Me Put Pee-Pee In Your Coke

Looks like Discover the Nutwork has made proactive enemies. From David Horowitz's Blog

We are battling a dedicated and pernicious hacker based in Communist China, who is attempting to divert visitors to DiscoverTheNetworks to a Communist Chinese website. The hacker has been blocked from the site several times but keeps coming back. We will defeat him in the end, but need your patience in the meantime. In addition to showing how serious and unscrupulous our enemies are, this hacker demonstrates -- no doubt inadvertently -- our international reach and respect.

Just before the site went down we had had 2.98 million visitors since February 15 of this year.

I remember when they were bragging about how many countries they were reaching. Looks like some of their readers decided to bite back.

Warrior Chang, friend of Jeb

"Last week, after “more than an hour of solemn ceremony” swearing in Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium to tell “a short story about ‘unleashing Chang,’ his ‘mystical warrior’ friend.”

"Below, courtesy of the Gainesville Sun, are Bush’s words, “spoken before hundreds of lawmakers and politicians”:

“Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.

“I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”

Bush then unsheathed a golden sword and gave it to Rubio as a gift.

‘’I'm going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior,'’ he said, as the crowd roared

It reads like something out of The Onion, but it's no joke

So was it Chang who told him to send state troopers to stop Terri's breathing tube from being removed? Inquiring minds want to know.

Hitchens vs Galloway

http://www.democracynow.org/ has the full debate.

There's a wonderful line from "the Abyss" - "Hippie, please don't take my side in this." That's how I feel listening to Galloway, and that's probably how I'd feel listening to Hitchens if I was still leaning on that side of the argument. Both of them are tedious, if well spoken, and it remains to be seen whether Galloway is really as dirty as some say he is.

Debunking Katrina

Thinkprogress has done some homework

That said, I'd have to give it a B-, as the bit about the buses still leaves a massive problem - why didn't they use what they had to evacuate?

Heads should roll for this, yes, but not only Bush's - I think Nagin and Blanco deserve a chop as well.

Bedtime for Bozo / Running for the Border

(courtesy of Cloudwatcher)

From Newsweek:

"Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed."

(Italics, and disgust, mine)

In better news, "Brownie" has resigned.

I guess the trip to DC for margaritas and a mexican meal prefigured a literal run for the border...?

The Many Faces of "Brownie"

Is there anything this clown hasn't lied about on his resume?

The good news is that he's been relieved of his oversight and sent back to DC, now that the truth is finally out.

The bad news is that it's thousands of lost lives later.

"What didn't go right?"

Before Katrina, the Republican theory received its most apposite formulation by a prominent lobbyist and close advisor to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, who said about government that he wanted to "drown it in the bathtub." In relation to the waters that surround it, New Orleans has been described as a bathtub, and it has served as the bathtub for Norquist's wish.

Sydney Blumenthal brings it all down over at Salon - well worth the ad, as well as having to skip some of his purple prose on the first page to get at the meat on the second.

"Come see the lack of caring inherent in the system!"

So, Louisianna's a hellhole and New Orleans is now a (hopefully temporary) body of water known as Lake George.

What does Condi Rice do? Go on vacation, and go to see Spamalot

I'll admit that she's more foreign policy than domestic, but that stinks to high heaven in the face of what we've just faced, and will continue to face for some time to come.

Piss-Poor Planning leads to Perdition

The federal government so far has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.

The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, told Knight Ridder that the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting the global war on terrorism.

...

"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."

And, from another article:

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."

And it doesn't help that the National Guard's off in Iraq, now does it?

I'm speechless at the devastation, speechless at our poor planning for it, and speechless and enraged at our so-far lackluster response to it. Speechless.

And angry.