A friend forwarded this to us. Yes, it’s a “friend-of-a-friend” situation, but I have no reason to doubt its veracity.

The world of cell phones. I sometimes wonder why I ever took the plunge.Besides constantly battling over where we have service and where we don’t, paying the dreaded ‘over your minutes’ bill, giving people the ability to ALWAYS be able to find you and having to deal with customer service representatives…….why? Why do we do this to ourselves?

Ok, so the White House is denying that Shrub said at a summit in Jordan that god told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. And granted, there seem to be no actual recordings of the comment. However, it appears to be backed up by at least one witness, and, really, doesn’t it sound entirely within Shrub’s character to say such a thing? Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind anymore that the US’s shift from a democracy to a monarchy to a theocracy is complete?

Given the recent furor over inexperienced Friends of Bush being given top positions in the administration, you’d think that Shrub would have had second thoughts about nominating old friend and White House council Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. She has zero judicial experience. She’s a lawyer; she’s never been a judge. In fact, she has only held the post of White House Council since February of this year. I thought that the Democrats remained totally spineless on the John Roberts confirmation. I can only hope that they will summon at least a tiny bit of courage and say “no” to putting another Michael Brown on the Supreme Court.

But then, Shrub often doesn’t have a first thought, let alone a second. How else can one explain putting a person who’s never sat on the Supreme Court in charge of the Supreme Court? Or making someone who is openly contentious of the United Nations ambassador to the United Nations? Or giving out the job of Attorney General as a consolation prize for losing an election to a dead man?

Shrub appears to have learned nothing from the total man-made disaster that emerged from hurricane Katrina. He has zero concept of the consequences that arise from granting positions of power to those who haven’t earned them. When politicians in this country give powerful posts as rewards to friends and those who spent lots of money to get them elected, we call it cronyism. When leaders of other countries give powerful posts as rewards to friends and those who spent lots of money to get them elected, we call it corruption.

Mountain lions have returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Over the last decade, mountain lions, which once existed as little more than rumors, have gained a foothold and established a sizeable population. Now state officials say that there are too many lions and have authorized South Dakota’s first-ever mountain lion season. Already, over 1,000 licenses have been handed out.

Problem is, there are only an estimated 150 lions in the Black Hills. The entire population could be wiped out in a single hunting season. Mountain lions are already extinct in many neighboring states in the west; South Dakota does not need to add to that. In theory, the season will end when 25 lions are brought into the Rapid City Game Fish and Parks office. How realistic is that? With 1,000 hunters prowling around the hills and prairies on opening day, what are the odds that the kill will be no more than 25 lions? I’ve seen these guys hunt and fish. It’s common practice to take well over your limit and simply conceal the extra.

It’s true that because a mountain lion has such a large territory (300 sq miles), they have encroached into populated areas as their numbers grow. However, if it’s becoming a problem, the GFP should partake its own controlled hunt to cull their numbers. Letting a bunch of hunters do the job for them will only cause overkill and destabilize a mountain lion population that’s only now emerging from the brink of extinction.

In typical fashion, Shrub has managed to turn tragedy into profits for his rich buddies. On Friday, Shrub suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay at least the prevailing wage of the area in which they are working. For instance, the average roofer in Louisiana may normally make $12 an hour (a figure pulled straight out of my butt); suspending the Davis-Bacon Act means that federal contractors working in Louisiana can pay their roofers as low as the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour. There are a lot of unemployed people in the hurrican zone right now who are going to be temporarily hired by these contractors, and they aren’t going to be paid what they deserve.

And who is going to benefit from this change? BushCo’s old corporate pals. Two of the biggest federal contracts handed out so far have been to Kellog Brown and Root–a subsidary of VP Cheney’s old company Halliburton (Remember them? The no-bid contractor who has made over $9 billion taxpayer dollars so far for work in Iraq)–and to Shaw Group, both clients of Shrub’s former campaign manager and head of FEMA Joe Allbaugh. It’s worth noting that Allbaugh resigned his position as head of FEMA to form a firm called New Bridges Strategies, which exists solely to discover profit opportunities for American companies in war-ravaged Iraq.

In addition, the CEO of another contractor, Bechtel Corp, is a Shrub appointee to the Export Council. A former Bechtel CEO and Bush for President 2000 campaign chair in Maine, Ross Connelly, was appointed to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government entity which secures loans for American companies working in foreign countries.

One of the largest contributors to the human suffering in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf coast was cronyism–inexperienced people appointed to high-ranking positions not because of what they could do, but because of who they knew. It seems that BushCo has learned nothing and is merrily bumbling along in the only way it knows how: political payback.

