Spin This!

From the National Response Plan (italics are mine):

Pursuant to HSPD-5, the Secretary of Homeland Security
is responsible for coordinating Federal operations
within the United States to prepare for, respond to, and
recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters, and other
emergencies. HSPD-5 further designates the Secretary
of Homeland Security as the “principal Federal official”
for domestic incident management.

In this role, the Secretary is also responsible for
coordinating Federal resources utilized in response to or
recovery from terrorist attacks, major disasters, or other
emergencies if and when any of the following four
conditions applies:

(1) a Federal department or agency acting under its
own authority has requested DHS assistance;
(2) the resources of State and local authorities are overwhelmed
and Federal assistance has been requested;
(3) more than one Federal department or agency has
become substantially involved in responding to the
incident; or
(4) the Secretary has been directed to assume incident
management responsibilities by the President.

What part of "is responsible" don't the administration apologists understand?

And what's so confusing about this...

When State resources and capabilities are
overwhelmed, Governors may request Federal assistance
under a Presidential disaster or emergency declaration.

...in connection with this? (In the first paragraph of an official letter from Governor Blanco to Mister Bush, dated August 28, 2005.)

I request that you declare a major disaster for the State of Louisiana...

Another Black Friday

The Big Brother Broadcast is hard at work this fine Friday.

I spent the morning compiling links from the usual suspects--Rush, Ann, Sean--but decided I'd just be contributing to the echo chamber if I posted them here. And you already pretty much know what they have to say.

I'm somewhat dismayed (again) with The New York Times. If you haven't read "Political Issues Snarled Plans for Military Help After Hurricane" yet, take a look at it. Intentional or not, it's a classic case of Judy Miller journalism. NYT lets Bush administration types make all their talking points and reports them as real news. By the time the rhetoric makes its way around the info-sphere, it will be accepted as "truth."

The article shows no sign of fact checking or journalistic challenges to questionable claims of the sources.

---

Small Victories

I've written several e-mails to MSNBC about trotting out neo-conservative think tankers and introducing them as "news analysts." Apparently I'm not the only one who complained, because I haven't seen one of these Rove proxies on the network since Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation pulled a number on Ron Reagan.

---

Mister Bush has been seen on television more in the last week than during the whole 2004 campaign.

"9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11... 9-11..."

I guess it's hard for the cable news networks not to air an address from... (Sorry. I can't bring myself to refer to the guy by his official title. You know who I mean. Him.)

There he is now.

"We're huntin' down the tourists... We're fightin' the tourists... We're fightin' their hateful tourism."

"Free nations are peaceful nations..."

Even the free nations that invade other nations on false pretexts?

---

HOLY SHIITE!

The sound of one head rolling...

Just heard it on MSNBC. Mike Brown got canned.

More specifically, he's "being removed from managing Hurricane Katrina efforts."

Some news. He was removed from that responsibility days ago.

He'll still be an undersecretary.

I wonder how soon he gets his Medal of Freedom?

---

Looks like they're putting Vice Admiral Allen of the Coast Guard in charge of the Katrina recovery. Probably a good choice, but an interesting one. Replacing an undersecretary with a military three-star.

---

Along those lines...

Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton's talking about what her department's doing to fix the Katrina related oil and refining problems.

Hmm. The Bush administration coming to the aid of the American oil industry. Necessary? Perhaps. But we need to keep an eye on this.

Remember the $15 billion bailout of the airlines after 9-11? We'll probably never find out how much of that went into bankruptcy-proof platinum parachutes for airline executives.

---

Taking a tour of the Gulf states, Dick Cheney says:

"If there's a place on the face of the earth that has the resources to deal with these problems it's the United States of America, and we're going to get it done... There's no question there were problems with respect to the evacuation in New Orleans. We've gotten around that problem now, and I think everyone's focused on the future."

So it looks like Katrina's in her last throes.

Mission accomplished.

We're problem solvers.

Trust us.

Those Were the Days

I'm thinking back to a simpler time, when all we really had to wonder about in Washington was whether or not our president had sex with that woman, and what his definition of "is" was.

