yet the people of america

keep electing these soul-less creatures. why? i ask you why?

if your city got hit by an earthquake, a flood, a tornado, a hurricane, wouldn't YOU want the government to come in and help (literally) save YOU and YOURS? or; would you rather wallow in your own waste, starve and die? your choice

(and what gets me the MOST is this creature is PROUD to have wanted to contribute to the deaths of citizens of the united states of america)

New Orleans editorial: ‘Steve King is heartless and proud of it’
By Lynda Waddington

In an opinion piece dubbed “Iowa Congressman Steve King is heartless and proud of it,” the staff at The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune takes particular offense to U.S. Rep. Steve King’s (R-Kiron) latest comment for a series published by The Hill that typically serves as a light-hearted glimpse of the nation’s elected officials.

In short, King is quoted as saying that his “best vote” was the one he cast against relief for victims Hurricane Katrina:

…Q: What vote would you like to redo?

A: I don’t really go back and re-live that sort of thing. Some of the big votes that I’ve thought about, some of the jury’s still out. And at this point, maybe I’d answer that question another way, probably with the singular vote that stands out that went against the grain, and it turns out to be the best vote that I cast, was my “no” vote to the $51.5 billion to [Hurricane] Katrina. That probably was my best vote…

It should come as no surprise that The Times-Picayune staff — many of whom felt the direct and personal wrath of Hurricane Katrina even as they attempted to cover the storm and its aftermath — wouldn’t take kindly to King’s point..............

after the big storm yesterday (i worked from my toasty living room)

it's time for some tuesday morning humor. although THIS IS NOT FUNNY IN THE LEAST. sometimes i think they're just way too self-absorbed and not too bright. then at times like this i KNOW it's way more than that. they're evil soul-less beings (who are NOT even human)

Rove: Bush administration 'fulfilled' its Katrina responsibilities

David Edwards and John Byrne
Don't be surprised if this causes you to spill your coffee. When pundits began to critique the recent speech of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in an ABC News green room on Sunday, former Bush adviser Karl Rove declared that the federal government met its responsibilities with regard to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

The following exchange appears on the video below at 2:11.

"With all due respect, the government official who was responsible for managing Katrina under the Stafford Act was the governor of Louisiana and she lost office in large measure due to the poor quality of her performance," Rove quipped.
............................

this pope benedict is some piece of work

discounting everything else he's done and said in the past, within the past couple of weeks he's UNexcommunicated someone who is a holocaust denier and now this:

Katrina 'divine retribution' pastor promoted
Cleric quoted as saying the hurricane was a punishment for 'immorality'

because that's a VERY 'christian' thing to believe. kill and wound the 'sinners'. hmmmmmmmmmm. wwjd?

the catholic church and it's old white men who KNOW EFFING NOTHING should clean itself out. first not only get rid of ALL OF THE PEDOPHILES BUT TURN THOSE F**KERS OVER TO THE AUTHORITIES and second get rid of all of the misogyny in the church, third make it your job to educate about birth control and safer sex (you don't have to do the actual education if it's too much for you, BUT SUPPORT THOSE THAT DO USE COMPREHENSIVE SEX EDUCATION), fourth support not only glbt peeps, but support gay marriage and finally PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH do unto others...................(there's so much more, but we'll cover that later)

VATICAN CITY - An Austrian pastor who has been quoted as calling Hurricane Katrina God's punishment for sin in New Orleans is being promoted to the rank of bishop.

The Vatican announced Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI has tapped the Rev. Gerhard Wagner, 54, to be auxiliary bishop in Linz, Austria. It made no mention of the reported remarks about Hurricane Katrina.

Wagner has served since 1988 as pastor of a church in the Austrian town of Windischgarsten and received a doctorate in theology from the prestigious Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome, the Vatican said.

he is just un effing believable

he is clueless. i used to vacillate between thinking he was stupid and a puppet of others (read: the big dick) OR that he was brilliant and he simply didn't care.

i think it's a some of one and some of the other. he is stupid as shite AND HE FUCKING DOESN'T CARE. he JUST DOESN'T GET IT

the following is king george chattin' it up with that goof ball larry king on tuesday night

Bush low point: 'Being called a racist'

..............“In fact, the truth of the matter is the response was pretty darn quick,” Bush said, “if you think about the fact that the Coast Guard and a lot of brave kids were pulling 30,000 people off of roofs as soon as the storm passed, as soon as they found people on those roofs.”

