Fickle nation

Accordng to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, George Bush's job approval rating has climbed to 45 percent. That is a whole five points up from last week.

Maybe this rise is due to the fact that Bush -- who (as the whole world knows) continued his vacation at his Texas ranch while Katrina was devastating the Gulf Coast -- eventually made seven photo-op trips to the hurricane-battered region.

He also, after almost five years of whacking away at all things protective of the environment, shocked weary ears with a call to drive less and conserve energy.

(Of course the newborn environmentalist did not mention that those Rove-staged flights to Louisiana and Mississippi cost taxpayers $6,029.00 per hour. But's it's a good thing that poor George doesn't have to pay for his flights out of pocket, since his salary is only $400,000 a year. Good heavens, that's only 76 cents a minute.)

Latest AP poll on Iraq

The latest Associated Press poll re the Iraq war/occupation has found that only 37 percent approve or lean toward approval of how Bush has handled the situation in Iraq; strong disapproval outweighs strong approval by 2-1, 46 percent to 22 percent.

In the meantime, Sunday's pro-war demo in Washington expected 20,000 people but only drew 400, while Saturday's anti-war event drew at least 100,000.

Challenging the national arrogance

Last Monday, the New York Times began a paid subscription requirement for those who want to read the Times' op-ed columnists. (There are other benefits to the subscription, such as access to their archives.) Some folks are having a bit of a fit over this, but I subscribed right away. I did so because I believe that section of the NYT is one of the very few places in the mainline US media where the truth is told in plain, unvarnished, hard-hitting language.

Just one example, in today' edition, from Nicholias Kristof's article, "A Health Care Disaster":

"In both Mississippi and Louisiana, infant mortality is worse (for every 1,000 babies born, 10 die in their first year of life) than in Costa Rica (8 die per 1,000). For black babies in either state, the picture is still more horrifying: 15 die per 1,000. In poor, war-torn Sri Lanka, where per capita medical spending is only $131, babies have better odds, with 13 dying per 1,000. So let's rebuild the levees, but let's also construct a health care system that works. A dozen years after the last, failed attempt to reform health care, the system is more broken than ever."

While Rita draws near...

Maureen Dowd has a real gift for succinctness. Here is the last part of her column in today's New York Times:

Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin.

When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving.

Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months.

Rich on Bush

I would call Frank Rich's article in today's NY Times a Must-read. In fact, if he had dedicated more than a brief mention to the horrendous Iraq fiasco, I would call the article the best portrait ever of George W. Bush.

Here is just one paragaraph from Rich's article (entitled "Message: I Care About the Black Folks):

"The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action."

Lest we forget about Iraq

As of today, 1,898 young Americans have been killed in Iraq since Bush unleashed his mad war on March 19, 2003. 1,761 of these have been killed since Bush did his "mission accomplished" carrier show. That was May 1, 2003.

The official number of US wounded is now 14,362; the estimated number is between 15,000 and 42,500.

The latest US fatality was today.

Perhaps we will soon get an updated report from The Lancet on Iraqi deaths. In any case, these have to number way beyond 100,000 by now.

Madness. But at least many more people are waking up across the land and Bush's popular support is sinking day by day.

This is a president?

The following is from Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times:

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

goodness amidst the horrors

Last week we heard that up to 2,500 evacuees might be flown into Tucson. But only one plane arrived, with about 80 people from New Orleans on board. (They did not learn where they were going until the plane was in the air.) That was Wednesday. Tonight the last of these evacuees moved to homes in the Tucson area. Having seen TV pictures of crowded conditions in places like Houston, I have no idea why more people were not sent here. But even this single flight brought a humanitarian response that seems to be taking place all across the country. With a federal government still in denial about the blood on its hands, people who believe compassion is more than a Karl Rove buzzword have turned out en masse to volunteer. Here in Tucson, a flood of volunteers came downtown from all corners of the city. They were clearly a multi-racial, multi-aged, multi-churched bunch. The lower level of the Tucson Convention Center was a sea of cots, surrounded by everything from a pharmacy to food, clothing and even a pet care section. Upstairs the long main hallway was lined on both sides with tables staffed by our county health department, the Red Cross and many other agencies. If this same spirit is carried to the polls, there are going to be big changes in the country next year.

Thru Canadian & Irish eyes

"We have all watched as a large part of the United States fell from a First World society into Third World death, chaos and social breakdown."

--Historian J.L. Granastein, a fellow of the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, writing in Canada's The Globe and Mail


"When America looks at the huge expanse of filthy, fetid water that has drowned New Orleans, it becomes a mirror in which it finally sees the scars on its own face. The scars of poverty, of racism, of ideological zealotry, of public corruption and of environmental degradation, usually concealed by a cosmetic media, become visible."

--Fintan O'Toole, writing in The Irish Times

Even the conservative voices...

Conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks wrote last Sunday:

"The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled...
Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."

It seems everybody but Bush & Co. gets it.

What America's done to itself

James Carroll in today's Boston Globe:

"Here was Katrina's second main epiphany -- what it means that the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of ''privatization," the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself."

A prophecy fulfilled

From the Houston Chronicle in 2001:
"The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city's less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet (6m) of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering ... If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or a category three storm or greater with at least 111 mp/h (178km/h) winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said."

Of course Katrina hit as a category four. And the whole world knows who's been at the helm for almost five years -- five years of tax cutting, infrastructure neglecting, program defunding, illegal war spending and colonial occupying.

Impeachment is long overdue.

Bush's buck

So now Bush's fan clubs are having a fit because lots of people are indicting him for negligence in the face of Hurricane Katrina. But he is the commander-in-chief (though apparently one who does not watch much TV news, at least in the last week), and there is nowhere else the buck should stop.

Not an operational brain in the world could see all those gruesome New Orleans pictures on TV and not ask how this could be happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. How mostly white folks with cars could quickly drive away from danger while tens of thousands of mostly black folks would have to sit in arenas or attics or on rooftops for days with not a rescue bus or boat in sight. The Coast Guard helicopter crews working around the clock must have wondered where on earth the federal reinforcements were.

To maintain his occupation, Bush presently has 118,000 Guardsmen in Iraq. 6,000 of these are from Louisiana and Mississippi. Imagine what a difference even the 6,000 could have made in New Orleans from Monday through Thursday.

The next Gallup report on Bush's approval rate should be very interesting indeed.

Bush & Hurricane Katrina

See today's NY Times editorial on Bush's dreadful Katrina speech. Even more succinctly, here is what Philadelphia Daily News Senior Writer Will Bunch wrote today:

"Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefited the rich.  Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time."