The Snowdens of Yesteryear

We read a lot these days about what the country needs now. The left needs a Democratic version of George W. Bush. The right needs a Republican version of Franklin Roosevelt. We need a strong leader to make things right. We need a Lincoln. We need a Churchill. We need a Patton.

I think we need a soft spoken, not terribly bright seeming, not too good looking person to step in and take the reigns of power reluctantly.

I think we need another Gerald Ford.

---

The second worst era of my American experience was the end of the Nixon reign. The country had been torn apart by Vietnam, Watergate and the resignation in disgrace of the leader of the free world.

Gerry Ford, who had no mandate whatsoever--he'd been appointed as Spiro Agnew's replacement by general consensus of the Congress--had no big plans, or ideas, or ideologies to push.

He willingly committed political suicide for the good (and sanity) of the nation when he pardoned Richard Nixon.

And he sat back while Chevy Chase made fun of him every Saturday night, and while the nation healed itself through its own inherent mechanisms.

---

Where is the Gerald Ford of yesteryear? I’m starting to think he's in Congress right now. Little Dennis Kucinich, who never once flip-flopped on his policies or his voting record while running for president in 'O4, is looking taller and taller to me every day.

Not So Fast...

I spoke a little too soon about the $6O billion and change federal appropriations. Just heard there's some haggling in congress over the second installment ($52 billion or so).

We'll see what happens.

Uncle Karl's Pockets

Funny how the Department of Education timed the release of their inspector general investigation:

On September 6, Editor and Publisher reported that columnist Anson Williams wasn't the only one writing pro-administration education program rhetoric while receiving money from the Department of Education.

[A new report from the DOE's inspector general states that] The Dallas Morning News, The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, the Mobile (Ala.) Register, and The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent were among the papers that published Op-Eds by authors who failed to disclose they were receiving DOE money. Separately, the office of Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) determined that additional opinion articles ran in papers such as The New York Sun.

We're not talking nickel-dime stuff here. According to USA Today...

Federal investigators probing the department's public relations contracts this week say the department has given nearly $4.7 million to groups...to promote administration education priorities since 2002, but that in 10 of 11 cases examined, the groups didn't disclose — in print, on radio or in other media, such as brochures or handbooks — that taxpayer funds were used.

That's condemning enough in itself, but here's the part that gets me:

John Higgins, the department's Inspector General, found no "covert propaganda" at work.

So we're back to Brave New World Dictionary definitions of the truth. If secretly promoting controversial administration priorities with tax dollars isn't "covert propaganda," what is?

Perhaps more important, though, is using tax dollars to promote administration agendas in the first place, even when it's done overtly. How can any opposition group compete with the deep pockets of the federal government?

---

This leads us to Karl Rove's strategy to divert blame for the Katrina disaster from the Bush administration to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. No doubt those two have much to answer for. But if Karl can work that voodoo that he does so well, he'll have much of America believing Nagin and Blanco are directly responsible for the tragic bumbling of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA chief Michael Brown.

Congress has approved $62.3 billion to date for the Katrina relief effort, and that's just the beginning. How many of these tax dollars will go to Karl Rove's smear campaign?

My guess: as much as Uncle Karl wants.

Operation Overload Rolls Over Chris Matthews

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is the latest spine challenged mainstream media figure to get bent over backwards by a Karl Rove proxy.

Chris let former New York City Chief of Police Bernard Kerik (they guy who was too Tony Soprano to get nominated as Homeland Security Chief) come on and tell the nation that things in New Orleans would have gone a lot differently if he and Rudy Giuliani had been in charge.

Chris didn't even make a pretense of challenging Kerik with the differences between 9-11 New York and Katrina New Orleans.

Burn Baby, Burn: Bushco Inferno...

This piece from Lisa Rosetta at The Salt Lake Tribune demands the widest possible dissemination. (Hand salute to Ariadne.)

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta...

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers...

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Our Rovewellian federal government at work--diverting desperately needed, skilled emergency workers for its desperately needed image repair campaign.

That some of these firefighters had the strength of character to refuse to cooperate gives me a flicker of hope for America's future.

---

As I typed this, MSNBC ran a piece on the need for more firefighters in New Orleans.

