Has Obama's Post-Katrina Gulf Coast Recovery Plan Been Sufficient?

As we live through another anniversary of the man-made disaster on the Gulf Coast and the shocking lack of a federal response that caused thousands to die needlessly, thoughts turn again to whether anybody remembers New Orleans and its environs, and whether the proper resources are being deployed to rehabilitate the region. If you listen to the President, of course, his Administration is doing a heckuva job down there. Lots of cabinet members have visited the region, to be followed by the President later this year. The White House has untangled some bureaucracy to allow for more federal assistance to reach the Gulf Coast, and the stimulus has enhanced recovery efforts. And even some local Republicans have praised his approach, particularly the renewed sense of confidence in FEMA.

But that's the White House's spin. And not everyone agrees with it. The Institute for Southern Studies has reported on coalition groups blasting the Army Corps of Engineers for their slow response to restoring the natural barriers - wetlands, marshes, and barrier islands - that could help prevent future hurricanes. New Orleans resident Harry Shearer has more on that. To their credit, the White House has created a federal task force to speed up coastal restoration projects. But on other issues, the ISS has given the Administration low marks.

The Institute of Southern Studies recently released a report that assesses how Washington has handled the storm's aftermath. The ISS asked 50 community leaders to grade the Obama administration's Katrina recovery efforts: Obama got a D+, and Bush was given a D-. If graded on an E for effort curve, Bush probably would have gotten the edge given his authorization of millions in Gulf Opportunity tax credits and bonds, and an extension of time under which developers could use them.

Meanwhile, Obama has done little in seven months beyond distributing $50 million in housing vouchers. Unfortunately, families either won't be able to use them because there aren't enough houses built yet, or the vouchers will be of little use because they only cover a fraction of rents, which have risen substantially since Katrina. He's also instituted a plan to sell FEMA mobile units to families for $1 or $5, but many of those trailers are toxic from formaldehyde leaks.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) did little for recovery and reinvestment in the Gulf Coast area that needed it the most. Since calculations were made based off current population numbers -- many displaced people throughout the country are still waiting to return -- fewer ARRA dollars reached these congressional districts. ARRA's tax credit exchange program, which cashes in states' low income housing tax credits, also excluded the Go Zone tax credits, leaving over 17,000 housing units hanging in the balance.

The Lower Ninth Ward, already struggling prior to the flood, has been particularly slow to return to stability. Only 20% of its residents have returned full-time, and the area has lagged far behind the tourist spots and the Garden District.

The neglect of the Gulf both during and after the storm will not get turned around quickly or easily. I'm tempted to cut the White House a little slack on this one. But on the current trajectory, New Orleans is looking more and more in the post-Katrina period like a restored home for the rich and connected, and a nightmare for the voiceless. And given the moral outrage that the response to the storm correctly engendered, that is unacceptable. We have an obligation to those who were left to rot in the fetid waters, not just to give them a return to the same inequality, but a chance at a better life. Should Obama visit the city before the year ends, he shouldn't go to Bourbon Street, but the Lower Ninth, and he should not just tell them what he will do, but back it up.

1/2 Percent Bump in GDP Just Like 2,000 People Dying In A Flood

National Public Radio gets grants from the federal government, so keep in mind that your tax dollars pay the salary of Mara Liasson:

Last night, Fox News aired a clip of a woman at a Philadelphia town hall meeting over the weekend berating Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) about health care reform. “What I see is a bureaucratic nightmare, senator. … And you want us to believe that a government that can’t even run a Cash for Clunkers program is going to run one-seventh of our U.S. economy,” the woman complained. “I think that there is anger out there, real anger,” said NPR’s Mara Liasson, responding to the clip. She then called the woman’s concern “legitimate” and compared the Cash for Clunkers program to Hurricane Katrina:

LIASSON: I thought that woman actually asked a pretty legitimate question — especially Cash for Clunkers is like a mini- Katrina here. I mean it’s not good to start a program and not be able to execute it.

Ahem.

The government did start a program in Cash for Clunkers, and they DID execute it, you magnificent fool. They executed it so well that traffic at dealers shot through the roofs and 250,000 eligible cars were sold in a week. They executed it so well that Congress will appropriate more money for it. They executed it so well that $5 billion dollars got circulated through the economy with a $1 billion dollar investment. They executed it so well that carbuyers saw a 69% increase in their fuel efficiency.

And, as long as you're comparing it to Katrina, they executed it so well that NOBODY DIED.

If Cash for Clunkers is a mini-Katrina, Social Security is a mini-9/11. Why does Mara Liasson hate Social Security and our brave men and women who died in a terrorist attack? Sadly, that logic is better than what Liasson used in her original statement.

Let NPR know what you think about this. Liasson made the comment on Fox News, but NPR is the bigger pressure point.

GoOPer: We're Not Going To Cry "Emergency" Every Time There's An Emergency!

Marsha Blackburn (Oblivious-TN) probably could have chosen a better example:

BLACKBURN: Let’s agree that we’re going to have PAYGO enforcement. That we’re not going to cry ‘emergency’ every time we have a Katrina, every time we have a Tsunami, every time we have a need for extra spending, that we don’t go call for a special appropriation that allows us to circumvent the PAYGO rules.

