From The Assocated Press: [Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California)] related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown. He said Why would I do that? Pelosi said. I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week. And he said What didn’t go right? Oblivious, in denial, dangerous, she added.
The syncophants are doing their lather-spewing best to divert responsibility for what now may be tens of thousands of deaths in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but when on Saturday, 27 August, nearly two days before the levee broke, Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco envoked the Stafford Act, President George Bush was in charge.
Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing.
[Snip]
In response to the situation I have taken appropriate action under State law and directed the execution of the State Emergency Plan on August 26, 2005 in accordance with Section 501 (a) of the Stafford Act. A State of Emergency has been issued for the State in order to support the evacuations of the coastal areas in accordance with our State Evacuation Plan and the remainder of the state to support the State Special Needs and Sheltering Plan.
Pursuant to 44 CFR § 206.35, I have determined that this 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 a disaster. I am specifically requesting emergency protective measures, direct Federal Assistance, Individual and Household Program (IHP) assistance, Special Needs Program assistance, and debris removal.
No amount of talking points, lies and damned lies is going to divert responsibility for the response to Governor Blanco’s letter. If this is the way that the Bush administration treats Americans, can anyone really comprehend how we’re treating people who can’t vote?
For now I can only echo Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to the disaster aftermath:
…from August 27 on, the president had full authority to act. He failed. Thousands of Americans are dead – under horrible conditions — as a result. That would be a national disaster before 9/11. After 9/11, it’s criminal negligence.
How high is the bar for impeachment?
My Soundtrack:
One of my good friends tells me that her 15-year-old son has taken to yelling at the television as he watches and listens to the mounting pile of stupidity coming out of the Delta. The Hall of Shame is collecting as many of them as it can so that when stupid people attempt to run away in the future, we’ll be able to hold their feet to the fire.
Via Jeff Jarvis, Recovery 2.0: Our goal is to be ready for the next disaster so people can better use the internet – via any device – to better: share information, report and act on calls for help, coordinate relief, connect the missing, provide connections for such necessities as housing and jobs, match charitable assets to needs and get people connected… sooner.
It’s been a busy week for Wal Mart. The company has taken a major lead in supplying relief to the communities devasted by Hurricane Katrina. It is important to recognize, applaud and thank the company for its humanitarian actions. This cannot, however, divert our attention from those aspects of the company that continue to do damage.
Mitchel Schneider, president of First Interstate Properties Ltd., the developer for Steelyard Commons, provided information that the Ohio Department of Transportation has been dragging its feet on giving up.
While repeated emails to ODOT failed to elicit what the department estimated would be the traffic growth as a result of the construction of Steelyard Commons, Schneider quickly came up with a figure of 15,000 vehicles daily on the weekend and about 10,500 daily on weekdays.
While the ODOT figures are not precisely comparable — they make no distinction between week days and weekend days, and the ODOT figures do not appar to address traffic coming in from the southbound Jennings freeway — the department estimated in its Thursday, 16 June presentation that:
If the Quigley Road Connector is not built, there will be an average of 18,060 vehicles a day on West 14th street. If the connector is built, that traffic projection drops 59 percent to an average of 11,880 vehicles per day.
For Clarke Avenue the drop is even more dramatic. If the connector is not built, ODOT projects that the average daily traffic there will be 19,680 vehicles. If the connector is built, that drops 70 percent to an average of 5,630 vehicles per day.
Assuming approximatley 12-hour days of operation, that works out to 875 cars per hour on the week days and 1,250 cars per hour on weekend days.
From The New York Times:
Having failed to unionize any Wal-Marts, American labor unions have helped form a new and unusual type of workers’ association to press Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to improve its wages and working conditions.
Belva Whitt, a Wal-Mart cashier, says a reduced schedule has at times forced her to choose between paying rent or putting food on the table.
With its first beachhead in Central Florida, the two-month-old group is already battling Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest corporation, over what it says is the company’s practice of reducing the hours that many employees work, often from 40 a week to 34, 30 or even fewer, jeopardizing some workers’ health benefits.
Belva Whitt, a cashier who earns $7.40 an hour, said she had joined the new group, the Wal-Mart Workers Association, largely because she was unhappy with her wages and because her hours were reduced to part time from full time many weeks.
I’m a single mother trying to raise my son, so not having that money makes it hard, said Ms. Whitt, 30. Sometimes I have to decide, am I paying the rent or will I have food on the table?