King then pointed out that a lot of mistakes were made in the days following the hurricane, to which Bush responded: “Well, yes, at all levels of government, absolutely.”

“No question,” the president added. “And that’s a good thing about government. By the way, we have had, that I know of, sitting right here, eight hurricanes, major hurricanes, and seven and a half were dealt with the way everybody expected them to be dealt with.

The Mississippi part of Katrina was dealt with well, even though it was a really horrible hurricane.”

“My brother was governor of Florida, and seven major hurricanes hit there. And the response was always pretty good. It's the response out of New Orleans and Louisiana which was not as good as we would have liked.”.........

we knew this happened

i don't think we knew to what extent. i also am shocked NOTHING has been done. although i shouldn't be shocked. next to nothing has been done (by the government) to help MOST of the people effected by katrina. OUR people, OUR country. if you don't think the rate of help to people of natural disasters is directly proportionate to their wealth and/or their color, you're just kidding yourself.

Katrina's Hidden Race War

By A.C. Thompson

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

• 
  

  
  

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks........

A.C. Thompson: White vigilante justice tore through New Orleans after the storm. But no official investigation has shed light on the violence.

picture: CHANDRA MCCORMICK AND KEITH CALHOUN
A vigilante shot Donnell Herrington twice shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

we really aren't shocked

or surprised. i don't think we as a country actually DO realize how devastating this disaster was. worse though, is our government's lack of reaction to it. putting everything else aside, even sending 4,209 of our men and women to their deaths in iraq, the government should be made to be accountable for what they did (and didn't do) during and after katrina. of course if you add on iraq, healthcare, homelessness, abstinence only education, the mixing of church and state, the repealing of many laws that protect our earth and the passing of new ones that destroy it even more.........

well if we do NOT demand justice (starting with contacting our senators and congress reps) it's ALL ON US

Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATON ROUGE, La. — Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years. Not that anyone took much notice. After Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip eighth grade altogether and begin high school. After three semesters of erratic attendance, he left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year and moved in with another family in a suburb of New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy Queen.

A shy, artistic boy with a new mustache, Jermaine is one of tens of thousands of youngsters who lost not just all of their belongings to Hurricane Katrina, but a chunk of childhood itself.

After more than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked..........

i'm embarrassed

i didn't even think of this until i read larisa. i'm horrified (at myself), two of my dearest friends are from iowa. it doesn't matter though if i know someone from iowa or not. these people need their president. where is he? it's sort of like where's waldo.

king george is NOT in new orleans
king george is NOT in a homeless shelter seeing to the well being of families in need
king george is NOT in a soup kitchen feeding the hungry
king george is NOT in a free clinic assisting doctors and nurses who are volunteering to help the poor and/or uninsured
king george is NOT at the gas pumps
king george is NOT at the grocery check out
king george is NOT in a pharmacy where the pharmacist is refusing to fill a prescription for plan b for a woman who has been raped
and of course king george is NOT in iowa

Bush is MIA, again...

Nearly three years ago as people were drowning in NOLA, the so-called leader of this nation dashed eagerly from one side of the country to another -fund-raising for his party- without a moment's care for his fellow Americans in their time of crisis. In fact, whenever a national crisis has occurred, Bush has been conspicuously absent. During the fourth or fifth day of the Katrina massacre and the missing leadership of this nation, I wrote the following:

We have no leadership, no captain at the helm as it were. We are, in effect, being led from disaster to disaster by a headless horseman run amok with stuffed pockets and an empty conscience.

We are here, again. This time in Iowa, where tens of thousands of Americans are without a home, many dead, many injured and once again, during this national crisis Bush is busy playing voodoo politics (This time in Europe).

Here is what is happening in Iowa:
More national guard troops deploy into disaster territory
Iowa in a drinking water emergency
Culver City, 36,000 homeless
Des Moines is mostly underwater
Death toll as of today at 20 (from what they have been able to determine in the chaos)
83 Iowa Counties declared disaster zones

........................

where's brownie when ya REALLY need 'em???

we STILL haven't helped these people but we're funneling in millions and billions to OTHER countries for goddess only knows what. pakistan? india? iraq? what the hell are we giving france now to be our best buds?