Well, I'm sure Blackburn will hold herself to that. I'm sure that any time a disaster threatens her state of Tennessee, she won't cry emergency and bother to get federal funding to help people in need. I'm sure that-

The President today declared a major disaster exists in the State of Tennessee and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts in the area struck by severe storms, tornadoes, and flooding on April 10, 2009.

Federal funding is available to State and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations on a cost-sharing basis for emergency work and the repair or replacement of facilities damaged by the severe storms, tornadoes, and flooding in Benton, McMinn, Rutherford, and Sequatchie Counties.

Well, OK, fine, but that's the President, I'm sure Marsha Blackburn HERSELF never requested emergency funding for her state of Tennessee--

Members of Tennessee Delegation Urge Disaster Declaration for Five Counties Affected by Flooding

WASHINGTON, D.C. U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and U.S. Representatives Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn. 4), Bart Gordon (D-Tenn. 6), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn. 7) have joined Governor Phil Bredesen in requesting that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issue a federal disaster declaration for five counties in Tennessee "to help farmers who have suffered crop losses and damage to farm equipment and structures as a result of excessive rain and extensive flooding that occurred in May." The five counties are Bedford, Hickman, Lewis, Moore and Perry.

According to their letter to Secretary Vilsack, a declaration would allow qualifying farmers "to apply for a variety of federal farm disaster programs - including supplemental farm revenue payments, livestock assistance and low-interest emergency loans - through their local U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency office."

OK, one time, fine, but there's no history of this---

Title: Letter to The Honorable Mike Johanns, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Date: 07/12/2007

Alexander, Corker Join Tenn. Delegation In Requesting Disaster Declaration For Drought
from the Office of Senator Bob Corker

U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker joined other members of the Tennessee Congressional Delegation Tuesday in asking U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to issue an agricultural disaster declaration for all 95 Tennessee counties due to the results of the ongoing drought.

Marsha Blackburn
Member of congress

What's your point? That Marsha Blackburn is a rank hypocrite whose statements don't match her actions?

Oh, that is your point?

Well, OK, I agree with you, then.

And A Child Shall Lead Them

Don Rumsfeld never struck me as the religious type, and the assumption being made about this GQ article and his use of Bible quotes in intelligence briefings prepared for George Bush is that he played upon his boss' evangelicism to present the war in Iraq in a language well-understood to the then-President, the way a father would appease a son by playing a game of peek-a-boo. In the article, Robert Draper assigns the impetus for these cover sheets as a Major General working in intelligence for Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers, and according to him "my seniors ... appreciated the cover pages."

That clever bureaucrat, Rummy, always winning the battles inside the corridors of power, or at least making appearances to that end. Except this desire to work the system to his advantage crashed on the rocks of his own obstinacy during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"In many ways," says one of Bush’s national-security advisers, "Rumsfeld was more interested in being perceived to be in charge than actually being in charge." When I repeated this quote to an administration official privy to Rumsfeld’s war efforts, this person’s eyes lit up. “One of the most fateful, knock-down-drag-outs was over postwar reconstruction,” says this official. “It was the question of who’d take charge, State or DoD. Rumsfeld made a presentation about chain of command. ‘If State takes over here, are you saying Tommy Franks is going to report to a State official? Mr. President, that’s not in the Constitution!’ ” [...]

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.” [...]

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

And through this we learn who was the ACTUAL child in the White House. Bush may have been the boy king but at least he had a spark of recognition, if only about his own legacy, that kicked in four days late every once in a while. Rumsfeld simply had an insatiable desire not to control everything, but to make it appear like he controlled everything. He wanted to strut around as the main gatekeeper in the White House, and such gatekeeping mattered far more than. This report almost makes the turf wars sound like a game, like a child protecting his blocks at playtime in kindergarten. And this need for control, this petty outmaneuvering without regard for the real-world implications of the actions, permeates the entire neocon thought process, the entire way they relate to the world.

Rumsfeld comes off like the most insecure bastard that ever lived. And I came away learning far more than I expected about the ideological project with which he associates himself.

Gov. Jindal, I Believe Your Pants Are On Fire

The centerpiece of Kenneth from 30 Rock's Bobby Jindal's not-the-State of the Union rebuttal the other night was an anecdote about Hurricane Katrina. That a Republican would reference Katrina to say anything positive about their party is bad enough, but as it turns out, the story is not true, which was clear from the night he said it.

In the last few days, first Daily Kos, and then TPMmuckraker, raised serious questions about the story, based in part on the fact that no news reports we could find place Jindal in the affected area at the specific time at issue.

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee "during Katrina," and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn't have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, "that's ridiculous," prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

Boy, this rollout is making Sarah Palin look like George Washington, isn't it?

...here's some more lies, the "conservative Senator steers defense contracts to his home state to benefit personal real estate deals" edition...

Oh My Jindal

These responses to State of the Unions are very, very hard to make work. The President talks from a rostrum in front of a live and raucous audience, basking in the glory of every politician in Washington, and then out trots the responder, in a state house or some crappy looking set, in a canned environment, with no drama at all. It's like watching The Dark Knight and downshifting into Antiques Roadshow. Democrat after Democrat tried them and failed miserably (Kathleen Sebelius, Harry Reid, Gary Locke, Tim Kaine), and Jim Webb's success is a testament to his oratorical skills.