From the September issue of the Harvard Business Review, via Tom Peters:
Some observers have argued that Wal*Mart owes its superior returns to its enormous size and, as a consequence, its purchasing power. [But] if the purchasing power that comes with size were responsible for the company’s success, then Wal*Mart’s profitability should have increased as the company grew.
Yet its operating margins have not increased since hitting their high watermark in the mid-1980s. … As Wal*Mart has grown, its profit margins have suffered in comparison with those of more geographically concentrated competitors, such as Target. … Sam’s Club appears to be no more profitable than Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club.
The fact that Sam’s Club is the least geographically concentrated of the three competitors appears to have offset any advantages derived from Wal*Mart’s efficiency. … Wal*Mart’s experience overseas tends to confirm the limited impact of the retailer’s operating advantage. Overseas returns are less than half its domestic margins. – Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn, All Strategy Is Local.
My Soundtrack: Combing My Hair In A Brand New Style by Jim White on WOXY.
Being standup Americans, firefighters have volunteered for hurricane recovery. How are they being deployed? But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
From Shelbyville, Tennessee: A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Mississippi… DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies, [snip] The 40,000 estimate does not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from … mausoleums.
Bob Denver, who most remember as Gilligan, but who, for me, will always be Maynard G. (for Walter) Krebs, died this past weekend at 70. He was the side kick of Dobie Gillis, but I thought he ruled the show. I didn’t read Max Shulman’s I Was A Teenage Dwarf until five years after the show ended. I was bummed that Maynard wasn’t in it.
Via Mediagirl comes Welcome To Lake George: My Aunt & Uncle live in Florida, so every time there’s a report of a hurricane heading toward them, I start paying extra attention to the weather reports. When Hurricane Katrina first reached hurricane proportions, I did the usual. When Katrina passed over the southern edge of Florida, , killing 3, and seemed…
For me New Orleans means Anne Rice. Sunday she spoke: What do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American… Keep reading…
From Aramando at Daily KOS: One of the charges (READ “lies”) Republicans make to excuse Bush’s criminal incompetence is that Louisiana governor Blanco had not filled out the right form, or said the right magic incantation or had not ceded jurisdiction to the feds and thus had prevented the sending of troops into New Orleans… Keep reading…
Nearly a century ago the United States lost another major city to a natural disaster: the Great Earthquake that leveled San Francisco on 18 April 1906. Here, culled from the record at the Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Francisco by a Daily KOS diarist, are a few instructive observations about how the city handled that catastrophe:
The earthquake struck at 5:13 AM.
By 7 AM federal troops had reported to the mayor.
By 8 AM they were patrolling the entire downtown area and searching for survivors.
The second quake struck at 8:14 AM.
By 10:05 AM the USS Chicago was on its way from San Diego to San Francisco; by 10:30 the USS Preble had landed a medical team and set up an emergency hospital.
By 11 AM large parts of the city were on fire; troops continued to arrive throughout the day, evacuating people from the areas threatened by fire to emergency shelters and Golden Gate Park.
St. Mary’s hospital was destroyed by the fire at 1 PM, with no loss of life, the staff and patients having already been evacuated across the bay to Oakland.
By 3 PM troops had shot several looters, and dynamited buildings to make a firebreak; by five they had buried dozens of corpses, the morgue and the police pistol range being unable to hold any more.
At 8:40 PM General Funston requested emergency housing – tents and shelters – from the War Department in Washington; all of the tents in the U.S. Army were on their way to San Francisco by 4:55 AM the next morning.
Prisoners were evacuated to Alcatraz, and by April 20 (two days after the earthquake) the USS Chicago had reached San Francisco, where it evacuated 20,000 refugees.
Yes, 100 years can make a big difference, can’t it?
From Two Americas by Marjorie Cohn — professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild: Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go.
Cuba’s leaders go on TV and take charge, said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday — which seemed casual to the point of carelessness — suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.
Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable in Cuba, Valdes said. Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin.
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, so that people aren’t reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff, Valdes observed.
My Soundtrack: Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on WOXY.
President Ronald Reagan famously said (but I’ll be damned if I can find an authoritative attribution) The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d suggest that President George Bush is determined to prove him right with help so inept that we holler: Get the hell out of our way!
Well, Doc Searls and Jeff Jarvis are not going quite that far, but they’re coming close. In light of the past week, Jarvis, riffing on a post from Searls, writes at length about a lot of good ideas for bloggers and those who understand the power of communication technology to start thinking about.
