Tuesday, September 13, 2005

La. Nursing Home Owners Charged in Deaths The husband-and-wife owners of a nursing home near New Orleans were charged Tuesday with negligent homicide in the deaths of 34 people during the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina. The case represents the first major prosecution to come out of the disaster. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. These two killed more than all the "snipers" and Looters in all of New Orleans. Wonder if the wingnuts will get on their case? 10:39:51 PM    comment []

Al Gore: When there is No Vision, the People Perish Gore's theme was based upon the quote from Proverbs, "When there is no vision, the people perish." He dwelt at length on the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina observing, "It is important that we learn the right lessons from what happened, or else we will repeat the mistakes that were made." Gore identified three basic lessons that the American people must grasp: the first is deceptively simple - Presidents should be expected to pay attention. The former Vice President recalled that on August 6, 2001, President Bush received an intelligence briefing, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," but took no action as, "it was vacation time." Four years later, the Bush Administration received dire warnings of the damage that would be done to New Orleans, and the Gulf Coast, if Hurricane Katrina kept to its projected course; nothing was done, "It was, once again, vacation time." The second lesson, according to Gore, involves presidential accountability. "There has been no accountability for horrible misjudgment and outright falsehood - [leading to] the tragedy of Iraq." The former VP argued that this has produced an atmosphere, in the White House, where "there is no fear of accountability" for the Federal missteps surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Gore opined that the management philosophy of the Bush Administration has been dictated by conservative lobbyist, Grover Nordquist, who famously boasted, "my goal is to get [government] down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub." Gore indicated that, as a result, the President deliberately shrunk the size of FEMA, rendering it "weak and helpless." The former Vice President's third lesson is that Presidents ought to heed warnings. The Bush Administration ignored distress signals about Al Qaeda and the frailty of the New Orleans' levees, and continues to disregard warnings about global warming. "The average hurricane will get stronger because of global warming, he said, noting a scientific study, recently reported in "Nature" magazine, that concluded, "Since 1970, the average hurricane has been 50 percent stronger," specifically because the oceans have grown warmer. Gore passionately compared present-day America to Great Britain on the eve of World War II. He recalled the words that Winston Churchill spoke after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's infamous 1938 appeasement of Hitler, "They are decided to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent - This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time." Noting the chilling similarities between the crisis-management style of Bush and Chamberlain, the former VP declared that it is time that Americans, "recover our moral health and demand accountability." (Via Common Dreams.) 8:19:26 PM    comment []

TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows | PVRblog By marc Matt has a very well-written and detailed report on TiVo's continued war against its customers.... There's also this post over at Boing Boing. Is Tivo going to get any more customers from knuckling under to the copyright industry than it loses from that? As much as I love my Tivo, I'll sure start looking for something else. My machine is old, so maybe I'll get lucky and the new software won't run for me, just as I missed out on the recent upgrade that gave us folders. (Via O'Reilly Radar.) 8:13:23 PM    comment []

Is Osama winning? Taking Stock of the Forever War is a bleak assessment of the situation in Iraq and the war on terror by Mark Danner, a professor, author, and expert on the region. The basic gist: Democracy in Iraq is an unattainable fantasy and Osama is getting exactly what he wants. Iraq has become a grotesque advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror…Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” The answer is clearly no. “We have taken a ball of quicksilver,” says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, “and hit it with a hammer.”… Iraq has become a training ground that will temper and prepare the next generation of jihadist terrorists and a televised stage from which the struggle of radical Islam against the “crusader forces” can be broadcast throughout the Islamic world… Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror’s “central front.” (Via Signal vs. Noise.) 8:07:17 PM    comment []

Taking Full Responsibility President Bush should be commended for finally accepting “full responsibility” for his blunders in managing the Katrina recovery effort. While he’s in the mood to begin taking responsibility, we’ve offered 10 other issues for which he should also be held accountable: - The launching of a war of choice against a country that had no WMD - The approval of interrogation practices that led to torture at Abu Ghraib - The failure to disclose the true cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill - The tripling of global terrorist attacks - The 6 million more uninsured Americans over the past four years - The $1.40 increase in the price of gas per gallon over the past four years - The 7 percent decrease in real value of minimum wage over the past four years - The 11 percent increase in poverty over the past four years - The four straight years in which median household incomes have not increased - The all-time high trade deficit, nearing $700 billion Feel free to add to the list. (Via Think Progress.) 7:45:10 PM    comment []

She Did Her Job Gee, you think the Republicans will apologize now? 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.” [...] 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 ” 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.” (Via Suburban Guerrilla.) 7:42:52 PM    comment []

Iraq's Disappearing Billions How bad is the corruption in the American System of mercantilist warfare and nation building? Former DIA/CIA counter-terrorism officer Philip Giraldi reports in the September 12th issue of The American Conservative:"A Homeland Security Customs Enforcement Department top-secret audit of contracting in Iraq is beginning to reveal a level of corruption and fraud that is crippling both reconstruction and self defense efforts. Water and electricity supplies are at lower levels than one... "A Homeland Security Customs Enforcement Department top-secret audit of contracting in Iraq is beginning to reveal a level of corruption and fraud that is crippling both reconstruction and self defense efforts. Water and electricity supplies are at lower levels than one year ago, while the lines at gas stations have become longer. A weapons procurement of more than $5 billion for the Ministries of Defense and Interior under interim Prime Minister Iayd Allawi has reportedly completely disappeared, while a $300 million purchase of 24 military helicopters from Poland bought obsolete aircraft, many of which had already been stripped for parts. Work has never started on hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure-improvement contracts given to military cronies. Several deputy ministers who balked at signing multimillion-dollar fictitious contracts have been fired and replaced by more amenable appointees. Meanwhile, the disproportionate number of Kurds in the Defense Ministry is diverting funds and equipment to peshmerga militia units preparing to seize Kirkuk. On the other side of the Green Zone, the Interior ministry's police commandos provide cover for anti-Sunni hit teams from the Iranian-supported Badr Brigade and from rogue Shi'ite radical Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. The Potemkin-villiage Baghdad government is increasingly irrelevant to the future of Iraq." (Via Antiwar.com Blog.) 7:04:21 PM    comment []

Iraq's Disappearing Billions "A Homeland Security Customs Enforcement Department top-secret audit of contracting in Iraq is beginning to reveal a level of corruption and fraud that is crippling both reconstruction and self defense efforts. Water and electricity supplies are at lower levels than one year ago, while the lines at gas stations have become longer. A weapons procurement of more than $5 billion for the Ministries of Defense and Interior under interim Prime Minister Iayd Allawi has reportedly completely disappeared, while a $300 million purchase of 24 military helicopters from Poland bought obsolete aircraft, many of which had already been stripped for parts. Work has never started on hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure-improvement contracts given to military cronies. Several deputy ministers who balked at signing multimillion-dollar fictitious contracts have been fired and replaced by more amenable appointees. Meanwhile, the disproportionate number of Kurds in the Defense Ministry is diverting funds and equipment to peshmerga militia units preparing to seize Kirkuk. On the other side of the Green Zone, the Interior ministry's police commandos provide cover for anti-Sunni hit teams from the Iranian-supported Badr Brigade and from rogue Shi'ite radical Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. The Potemkin-villiage Baghdad government is increasingly irrelevant to the future of Iraq." (Via .) 6:58:30 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel. Last update: 10/1/2005; 12:08:51 AM.