So that's the preamble. All that said, Bobby Jindal just ended his career for national office tonight. And not just because of the necessary downshift in rhetoric - although yes, the Kenneth from 30 Rock jokes are completely accurate - but because of the terrible, terrible content. I agree with Ezra Klein:

On MSNBC, Matthews said that "the only space Obama has left open in America is on the far-right." And Jindal's speech is proving it: It's like a time capsule. "Dangerous enemies still seek our destruction." "The strength of America is not found in our government." "Democratic leaders in Washington place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you."

Beyond that, it's a speech that Boehner could have given in 2007 and that Frist could have given in 2005 and that Lott could have given in 1998 and that Gingrich could have given in 1993. Jindal made a mistake accepting the GOP's invitation to give this response. Yesterday, he seemed like a different kind of Republican. Today, he doesn't.

It's almost too easy for Obama to compete against these guys. For example, did Jindal really invoke Hurricane Katrina as an example of governmental mismanagement? I know we've collectively as Americans have decided to forget George Bush, but does Jindal really not think we have a long-term memory? Worse, the second half of his Katrina story - yes, a Republican REPEATEDLY brought up Katrina, is actually a brazen lie:

Let me tell you a story.

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.

Read the whole story at the link. He completely made this up. He also lied about the mythical "Las Vegas to Disneyland" HSR line. He lied about how the public "has never even seen" the stimulus bill, when it's up on a public website. He lied about how Democrats want to "dismantle our defenses." He criticized "something called volcano monitoring," which consists of, you know, monitoring volcanoes, which is a simple action to try to prevent natural disasters. And he tried to cast Obama as a pessimist moments after he gave one of the most optimistic, opportunity-in-chaos speeches I've seen in at least 20 years. This guy is a Rhodes scholar and by all accounts a policy wonk. To appeal to conservatives, he has determined that his only chance is to sound like a lying, blithering idiot.

In short, he offered the same tired conservative tropes which were almost unanimously rejected at the polls last November and have been even more rejected in the weeks and months since. And key conservatives know this. David Brooks read Jindal the riot act tonight.

JIM LEHRER: Now that, of course, was Gov. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, making the Republican response. David, how well do you think he did?

DAVID BROOKS: Uh, not so well. You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism. It's just not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is. There's an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he's making that case. I think it's insane, and I just think it's a disaster for the party. I just think it's unfortunate right now.

Put it this way - when Fox News is slamming your performance, and you're a Republican, you've laid an egg.

...question: did the Washington Post go ahead and remove this Michael Gerson mash note to Jindal from their morning edition, out of embarrassment?

Algiers Point Update

Following up on a previous item about white vigilante killings of black residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Police Superintendent of New Orleans says he is "looking into" the allegations. Given the seriousness of that statement, I'm certain it'll be entirely thorough.

In a press release sent to the media and local government officials, Riley said, “he is currently looking into the allegations, and asked if anyone has substantial information relative to any incidents of this type call to the New Orleans Police Department Bureau of Investigations.” [...]

Riley said the NOPD was unaware of this violence prior to the story’s publication. The department, according to Riley’s statement, “did not receive any complaints or information to substantiate any of the allegations of racial conflicts or vigilante type crimes in the City of New Orleans including the Algiers Point on the west bank of the City.”

That's just simply not true. Not only did the authors of the recent report contact the NOPD during the 18-month investigation, but this is not a new story. It was featured in the Spike Lee documentary "When The Levees Broke," for example.

Needless to say, I'm unimpressed that Riley will be "looking into" the incidents, but public pressure will likely leave him no choice. If you haven't yet, sign the Color of Change petition.

...here's the companion video to the Nation/Pro Publica story.

The Shootings At Algiers Point

Allow me to break with all journalistic convention and mention Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, which would be more than what was done during the entire Presidential election. One predictable outcome of that tragedy was the extent to which the conservative noise machine hyped incidents of looting and mayhem, broken down exclusively along racial lines, to "prove" that black people resort to animal instincts in a time of panic. It was not only completely offensive and wrong, but now an astonishing report by The Nation shows that in at least one case, the opposite was true - white vigilantes shot African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm.

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 [...]

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

The vigilantes came from Algiers Point, a white enclave in the middle of the city, where the residents stockpiled guns and ammunition after the storm, fearing that blacks would flock to their area, which was relatively unhurt by the storm. They assembled a small group of white males with instructions to shoot anything that moved. The hysteria created by the lurid details of chaos and gang activity led to paranoia and the "frontier justice" that ensued.

Three-plus years later, this is largely an untold story. As AC Thompson says in his story (which should be read in full), no investigation has ever been opened, nobody has been arrested or even interviewed about the multiple shootings and even deaths. If this sounds like something out of the 1950s to you, well I agree.

John Conyers has now responded to the report.

Responding to an investigation published in The Nation into vigilante violence after Hurricane Katrina, Rep. John Conyers Jr. issued a public statement Thursday, expressing concern. The investigation details how, after the storm struck, some white residents in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans repeatedly attacked African-American men.

In interviews, eyewitnesses--including some of the vigilantes themselves and two men who were blasted with a shotgun--describe a string of shootings in which at least eleven people were wounded or killed. A video accompanying the report features interviews with some of the vigilantes, including one who says, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."

"I am deeply disturbed by the reported incidents in Algiers Point, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina," said Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, and chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Color of Change, who brought the traditional media around to covering the Jena 6 case after months of activism, is distributing a petition calling for a full investigation into the Algiers Point shootings. Because this was at least in part caused by the media failure of hyping the "black menace" that led to the vigilantism, it's going to take even more pressure to get them involved. Please sign the petition.