Jarvis buries the best line, which comes from Searls, in what is a provacative post:
In the War on Error, people will need to take the lead. Governments will need to follow or get out of the way.
My Soundtrack: Tu M’intrigues by General Elektriks on WOXY.
Former U.S. Representative David Bonoir (D-Michigan) is now chairman of Americna Rights At Work. Today he was on News & Notes and talked about his new job. One of the things he talked about was the organization’s Labor Day List that recognizes the employers that are doing their part to improve the standard of living and working conditions for their workers.
I’m a writer. That’s what I do. But I also need to pay rent, buy gas and food. So I make money on the side working with students in grades 6-12 from three different school districts. I tutor everything except Calculus and the only foreign language I do is Spanish. I spend a lot of time on math. So when my dad forwarded this to me, I went hmmm…
Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried.
Why do I tell you this? Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1960s:
Teaching math in 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?
Teaching math in 1970: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
Teaching math in 1980: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit?
Teaching math in 1990: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
Teaching math in 2000: A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and a right-wing, conservative, anti-Abortion, Gay-bashing, NRA Christian, and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers.)
Teaching math in 2050: Un hachero vende una carretada de madera para $100. El costo de la producción es $80…
OK, so that’s the joke. Here are three real-world math problems I just picked at random from a 2005 6th grade text:
Jesse has run the 400-meter race in every track meet so far this year. At the first meet, his time in the finals was 58.4 seconds. In the second meet, it was 57.8 seconds. In the third meet it was 58.2 seconds. In the fourth it was 57.6 seconds. In the fifth meet he ran the race in 58 seconds, and in the sixth meet he ran it in 57.4 seconds. There is one more track meet before the district meet. If he continues this pattern, what will his time be in the district meet?
a. 58.4 seconds
b. 58.2 seconds
c. 57.6 seconds
d. 57.2 seconds
In order to better understand the nature of farm work, Ms. Sommer”s science class took a field trip to a farm. They spent part of the time picking apples. Students weighed their bags of apples when they were finished, recorded their weights and turned in their amounts to Ms. Sommer. When she looked through these the next day, she found that her 26 students had turned in bags with the following weights, rounded to the nearest pound: 21, 28, 15, 28, 22, 21, 25, 16, 18, 15, 20, 26, 18, 25, 16, 18, 22, 22, 25, 17, 18, 26, 22, 26, 24 and 25 pounds. What is the mode for the amount of apples picked by the students?
a. 18 pounds
b. 20.5 pounds
c. 21 pounds
d. 26 pounds
Twenty-seven is 15 less than 1/3 of some number. Which equation show below best expresses this?
a. n + 15 = 27
b. 27 + 15 = (1/3)n
c. 27 + (1/3)n = 15
d. 27 = 15 + (1/3)n
How well did you do?
My Soundtrack: Facing That Void by General Elektriks on WOXY.
From this morning’s Washington Post: Abu Musab Zarqawi’s foreign-led Al Qaeda in Iraq took open control of a key western town at the Syrian border, deploying its guerrilla fighters in the streets and flying Zarqawi’s black banner from rooftops, witnesses, residents and others in the city and surrounding villages said. A sign newly posted at the entrance of Qaim declared, Welcome to the Islamic Kingdom of Qaim.
Back on Wednesday, 31 August, I picked up the three now infamous looter photos from New Orleans. As the New York Times reports this morning, the photographers who wrote the captions were following guidelines. Where the breakdown occurred was at the editing stage where someone failed to see what hundreds of bloggers caught once the photos were online.
Gematria is the Jewish version of numerology. The idea is that you assign numbers to letters in the Alphabet and then manipulate the numbers to create interesting coincidences. In this case, compliments of my dad, the technique is applied to the motivational ploy — first conceived by, I’m sure, some sport’s coach — of demanding people give more than 100 percent.
What makes 100%? What does it mean to give more than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?
Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:
If: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
Then:
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%
and
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
But,
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%
And,
B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%
And, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%
So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that while hard work and knowledge will get you close, and attitude will get you there, it’s the bullshit and ass kissing that will put you over the top.
Well, I think that clears up a lot about what’s going on in Washington, doesn’t it?
My Soundtrack: Waiting Room by Fugazi on WOXY.
Bull shit! From the October 2004 issue of National Geographic: When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t-yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Compliments of my dad, Read all of the story.
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