agitprop version 2.0

Crisis In Newport Beach!

Sea Lions Attack Rich People:

In a scene that has played out up and down the West Coast, the whiskered creatures are charming tourists but exasperating local officials, who are studying a far-flung set of strategies to thwart the federally protected mammals. On Wednesday, the Newport Beach Harbor Commission debated the situation, which has taken on added urgency since 18 sea lions piled onto a 37-foot sailboat and sank it over Labor Day weekend. The sheriff's Harbor Patrol has also been inundated with noise complaints. "A barking dog doesn't hold a candle to this. It's like 40 barking dogs — in surround sound," grumbled Balboa Peninsula resident Darci Schriber.

Well, what do you expect when you live on the coast and invade their natural habitat?

City workers and criminals serving community service terms formed 24-hour sea lion patrols, armed with giant squirt guns to scare off the lumbering intruders. Elsewhere along the Pacific coast, sea lions have attacked swimmers, chomped bodyboards and even yanked people off boats.

Sea lions of the world unite! Only you can destroy the ruling class by sinking their yachts and polluting the sonic space surrounding their mansions!

Faith-Based Disaster Relief

Hulkaleezza to the rescue:

BAYOU LA BATRE - After fending off criticism that help came too slowly for Hurricane Katrina's black victims, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nodded in agreement Sunday to a call for patience.

"Wait for the Lord," the Rev. Malone Smith Jr. told Rice and the rest of the Pilgrim Rest AME Zion congregation outside Mobile.

"There are some things the president can do; there are some things the government can do," Smith told about 300 worshippers. "But God can do all things. I want you to know he's never late. He's always on time."

Rice, the Bush administration's chief defender against charges that the government's sluggish response showed racial insensitivity, later echoed the call for patience.

"The Lord is going to come on time, if we just wait," she said.

Be patient you whiny petulant children. All you do is complain!

"Waaahh, we lost our house in the hurricane. We had no food or water for a week. No one helped us, not even the government. Waaahh!!"

Be patient and the Lord will come to your rescue (that is if you pray correctly).

Condi's damage control mission simply gives credence to Kanye West's outburst last Friday. If I may I'd like to revise Mr. West's statment . . . George Bush doesn't care about poor black people or ones that aren't in his administration. Actually, George Bush doesn't care about anyone but his corporate donors.

This also speaks volumes about the Republican attitude toward government. Starve it until it drowns in a bathtub. Then, simply tell citizens that they must be patient and wait for God's help.

hat tip: watertiger

hurricane katrina katrina politics michael brown kanye west

Katrina, One Week Later

The chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina and the lack of federal response to the disaster has led to some interesting discourse as well as some strange politicking.  I'd like to give a quick wrap-up to some of these items.

Look what the Queen Mum had to say about hurricane victims who are finding refuge in Houston. Babs thinks that poor black people are not only scary but they are also opportunistic:

"What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality . . . And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them." 

I think it's fair to call George W. Bush a son of a bitch. Norm has the audio @ onegoodmove. Maybe we can ship both Babs and Pat Robertson off to the funny farm now?

I previously mentioned that according to the media, black people loot while white people borrow. Well, it appears that cops borrow as well. Check out this footage of cops borrowing merchandise at Wal-Mart.

Bill Clinton spoke out today on CNN about the lack of federal response to aid hurricane victims:

"Our government failed those people in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it," Clinton told CNN. "One hundred percent of the people recognize that -- that it was a failure." We've got the departments on the ground, we've got the military on the ground, we've got a chance to do it right now, and we should do it right," he said. "And then in an appropriate time we should analyze what went wrong and why and what changes should be made."

Say what you want about his extra-marital affair, but at least Clinton didn't cut funding and staff to FEMA for three straight years in a row like the Chimperor has. Thanks Dubya!

Republic of T notes that Al Gore was helping hurricane victims evacuate from New Orleans and flying them to his home state of Tennessee. He kept these actions under the radar without any fanfare unlike Bush's Friday photo-ops.

Last but not least, I recommend reading or watching Keith Olbermann's hard-hitting editorial from yesterday evening:

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?  I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant . . .

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

Countdown is probably the only MSM show I watch occasionally, simply because Olbermann is not a right-wing wacko talking head like the rest of the pundits on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc. Norm has the video and transcript here in case MSNBC decides to pull a Winston Smith and erase Olbermann's blog. There is video here also.

