state or federal. The president doesn't MAKE hurricanes, therefore he will not be blamed FOR hurricanes. Nor do the governor and the mayor.

ABC also has an emotional breakdown by party: Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to describe themselves as "shocked" (68% to 42%), "angry" (63% to 27%) and "ashamed" (63% to 28%) at the response to Katrina, while Republicans were far more "hopeful" (80% to 50%) and "proud" (43% to 17%). Is there any doubt that those gaps would have been similar if the poll had been conducted after any other major event--or indeed at any other time--since President Bush was elected, other than immediately after 9/11?

Indeed, the experience of 9/11 shows how resistant political trends are to the influence of big events. The attack on America changed a lot, but not the electoral map: Only three states were carried by a different party's presidential candidate in 2004 than in 2000, the smallest such shift since 1924.

This is not to say 9/11 had no effect at the ballot box. At least one politician probably owes his election to the attack on America: New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A beloved but term-limited Rudy Giuliani campaigned heavily for Bloomberg, who beat Mark Green, a deeply unserious man in a suddenly serious time.

Similarly, if Katrina has an electoral effect, it is likely to be local rather than national, especially since President Bush won't be running for re-election. (The Democratic Party and the left seem to have so fully absorbed the Clintonian doctrine of the "permanent campaign" that they've lost sight of the importance of actual elections.)

If Katrina's aftermath was, or is seen to have been, a government failure, state and local officials in the affected states--especially Louisiana--are likely to pay a price. And Katrina may change Louisiana politics for another reason: demographics. The storm forced a mass exodus from New Orleans and vicinity, and many residents surely will resettle out of state. The political effect will depend on whence the emigrants turn out to have come.

In the 2004 election, President Bush carried Louisiana by 281,870 votes, according to data from David Leip's election atlas. A breakdown by parish shows that the two candidates ran almost exactly even in the New Orleans area: John Kerry had a 109,763-vote margin within the city (Orleans Parish), while Bush beat Kerry by a combined 109,546 votes in the suburban parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.

Obviously if more New Orleans residents than suburbanites move out of state, Louisiana will become more Republican. Less obviously, the state will become more Republican even if flight from the suburbs equals that from New Orleans, since the evenly divided New Orleans region will account for a smaller part of the population than the heavily GOP-leaning rest of the state.

New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives.

[madape]

Bush isn't running in '08. How this might effect my favorite potential candidate, Rudy Guliani, is less clear. I think it might actually help him. The difference between how he handled the 9/11 tragedy and the way New Orleans, Louisiana, and FEMA handled Katrina, should be enough to swing anyone who really cares about homeland security back over to the GOP.

[Drbio]

Originally posted by: madape
Bush isn't running in '08. How this might effect my favorite potential candidate, Rudy Guliani, is less clear. I think it might actually help him. The difference between how he handled the 9/11 tragedy and the way New Orleans, Louisiana, and FEMA handled Katrina, should be enough to swing anyone who really cares about homeland security back over to the GOP.

Excellent point. If Rudy is on the ticket, his exceptional response to 9/11 will be a HUGE discussion and selling point.

[dude1394]

Well the folks up in boston didn't appreciate him very much.

[W]e got remotes of rapper Kanye West and pop rockers Maroon 5 from a generic-looking, red-white-and-blue stage in Los Angeles. Maroon 5 came off vapidly (doing just one song, ''Harder to Breathe"), while West did one tune, ''Heard 'Em Say." Yet it was disconcerting to hear his name booed loudly by Patriots fans who evidently didn't appreciate his nationally televised comment the other night on a Hurricane Katrina benefit that President Bush ''doesn't care about black people." The boos were thunderous and lasted for much of his number.

Oh this is going to hurt big time...

Way to go you yankees!! [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

[chumdawg]

If you want to watch Kanye, click here.

Oh, and watch Mike Meyer's expression.

[mavsman55]

Originally posted by: chumdawg
If you want to watch Kanye, click here.

Oh, and watch Mike Meyer's expression.

My god, for a freestyle rapper, he sure had a lot of trouble putting together complete sentences on the spot. He could have at least made it rhyme or something.

[dude1394]

All at the same time that the dumb son of a ***** is asking for donations. If it wasn't for such a good cause and if other idiots didn't actually believe his race-mongering, it would be comical.

[Drbio]

Nagin and Blanco should shack up in bayou dump and never see the light of public service again. Both are reprehensible.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: Drbio
Nagin and Blanco should shack up in bayou dump and never see the light of public service again. Both are reprehensible.

True but just imagine how bad it would have been if Sean Penn was the Mayor, and Michael Moore was the govenor. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img]

[LRB]

Originally posted by: Drbio
Nagin and Blanco should shack up in bayou dump and never see the light of public service again. Both are reprehensible.

True but just imagine how bad it would have been if Sean Penn was the Mayor, and Michael Moore was the govenor. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img]

[chumdawg]

and although 67% think the federal government wasn't "adequately prepared," 75% say the same thing about state and local government.

And how, again, do you see this impacting the next national elections?

[Drbio]

No one has ever accused a rapper of being well educated.