I Allow Myself To Be Optimistic For A Paragraph

As I remember, right around the same time as Katrina there was this horrible bridge collapse in southern Baghdad that killed upwards of 900 people. It wasn't from a bombing, just a rumor of a suicide attack that caused a stampede. Three years later, in the middle of a war zone, that bridge has been reopened as a source of hope for the remaining residents.

It's not much, but when there's so much bleakness in Iraq, it's comforting to see Sunnis and Shiites walking together.

(Has the Lower 9th Ward been reopened yet?)

Worse Than Katrina

Gustav is twice the size of Katrina, and by the time it passes through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico it'll be bigger. They've begun the mandatory evacuations.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city beginning 8 a.m. Sunday but urged residents to consider escaping "the mother of all storms" before then.

"You need to be scared," Nagin said of the Category 4 hurricane tearing along Cuba's western coast. "You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century."

The city's west bank is to evacuate at 8 a.m.

Nagin said the city had evacuated roughly 10,000 people Saturday on buses, trains and planes, in addition to the thousands who left on their own. Buses from collection points would continue running until midnight and resume at 6 a.m. Sunday, he said.

Here's what the region DOESN'T need - a Presidential candidate visit so that resources can be pulled from public safety. Who does McCain expect to have listen to him prattle on, instead of getting the hell out of town? Also, the talk about how it "wouldn't be appropriate" to hold a big party while a major American city is in peril, John? You don't get to say that.

It looks like the Republicans are going to put on their compassionate face on this one, scaling back their convention and doing some kind of mass telethon, using the convention as a marketing tool. I don't think that is going to work. Presumably, Americans actually remember Katrina and the stunning lack of competence. The graphic of the storm bearing down on the city in a picture-in-picture while speeches are being made - one from the Governor of Louisiana - is not going to be pretty. This is what's going to linger:



Meanwhile, I'm voting for Matt Duss. For something.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress contacted John Hagee Ministries to see if erstwhile John McCain endorser Rev. Hagee saw the Lord’s hand in reports that President Bush might not speak at the Republican National Convention on Monday because of Tropical Storm Gustav [...]

ThinkProgress asked Rev. Hagee’s spokesperson, Kara Silverman, whether Gustav’s possible impact on the Republican National Convention might be seen as punishment against Republicans for their not having done enough to combat the “homosexual agenda,” or whether this storm could be attributed to some other target of divine wrath.

Ms. Silverman said Hagee had “no comment.”

Brilliant.

But if you're anywhere near the Gulf, the take away from this post is, get the hell out of town.

There's a Storm Coming

Well this could be just awful.

Energy companies on Wednesday braced for the worst storm to threaten the U.S. Gulf of Mexico oilpatch since 2005's devastating hurricanes as Tropical Storm Gustav churned toward the heart of U.S. offshore production.

No company had reported output cuts as they began evacuating staff from offshore oil and natural gas platforms, but Shell Oil Co, which has the largest offshore operations, said it may begin shutting output as early as Thursday while it works to evacuate all of its 1,300 Gulf workers by Saturday.

Gustav is expected to morph into a powerful hurricane as it gains strength from the Gulf's warm waters, and about 85 percent of U.S. offshore oil and gas production could be in its path.

By midday Wednesday, weather forecasters were saying the storm could, as did Katrina and Rita, become a catastrophic category 5 hurricane with winds over 155 mph (249 kph) as it crosses the Gulf, which provides a quarter of U.S. crude oil production and 15 percent of the nation's natural gas output.

"We do believe Gustav is going to emerge into the Gulf as a major hurricane, category 3 or better," said AccuWeather Inc Forecasting Director Ken Reeves. "It has a chance for a brief period to be a category 5."

"Whether or not it can produce the same amount of damage as Katrina or Rita remains to be seen," Reeves said.

In addition to devastating the Louisiana coast, including the city of New Orleans, Katrina and Rita shut 25 percent of U.S. oil and fuel production. Gulf energy companies needed months to restore operations close to their full capacity.

This was a business article so the focus was on the oil offshore (hey, I thought Republicans told us that not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina?), but it's already hitting Jamaica and could be on the way toward New Orleans.

If anything the federal government is even more tattered and incompetent now than in 2005, if only because of a massive case of senioritis. It ought to be recalled where John McCain spent his birthday that year, on the very day that Katrina hit.



But for now, light a candle for the residents of the Gulf Coast.

Time To Talk About Katrina

There's been a lot of reflection on the fact that Barack Obama's nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for President will fall on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. But there's another, more recent milestone associated with the late August time frame. The day after August 28, 2008 will be the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and the third anniversary of the catastrophic levee failure that caused a man-made disaster in one of America's great cities.

The aftermath of Katrina and Gulf Coast reconstruction has been confined to the outer edges of the Presidential election debate, if it has any presence at all. This is hauntingly familiar to me. In May 2004, the Abu Ghraib pictures first reached the public eye, and after the round of assurances that they were the work of "a few bad apples," the issue receded, and the Democratic nominee remained silent about it for the duration of the fall campaign. Abu Ghraib (and to a lesser extent, Enron) was the Great Unmentionable of the 2004 Election. I'm sure you can come up with a thousand reasons why, but a lot of them went to this pervasive myth that Democrats didn't want to insult the military when their nominee was running on his military record. Never mind that we now know that Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals came directly out of the White House and were often carried out by contractors and the CIA.