Got any interesting Katrina-related information? Send it along in the comments . . .

hurricane katrina katrina politics barbara bush bill clinton keith olbermann downing street memo

This did NOT have to happen

       

As I was driving home today I flipped the radio on the Tom Leykis show [note: his website contains explicit material]. Typically I can't stand the arrogant bloviations of this fat misogynist pig but today I was curious to see what he had to say about the hurricane and its aftermath. Quoting an article by Tim Rutten in today's LA Times, Leykis noted that the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided. Rutten's article actually discusses a 2002 joint report by NPR's All Things Considered and the Times-Picayune which argued that New Orleans was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week.

The report describes this week's events so closely that it is eerie:

The series' second part began: "It's a matter of when, not if. Eventually a major hurricane will hit New Orleans head on, instead of being just a close call. It's happened before and it'll happen again." In that installment, McQuaid and Schleifstein reported that "a major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.... Evacuation is the most certain route to safety, but it may be a nightmare. And 100,000 without transportation will be left behind.... Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins....

The original full five-part report from the Times-Picayune is located at NOLA.com. The original two-part NPR audio report is archived in Real format at NPR (1) and (2).

According to the NPR report, scientists predicted the odds were 1 in 6 for a storm as powerful as Katrina. What amazes me is that the local, state and federal governments ignored these warnings from scientists and reporters. The federal government even cut funding to the Army Corps of Engineers--the very group responsible for bolstering the levees which broke--despite insistence by Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu.

Editor and Publisher has a nice breakdown how the federal funding was removed from this project and pumped into the Iraq War:

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That's your government at work folks. Give tax cuts to the wealthy and spend money blowing shit up in foreign countries while starving the beast at home and neglecting the security of the nation.

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The Day After Tomorrow

         

In what could only be described as an Emporer Nero moment, Chimperor Dubya casually strummed a guitar yesterday while the Gulf Coast states continued to drown. As an American I would expect our leader to do everything in his power to help those in need. As a guitarist I am deeply troubled at the sight of Bush touching my favorite instrument.   

Here the bloggers weigh in on Hurricane Katrina:

• The Heretik:  George W. Bush as the Invisible Caesar American.
• RJ Eskow:  A rudderless ship adrift in the gulf.
• Tattered Coat:  Matt has excellent coverage of Atlantis and ways to help.
• Broken Windows:  Kate has been keeping track of the damage.
• Liberal Revolt:  Please remember our blogger friend Vaughn this week. He is, or was, a resident of New Orleans. He and his wife are now refugees and their home most likely destroyed.
• BoingBoing: A Tale of Two Photos (Bush + Geetar)

Please help. There are a variety of ways to do so.

Network for Good:  Hurricane Katrina has blazed a trail of devastation throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Across the Gulf Coast, Katrina engulfed thousands of homes and decimated the landscape in what could become the most destructive storm in U.S. history. Victims are stranded and in need of immediate medical care, food and water, and tens of thousands of people will need temporary housing for months. Help people affected by this storm by making a donation today.

hurricane katrina

Club a Baby Seal, Pass Go and Collect $200

$200 Canadian Dollars that is. The great Canadian seal hunt is on. Is it an economic necessity to satisfy the needs of the European fashion market or just plain genocidal? I say genocide. Here's what the Guardian reports:

Thousands of sealers armed with clubs, rifles and spears headed for the ice floes off eastern Canada yesterday for the world's largest seal hunt. The annual slaughter of harp seal pups has been the target of protests since the 1960s. It begins about 12 days after the seal pups are born and animal rights activists say the pups are clubbed to death and often skinned alive. But sealers and government officials who monitor the hunt insist the pups die instantly, under strictly monitored guidelines.

"It's just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see," Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States, said by satellite phone from the Gulf of St Lawrence yesterday. "We've seen seals that were moving around and breathing, that have been left in these piles, some left conscious and crawling," said Ms Aldworth, a native Newfoundlander who has observed the seal hunt for the past six years.

The white and black furry seals with cute puppy dog faces are being slaughtered as I type on my keyboard. Some are only weeks old when they are brutally clubbed or shot, left to bleed to death on the ice flats. You can sign a petition at The Humane Society to protect the seals. They also have some pretty graphic photos.

Unfortunately there's not much that can be done to stop this. Economics dictate this tragedy. The hunt is well under way and when it is over about 300,000 seals will be dead. It just amazes me that in the 21st century humans will still take part in such barbaric acts of destruction. I don't think we've evolved much as a human race. This planet is still plagued by the same tragedies of war, genocide, barbarism, poverty and oppression that existed 2,000 years ago. Sorry for the downer. I must seek to accentuate the positive . . .