---

I was thinking of crafting some joke about Bush and the Gang burning in hell, crying for someone to put out the fire, and being told to dial 1-800-621-FEMA.

But I'll leave that to someone else.

---

Though I can't resist this:

"Burnin' in hell for all eternity is hard work. But we got just the right team assembled here to get the job done. We're problem solvers."

More on Evergreen Freedom Foundation...

This from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services:

June 4, 2004
Advisory To News Media Regarding Evergreen Freedom Foundation's False Statements

Olympia - The Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) issued a news release on June 3, 2004, that contains false statements about the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and its ongoing investigation of child care payments in the Mattawa area.

EFF did not contact DSHS in the course of any research, and did not afford the agency the opportunity to provide facts contrary to speculative, unproven allegations.

Particularly offensive, and blatantly false, is this statement by EFF:

• "Fraud, obstruction, possible drug trafficking, and blatant disregard for law enforcement all amount to the state's Department of Health and Human Services (DSHS) ripping off taxpayers and putting kids at risk."

Aside from misidentifying DSHS, this statement falsely suggests that DSHS employees have committed numerous serious crimes, presumably related to child care payments made to child care providers in Mattawa, Wash.

---

From the Washington Education Association on why EFF won't reveal the identities of its contributors:

As a tax-exempt "charity," EFF is not required by law to divulge where it gets its funding, despite its attempts to influence public policy. When asked by the media, EFF staff members refuse to admit who pays their salaries and funds their attacks on unions and public schools.

"We have a policy that we don't reveal any of our donors," EFF analyst Michael Rietz told The Olympian newspaper. And, in an example of circular logic, Reitz added: "We're supported by anyone who supports us."

What is EFF hiding? It turns out EFF isn't the grassroots organization it purports to be. According to The Olympian, EFF's anti-worker, anti-public education agenda is funded in part by the family that owns Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and a notoriously anti-union company. John Walton, a Wal-Mart heir, is a major contributor to school privatization efforts, or vouchers.

While EFF doesn't want to talk about its donors, public records have shown at least a third of EFF's funding comes from right-wing, out-of-state foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

---

I wonder who's paying EFF for Bob Williams' recent contributions to Operation Overload?

Operation Overload Watch...

I just caught Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation with Ron Reagan on MSNBC Coast to Coast, blaming Blanco and Nag for New Orleans.

According to the EFF web site:

In response to his Wall Street Journal column concerning those responsible for Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, Bob Williams, president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, will appear on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor and CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight programs this evening. Mr. Williams may also appear on ABC's World News Tonight.

Williams appears to be following in the footsteps of Dan Goure; a neocon supporter passing himself off as a "news analyst" in the mainstream media.

And the mainstream media appear to be letting him get away with it.

---

For your further perusal...

Some interesting tidbits about The Evergreen Freedom Foundation from Media Transparency:

When is a think tank not a think tank? In the case of the Olympia, Washington based Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF), it’s when a group that purports to be public interest policy organization turns out to be a private interest law firm for a few contributors.

Evergreen, which enjoys 501 (c) (3) nonprofit tax status, claims in its literature and on its web site to be a "public policy research organization" – a local think tank claiming support from some 2,500 donors. On it tax returns, Evergreen describes its mission as "educational research and analysis." Newsletters and fundraising mail tout Evergreen’s advice to Washington state legislators on budget and tax issues, reducing growth management regulations, and privatizing public services, including schools. The tidy mission of a public policy group, however, is merely Evergreen’s public face.

In truth, Evergreen has built its revenue base and committed much of its expenses on a seven-year public relations and legal campaign to curb the Washington Education Association’s (WEA) use of dues for political purposes – the country’s most sustained and targeted "paycheck protection" campaign. Much of Evergreen’s work -- and its subsequent expenses and its fundraising – is tied to legal complaints in the courts and in Washington state’s Public Disclosure Commission. Evergreen carries on an agenda driven by its president, former Republican state legislator Bob Williams – an unsuccessful gubernatorial and congressional candidate -- and executed by Evergreen’s staff of active Republican political operatives and insiders.