I'm seeing Katrina become the Abu Ghraib of 2008, and there's undeniably a racial component to that. We have a disaster that completely discredits conservative theories of governance, but because it disproportionately affected poor black people in New Orleans, our African-American nominee, who has to play by the Jackie Robinson Rules, would be presumed by a clueless media to be stirring up racial warfare, or "playing the race card," or whatever.

It would be a crime if Katrina got lost in the national conversation this year. The failure in the Gulf was not solely attributable to President Bush, it was a conservative failure, a full blooming of their beliefs in laissez-faire, "you're on your own" government that can be drowned in the bathtub, as well as shock doctrine politics in the aftermath, which approve of housing projects to be bulldozed to make way for developers, which foreground the whims of the rich and connected to take precedence over the needs of the struggling and the suffering.

In fact, there's a new documentary being released right before the anniversary of the storm that could catalyze this conversation, and I had the privilege of seeing a preview yesterday. Trouble The Water, directed and produced by the producers of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine follows two residents of the 9th Ward, Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, as they survive the hurricane and the flood and struggle to survive what comes after. Kimberly picked up a video camera just a week before the storm and documented the events of August 29th from her attic, eliciting stunning footage and an entirely new perspective. First of all, the conservative myth that black Katrina victims were a bunch of whiners and moaners while white flood victims in Iowa "worked together" and showed their true American-ness is revealed as utter bullshit. Kimberly and Scott, along with their fellow residents left behind in the 9th Ward, were nothing short of heroic, saving their neighbors, pulling them from their houses and eventually bringing them to safety. One man, who used an old punching bag as a life raft to save dozens of people, remarks in the film "I never thought God had a purpose for me until that day." This is the story of a community brought together by the violence of the flood and the neglect of the government, forced to become their own first responders.

At one point, in an episode that I certainly never heard before, Kimberly and Scott walk about a mile through the water to a near-abandoned Navy base that was marked for closure and had hundreds of beds. With several dozen 9th Ward residents at the gates, the Navy personnel pulled out ammunition, cocked their rifles and turned their guns on the crowd, saying "Get off our property or we're going to start shooting." Months later the base received a COMMENDATION from Bush for "protecting the integrity of the base."

At its heart, this is actually a deeply conservative in some respects. Thrust into extraordinary circumstances, this couple, which has stayed together for 10 years and raised a family, made their own opportunities, in the face of a government that seemed to be actively working against them, and lifted themselves up in the face of adversity, returning to New Orleans and literally rebuilding the city (Scott becomes a contractor). They entered the storm hustlers and came out activists, organizers, and community symbols. They reflected the best values of America and proved more than deserving of equality of opportunity and access to pursue their dreams.

But that never came. And so while this is a very empowering and affecting film, it also reveals the hollow heartlessness that conservative policies reflect. The makers of Trouble the Water, including executive producer Danny Glover (who was on hand at yesterday's screening) see this film as an opportunity to broaden the conversation and ignite community development and organizing around the underlying issues that the failure of the levees forced into the public consciousness. As Glover said:

“When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, it did not turn the region into a Third World country… it revealed one.”

You can do something to further the goals of this powerful film. But the most important thing you can do is to not let this region and this catastrophe be forgotten. This is the first Presidential election since Katrina, and despite that the issues have been almost invisible in the national debate. Aside from the fact that John McCain was celebrating his birthday with George Bush and some cake on the day of the storm, and indeed his entire record with respect to post-Katrina reconstruction, there are serious issues surrounding reconstruction and the suffering of the urban underclass, that never reach the highest levels of the debate because those most affected are essentially voiceless. This film amplifies that voice, and we should all contribute to that effort by refusing to let Katrina fall down the memory hole.

Trouble the Water opens in these cities starting August 22 and throughout the fall. Don't miss it, petition your local theaters for a screening, request a copy for your own organization and tell this story to everyone you know.

UPDATE: Just as an FYI, Katrina does make an appearance in the Democratic platform, and it's an OK statement as far as it goes:

For many in America, Hurricane Katrina conjures up the memory of a time when America's government failed its citizens. When the winds blew and the floodwaters came, we learned that for all of our wealth and power, something wasn't right with
Washington. Our government’s response during Hurricane Katrina is a national shame–and yet three years later, the government has still failed to keep its promise to rebuild.

The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are heroes for returning and rebuilding, and they shouldn’t face these challenges alone. We will partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina and restore the region economically. We will create jobs and training opportunities for returning and displaced workers and contracting opportunities for local businesses to help create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities. We will increase funding for affordable housing and home ownership opportunities for returning families, workers, and residents moving out of unsafe trailers. We will reinvest in infrastructure in New Orleans: we will construct levees that work, fight crime by rebuilding local police departments and courthouses, invest and hospitals and rebuild the public school system.

Fine. Now say that every day on the campaign trail for two months.

When Government Breaks Down

Here are just a few stories I've collected over merely the past week, the little outrages that aren't as substantial as, say, killing over a million Iraqis in an unnecessary war or leaving 47 million without health insurance or torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. But they provide shocks to the conscience nonetheless.