And Dennis Hastert, too, for skipping the emergency relief funding vote so he could attend a fundraiser. They should be forced to live alongside the bodies piled in the freezer, including those of the 5-year-old girl who was gang-raped and the 7-year-old whose throat was slashed.

Reminds me of the mantra from Stephen King’s Cujo: “Nope, nothing wrong here.”

From CNN:

The House majority leader late Tuesday tried to deflect criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina by saying “the emergency response system was set up to work from the bottom up,” then announced a short time later that House hearings examining that response had been canceled.

It strikes me that the title of this blog is more appropriate than ever. It has its origins in a regular column I wrote for my college paper many moons ago. In that particular frame of the film, the economy was stagnant in a recession no one would acknowledge, we were in the midst of (at the time) the most controversial war since Vietnam, and the emerging science of DNA comparison was revealing a ghastly number of innocent people sentenced to Death Row. Every facet of what we had known to be good and just about the world seemed to be, piece by piece, falling down around us.

How little things change, eh?

Now we have witnessed the literal collapse of both a city and society within it. Now that adequate relief support has finally reached the survivors along the gulf coast, the real questions are beginning to be asked. Primarily: why the hell did it take four days for meaningful help to reach these poor people? Even President Clinton, reluctant ever to speak a harsh word of anyone, said, “Our government failed those people in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it. One hundred percent of the people recognize that–that it was a failure.”

At the end of Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, even milder-mannered Bob Schieffer delivered what for him was a downright foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe against the officals responsible. It bears repeating. I hope he will not mind my reprinting it here in full for those who missed it:

A personal thought. We have come through what may have been one of the worst weeks in America’s history, a week in which government at every level failed the people it was created to serve. There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens. Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.

As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don’t have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest.

By midweek a parade of Washington officials rushed before the cameras to urge patience. What good is patience to a mother who can’t find food and water for a dehydrated child? Washington was coming out of an August vacation stupor and seemed unable to refocus on business or even think straight. Why else would Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert question aloud whether New Orleans should even be rebuilt? And when he was unable to get to Washington in time to vote on emergency aid funds, Hastert had an excuse only Washington could understand: He had to attend a fund-raiser back home.

Since 9/11, Washington has spent years and untold billions reorganizing the government to deal with crises brought on by possible terrorist attacks. If this is the result, we had better start over.

The raw stories coming out of New Orleans are un-fucking-believable. Civilization has collapsed. The police have become desperate animals right along with the rest of the people who have devolved into survival mode in the flooded ruins of The Big Uneasy. The streets are ruled by armed thugs. Gunmen have invaded at least one hospital, rescue operations have been suspended because helicopters and rescue boats are being fired upon. The situation at the Superdome is sickening and is about to implode.

“We tried to airlift supplies into Kenner Memorial Hospital late last evening and were confronted by an unruly crowd with guns, and the pilots refused to land.”

Quite honestly, I don’t think the situation is going to come under control until either there is a mass slaughter of survivors amongst one another, or the National Guard is reduced to machine-gunning people from the air.

It’s hard to believe that this is America. These are stories we only hear out of second- and third-world countries where survival was pretty much your own to begin with.

Ten-thousand National Guard on the way. Those with the least training and experience (all of those were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan). An estimated 100,000 survivors and survivalists are left in the city. Ten-to-one. Ten-to-one odds for the National Guard to attempt to quell the violence, bring relief supplies, and construct evacuation routes while attempting to hold the crumbling levees together and drain the standing water.

Can the Shrub smirk his way through this human and political catastrophe? These are the types of conditions which cause the citizens of other countries to march upon the palaces with rifles and baseball bats. Do you think once the survivors escape their situation–which most likely will mean little more than tent cities with minimal food supplies and sanitation–that they will be thankful? Or will they ask, “Why did it take so long to rescue us from that hell? How were conditions allowed to get so bad? Why wasn’t the city and government better prepared for what they had known could happen for years?”

A year and a half ago, New Orleans was awarded $7.1 million in homeland security funds. Apparently most of the money was earmarked for anti-terrorism measures in the city’s ports. Why, in what we learned from the aftermat of Sept 11, 2001, did the city’s police experience a total communcations failure? In a city in constant threat of flooding and hindered by isolating geography why were mass-rescue plans and facilities never created?

So where did the money go? One thing’s for certain: money is now meaningless in the lawless cesspool that used to be New Orleans.