Lawmakers Criticize FEMA's Handling of Hazards Posed by Trailers

By Spencer S. Hsu Washington Post Staff Writer
Nearly four months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised to study the risk of formaldehyde in trailers provided to Hurricane Katrina survivors, none of 52,000 occupied units have been tested, and FEMA has warned its employees for their own safety to stay out of 70,000 similar trailers in storage.
"This double-standard is wholly unacceptable," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said in a written statement, accusing FEMA of hiding the extent of trailer contamination and leaving "American disaster victims exposed to a whole new nightmare." .............

hey i have an idea

why not withdraw our troops from iraq - stop squandering our money (lost weapons, giant unsafe and unsound embassy buildings, new police buildings with leaky plumbing and worse, etc etc etc) and give that money to the citizens of the gulf coast who lost EVERYTHING to katrina.

if given a choice where my tax dollars went - iraq or the gulf coast, I CHOOSE THE GULF COAST

Big Insurers Win Ruling On Katrina Levee Break
Appeals Court Says No to Claims Payout


By Becky BohrerAssociated Press

Hurricane Katrina victims whose homes and businesses were destroyed after floodwaters breached levees in the 2005 storm cannot recover money from their insurance companies for the damage, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.
The case could affect thousands of residents and business owners in Louisiana who are attempting to rebuild. Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist at the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute in New York, said in June that a ruling against the industry could have cost insurers $1 billion.
This event was excluded from coverage under the plaintiffs' insurance policies, and under Louisiana law, we are bound to enforce the unambiguous terms of their insurance contracts as written," Judge Carolyn D. King wrote for a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans......

(and oh yeah, big bid-nez ONCE AGAIN wins)

i happened to see this on nightline the other night

and it was NOT pretty. lots of pet owners were (literally) forced to abandon their animals. there were even pet rescue workers from other states that were PREVENTED from helping. as if effing up helping the people of the gulf coast wasn't enough...

Cops sued for mass pet murders during Katrina

David Edwards and Muriel Kane

ABC's Nightline described on Monday how, in the days following Hurricane Katrina, police killed many stranded pets that had been left behind by their owners. Residents of St. Bernard Parish have since claimed they were forced to leave behind their dogs, which were then wantonly killed by sheriff's deputies. The dog owners have filed a class action lawsuit, asserting their pets were executed in three schools that were supposed to serve as shelters.........

ms blanco is right about at least ONE THING

you expect some HUMAN reaction to a natural disaster. not even a who is right and a who is wrong one. all we got (well all those on the gulf coast) was a POLITICAL response.

it's YOUR fault, no, it's YOUR fault, no it's HIS fault, no it's HER fault and on and on and on. yet there are STILL tons of people suffering.

(and mr capehart, what's with the jerry springeresque lead in to this article anyway? would you have set it up this way - girls fighting/hold my earrings - if the governor of louisiana was a MAN? i think we both know the answer to that)

Fed Up in Louisiana


By Jonathan Capehart Saturday, May 12, 2007; Page A15
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) went off. Not in a girls fighting, "Hold my earrings!" kind of way. But in a blunt manner befitting a chief executive who endured the worst natural and engineering disaster in U.S. history, who continues to battle Washington for federal assistance, and who is not running for reelection.
We met in Blanco's imposing office on the fourth floor of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge on Wednesday. After watching her testify pleasantly before state legislative committees on behalf of her insurance reform package and for an expansion of Louisiana's Child Health Plus program, I was floored by her "bring it on" forthrightness as she talked about her dealings with Washington after Hurricane Katrina............

a bush or two and a pump or two

put 'em together and what do you get?

Corps Asked to Explain Pump Contract

By CAIN BURDEAU
Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, it copied the specifications - typos and all - from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract, a review of documents by The Associated Press found.
The pumps, supplied by Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla., and installed at canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season, proved to be defective, as the AP reported in March. The matter is under investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
In a letter dated April 13, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., called on the Corps to look into how the politically connected company got the post-Hurricane Katrina contract. MWI employed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother, to market its pumps during the 1980s, and top MWI officials have been major contributors to the Republican Party.
While it may not be a violation of federal regulations to adopt a company's technical specifications, it is frowned on, especially for large jobs like the MWI contract, because it could give the impression the job was rigged for the benefit of a certain company, contractors familiar with Corps practices say. ..............

how much more evidence do you need

to see king george and his court do NOT care about the people of the united states?

they just don't. here is a story about katrina. there is a story about sudan. over there is a story about iraq. there are stories everywhere in this naked world. stories that show a basic lack of not only compassion BUT morality.

those that support this administration simply because they have always supported republicans, must look at the consequences. the world indeed IS going to come to an end IF and ONLY IF we allow these people free reign

let's not do that, ok?

Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed
By John Solomon and Spencer S. Hsu Washington Post Staff Writers

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.
Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."
Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.
Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors....................