• The Department of Labor is rushing to make rules that would make it tougher for the government agency to regulate the amount of chemicals and toxins in the workplace.

• The Wage And Hour division of the Labor Department has been charged by the GAO with delaying and misplacing hundreds of overtime and minimum-wage complaints from individuals being shortchanged.

• Fifteen percent of all women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have visited a VA facility have tested positive for sexual trauma through rape, assault or harrassment.

• An immigrant was handcuffed while giving birth in jail and separated from her infant within two days and she continued her imprisonment.

• In Louisiana, Baron Pikes was tasered nine times and killed after failing to comply swiftly enough with police demands. He wasn't resisting arrest, he just didn't comply fast enough.

• Supplies designed to go to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were massively undercounted due to a math error, resulting in a reduction of $70 million worth of aid.

• Pentagon auditors, whose role is to conduct oversight over government military contracts, were pressured by superiors to produce reports favorable to the contractors and shielding them from wrongdoing and overbilling, according to a GAO report. And at that time, the Air Force was spending counterterrorism funds on comfort capsules that can spirit them around the world in the height of luxury.

Now mind you, this is simply a partial list of the last week or so. This kind of venality, callousness and contempt for anyone but the rich and connected has characterized the last eight years. Corporations are to be protected instead of the poor. Authority is to be demanded but assaults on the downtrodden tolerated. Regulations are eliminated and help for the needy denied. This has become America in the first decade of the 21st century - an authoritarian kleptocracy. The level of rot is so great that the next President won't be able to get at all of it. Remember that these are just some of the LESSER stories.

Lying With Impunity

It's amazing to me how much of conservative thought is based on outright lying. These aren't opinions that you could see both ways, just total lies.

On Fox & Friends, Mike Huckabee falsely asserted, "When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico." In fact, according to a report prepared for the federal government by an international consulting firm, damages related to Hurricane Katrina resulted in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume of approximately 11,104 barrels of oil and petroleum products.

You could see the Katrina-caused oil spill from space. There's documentary evidence. Yet not only every conservative columnist, but the current governor of the state of Louisiana insists that no oil was spilled there.

Of a similar ilk is this myth that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba, which conservatives have been spouting for three weeks despite it being totally untrue.

This is important to understand. You have one political party whose entire worldview is shaped by lies. You have another political party that is oftentimes too timid to call the lies for what they are. And you have a media completely unwilling to play referee.

If nothing changes, you literally have a country's citizens unable to get the truth.

Shiftless And Lazy

The flooding in Iowa all flowed into the Mississippi River, and now it's a floating hazard running downstream, encountering levees throughout the Midwest and breaching them. 19 levees in all have been compromised in cities in Iowa and Illinois. This is going to play out for the entire week, and Bush is back from his European vacation vowing quick action.

This is a disaster, but it's largely a property disaster. Towns on the river are not surrounded by water on all sides, they have plenty of notice, and deaths have been thankfully minimal. Most reasonable people would see this and be happy that this is not the challenge residents faced on the Gulf Coast. Rush Limbaugh sees it and can only see color.

Limbaugh: I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

How must it feel to be so aggrieved that any opportunity to denounce blacks as lazy is taken. Never mind that there was one high-profile black man who was working on the front lines of the floods in the Midwest.



Now I could go ahead and debunk all of Rush's lies. The devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf was orders of magnitude above that of Iowa. Nobody in New Orleans shot at cops. The lurid stories of rape and gang warfare weren't true. But there is no point, really. Because all we're seeing here is a stone racist, convinced of his own biases, assured of his beliefs in how Heartland Americans are real Americans.

These next eight years of a black President are going to put him over the top.

No Sympathy For The...

Digby called W. a bad boyfriend for firing Karl Rove in the middle of a church so he couldn't make a scene. It's just awful hard for me to work up any sadness for ol' Turdblossom, especially after I read this. While you read this, try to remember that hundreds of people in New Orleans were dying at the time.

If Bush had not seen what was taking place by Tuesday, Karl Rove had. The first evidence of Rove's involvement in the Katrina disaster occurred on Tuesday afternoon. "Rove understood what a nightmare this was for the president," Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana says, "so he went into high gear on the spin thing they're so good at in the White House. Rove had David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana. I was at a press conference and David Vitter walked up to the mike and said, 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.' I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, 'Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?' I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man."

Despite his expertise being politics, the administration had made Rove a central player in the handling of the disaster. "A light switch in the White House didn't get turned on without going through Rove," says Adam Sharp, an aide to Landrieu. "It was clear that Rove was the point person for the White House on this disaster." [...]

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

Americans drowning in the middle of a major city and Rove was concerned primarily with finding the right Democrat to blame.

Fired him in the church? He should have used the conveniently placed cross and some nails.

McCain And Katrina

For some reason, John McCain has spent the past two days in Louisiana (if he thinks the state depopulated of black people after Hurricane Katrina is worthy of attention, he's in BIG trouble), and yesterday, he got a little tripped up about his response to the Katrina tragedy.

Still in Louisiana today, following his epic speech in Kenner last night, John McCain was asked by a local reporter why he had voted against creating a federal commission to investigate the Katrina disaster.

McCain's response? "I've supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy. . . ."

The problem is that's just not true. He voted against such a commission -- twice.

