Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Trying out the office digital camera for something else, so I thought I would bring you some shots of the roommate:
People who pose cats for a living do not earn enough money. If I could figure out how to turn the flash off on this thing, I bet he would stop scowling, too.
Just the kind of thing we should all be proud of…
Tierney hammers Congress for their lousy priorities:
At last there is a light in the darkness. Washington was slow to respond to Katrina’s victims, but now Congress has finally sprung into action. It has bravely promised to investigate the situation.
Unfortunately, the members haven’t figured out exactly how, because Democrats want it to be done by outsiders. They say the Republicans will turn it into a cover-up. But why does that bother the Democrats so much? Shouldn’t members of both parties want to cover this up? …
Or suppose the investigators try to find out why the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t protect New Orleans from the flood. Democrats have blamed the Iraq war for diverting money and attention from domestic needs. But that hasn’t meant less money for the Corps during the past five years. Overall spending hasn’t declined since the Clinton years, and there has been a fairly sharp increase in money for flood-control construction projects in New Orleans.
The problem is that the bulk of the Corps’s budget goes for projects far less important than preventing floods in New Orleans. And if the investigators want to find who’s responsible, they don’t have to leave Capitol Hill…
Would Congressional investigators focus on these pork-barrel projects? I would guess not. My daring prediction is they would make two discoveries. First, that mistakes were made by many people outside Congress. Second, that more money must be spent on flood protection throughout America.
A few outside skeptics may suggest letting this money be spent by mayors and governors in flood-prone areas who can lose their jobs if they earmark it for too many boondoggles and allow disasters to occur. But members of Congress would conclude that only they can be trusted to dispense the money. Of course, should there be another flood somewhere, they would be glad to investigate.
Amen. See also Will Wilkinson, who appears to be at the end of his rope with some of this stuff.
John Aravosis, reacting to this CNN story about Al Gore financing a plane flight from a New Orleans airfield:
Al Gore personally saved 270 people in New Orleans
All it took was one guy saying God damn it, I’m getting the planes and saving these people.
Where the bloody hell was George Bush when everyone else was trying, and succeeding, in saving these people? College students were able to get there quicker than Bush (true story). The man is a pitiful excuse for a human being, let alone a president.
George Bush: A failed presidency. The worst president ever.
It reads like an Al Franken SNL skit, that Americablog does. Al Gore is good enough, and smart enough, and doggoneit, he cares enough to ‘save’ those people.
Really. I am sorry you lost your house and everything, but you are just a dick, Dr. Ben Marble.
Also at the DKos (this must be Dkos Friday here), this diary on disaster preparedness. Personally, I will take the new fashionably easy route to disaster preparedness. I am not going to prepare at all, and when the shit hits the fan, I will just just get on the horn to the feds and tell them that “I need everything you have got.” And if they don’t get there fast enough or to my liking, or find my request a little vague, I’ll just have to hit them right in the polls.
(Consider this an open flame war thread)
Lt. Smash and Code Pink raise money for Katrina.
Jeff Goldstein takes on those suggesting it is absolutely necessary to photograph and pass around pictures of the dead in order to somehow speak ‘truth to power’ about the ‘government failures’ in New Orleans.
Go flame him for a while.