If you want to extend that out, his bestest pal Joe Lieberman has chaired the committee with jurisdiction over investigating the federal response to the hurricane and the condition of the levees, and he checked out on that investigation two years ago.

Barack Obama jumped on this yesterday, once again demonstrating the speed of their rapid response team.

As the Obama campaign put it, “Whether he simply wasn’t aware of his voting record again or he was intentionally misleading the people of Louisiana, John McCain certainly isn’t offering us ‘leadership you can believe in.’”

That's McCain's new rip-off tag line, by the way: "Leadership You Can Believe In". More like "Leadership You Can't Remember."

The problem is making this stick. The traditional media is very invested in an image of McCain as a straight-talker, that they'd twist his words in whatever way possible to fit the narrative.

But the Obama team could have just sent along one photo, taken while people were drowning in New Orleans and the federal government wasn't doing much of anything about it:



It's one of those "Picture=1,000 words" moments. I expect to see that one a lot this election season.

The Blogger Candidate

Barack Obama has pretty much shunned the blogs and his campaign has been perhaps the worst in terms of netroots outreach. But the SENSIBILITY of his campaign is similar to that of a blogger, the way in which he weaves new information into his overall narrative. In this latest dust-up with John McCain over whether forces in Iraq have returned to "pre-surge levels," Obama has forcefully used the episode to illustrate the general unease we have felt over the last eight years, that the leaders in Washington aren't acquainted with the facts on the ground and make untrue statements to bolster their political goals:

"But that’s not what John McCain’s been talking about the last few days. He’s been proposing a joint trip to Iraq that’s nothing more than a political stunt. He’s even been using it to raise a few dollars for his campaign. But it seems like Sen. McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts, because yesterday – in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy – he stood up in Wisconsin and said, 'We have drawn down to pre-surge levels' in Iraq."

"That’s not true, and anyone running for commander-in-chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq -- 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer -- that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Sen. McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to 'nitpicking.'"

"Well, I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged."

"It’s time for a debate that’s based on the truth, and I can’t think of anything more important than how many Americans are in harm’s way. It’s time for a debate that’s based on how we’re going to end this war -- not a debate that’s based on raising a few dollars for John McCain’s campaign."

"The American people have had enough spin. Just this week, we were reminded by President Bush’s own former spokesman of how it was deception -- not straight talk -- that misled the American people into war. It’s time to cut through the tough talk so that we can be straight with the American people about a war that’s cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer. It’s time to end the political game-playing so that we can finally end this war. That’s what I’ll do in this campaign. And that’s what I’ll do when I’m President of the United States."

He's calling in the misstatement about troop numbers, the McClellan book, the stupid "he hasn't been to Iraq in a couple years" line and the email with Petraeus' picture on it to make a narrative about McCain as unwilling to admit wrong and unable to tell the truth. And he went further today.

We all misspeak sometimes. I've done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you'd think that Senator McCain would just admit that he made a mistake and move on. But he couldn't do that. Instead, he dug in. And the disturbing thing is that we've seen this movie before -- a leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain refused to admit that he made a mistake. And that's exactly the kind of leadership that we've had through more than five years of fighting a war that should've never been authorized, and should've never been waged.

We don't need more leaders who can't admit they've made a mistake, even when it's about something as fundamental as how many young Americans are serving in harm's way.

He's making the pieces fit and having them fit into the overall storyline. That's the mark of a good blogger. Hopefully he'll pick up this other angle, which has been well-framed by Sam Stein at HuffPo.

Up until traveling there one month ago, the Arizona Republican had made just one public tour of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina touched down in August 2005, according to the Washington Post's travel records.

When the hurricane first struck, he was celebrating his birthday with President Bush in Arizona. In the days that followed, he urged Congress to make sacrifices to help the recovery effort. But he also expressed concern about going overboard and burdening "future generations of Americans" with "the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country."

McCain's first post-hurricane visit to the region was in March 2006. His trip, according to those in attendance, was a full-day affair touring all aspects of the storm's destruction. It came, it should be noted, after pining by local officials for more federal attention including, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu insisting that any politician serious about a presidential run would have to, at the very least, get a first hand account of the hurricane's destruction.

In the year that followed McCain did not return to New Orleans. He did, as noted by a Mother Jones feature on the topic, vote against establishing a congressional commission to examine the federal, state, and local responses to Katrina. Later, he voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane. In July 2007, he ventured back to the Gulf Coast, but, while he held an open news conference, the purpose of the trip was officially a private fundraiser.

You put that into soundbite form and I can easily see that in an Obama speech.

It goes without saying that I like the way his campaign is unfolding.

McCain's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very Bad Week

I hope somebody's taking notes on this week's travails for John McCain, because if this was October and anyone was paying attention, his entire staff would be fired and the RNC would be gamely talking about random downballot races and how "2012 looks to be an up year."

The week started with a front-page story about his legendary temper, with new stories revealed therein. Then McCain embarked on a "Forgotten Places" tour this week, traveling across the country to places that "conservatives don't normally appear." And now, we know why. In Alabama, he attracted a largely white crowd in the landmark of the civil rights movement, Selma, and praised a ferry that was constructed due to an earmark, after condemning the practice. He then departed for Youngstown, Ohio, where he offered a stirring defense of free trade at a plant which closed earlier in the decade. When asked about the "cheap dumping of foreign goods" on US shores, McCain replied "I can't turn that around," which ought to be comforting to unemployed steelworkers.

Then came multiple gaffes over the situation in New Orleans. First extremist pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain enthusiastically sought, reiterated his belief that Hurricane Katrina occurred as a punishment for a planned gay pride parade in the Crescent City (why Mississippi had to bear the brunt of the storm as well is unclear). McCain had to answer for these charges while docking in New Orleans, and he responded like any adult politician would, by saying "it's nonsense" eight times. Hagee has since retracted the comment, but clearly it made things awkward on McCain's stroll through New Orleans.

Of course, McCain's ideas on New Orleans aren't much better than Hagee's justifications for the hurricane. And Newsweek actually committed some journalism on that front, reaching into recent history to remind everyone that while Bush was galavanting around the country partying and ignoring the fact that New Orleans was underwater, one of his party partners was McCain:



Not only that, but McCain's prescriptions for New Orleans leave much to be desired:

Today he took a walking tour of the Ninth Ward--perhaps the most visible symbol of the Bush administration's inaction in the wake of Katrina--passing a mix of rebuilt homes and vacant, blighted houses. After the tour, McCain addressed reporters in front of a restored church. "Never again will we allow such a mishandling of a natural disaster," he vowed. "Never again."

Yet on the issue of New Orleans, it's still unclear how different McCain and Bush actually are. Speaking about Katrina, McCain, like many other Republicans, has trashed the administration's handling of the storm and has vowed to prevent similar catastrophes. "We can never let anything like that happen again," McCain told reporters on board his Straight Talk Express earlier this week. Still, the senator, who has visited the Lower Ninth Ward twice since the storm, has yet to tread into the far trickier debate over what to do about New Orleans now, a fight that has dragged on and on with little progress since the waters washed part of the city away.

The senator won't present his own plans for recovery, at least not today. Asked earlier this week if he thought the Lower Ninth Ward should be rebuilt, McCain shrugged, considering the question for several seconds. "I really don't know," he finally said. "That's why I am going … We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is."

Democrats pounced on this errant statement that McCain would be open to tearing down the Ninth Ward, and despite his media constituency running interference for him, there's no question that saying this in the midst of a tour to forgotten places was just a cardinal sin. When he was confronted about it, he claimed that he never said it despite the fact that the quote was only three days old.

McCain is of course completely constricted by his new image as a tax-cutter while still trying to keep alive the flame of the old image as a budget hawk, which essentially means that he won't be able to pay for anything that he proposes. In fact, the Washington Post hit him again, for offering tax proposals that he once considered anathema, and offering no explanation for the sudden change of heart (we know that he's unable to keep the fragile Republican coalition together without claiming to be the second coming of Milton Friedman). This leads to an endless series of contradictions.



McCain ended the week by admitting the country is worse off than it was eight years ago, despite having said the opposite on multiple occasions and offering economic proposals that are identical to Bush's. The New York Times attacked him for offering multiple favors to a wealthy Arizona friend and contributor. Oh, and McCain reveled in private fundraisers throughout this tour of "Forgotten America" this week, including one in Alabama where he got an 80% discount from a municipality on rental space and used PRISON LABOR for the event.

The McCain campaign was charged $250 to use two rooms in the hall, which normally would book for $1,200 on a weeknight. The campaign also was given free labor from Homewood City Jail inmates to set up tables and chairs for the event, avoiding a $100 set-up fee, but did pay a standard $50 cleaning fee.

He also said he would do anything he could to stop the North Carolina GOP from running their stream-of-consciousness "OBAMA WRIGHT GOD DAMNS AMERICA SCARY BLACK ZOMG!!1!" ad, which resulted in the ad running anyway. And while the media certainly gave a ridiculous amount of coverage to this ad as they will any anti-Democratic attack ad, I think the real story is McCain's impotence - not that he's trying hard, or at all, to stop the ad, but the "I deplore their behavior" pose runs a little stale when nothing is done to stop it, and there will be diminishing returns to this trick as McCain spends all his time denouncing and rejecting yet doing nothing substantial to stop the smear campaigns. He's actually in a bind over that as well.

Hell of a week. One thing that is getting lost in this primary fight is that John McCain is a pretty terrible campaigner and general election candidate. The only thing going for him is media interference, but even they can't hide the contradictions and the gaffes and the essential conservatism he's boxed himself into.

Can't Wait To See The Saem Clip On Television For Two Weeks

John McCain's endorser John Hagee, not a bunch of years ago but yesterday:

HAGEE: Yes. The topic of that day was cursing and blessing. … What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it’s called a curse [...]

PRAGER: Right, but in the case, did NPR get, is this quote correct though that in the case of New Orleans you do feel it was sin?

HAGEE: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The rally never happened.

PRAGER: No, I understand.

HAGEE: It was scheduled that Monday.

PRAGER: No, I’m only trying to understand that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel that God’s hand was in it because of a sinful city?

HAGEE: That it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct, yes.

It's important to note that this is right smack in the center of religious right discourse. It's not all that far from normal. The people John McCain is trying to appeal to with the Hagee endorsement believe this stuff. And McCain continues to be happy to have the endorsement.

On the key demographic of controversial pastors, I think McCain is pulling ahead. Yet the double standard on this is so glaring.

By a twist of fate, McCain's visiting New Orleans tomorrow. Will the question be asked?