Bush to Play Dressup Again?

Unbelievably, the president apparently still has a hankering for screentime. A tip, George: going down in history as the most narcissistic president of all time is not going to enshrine you at disneyworld or distract anyone from your pattern of being AWOL and unaccountable whenever it matters.

What sort of getup do you suppose his fashion consultant KKKarl has in mind for this?

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

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One fire chief from Texas agreed that the call was clear to work as community-relations officers. But he wonders why the 1,400 firefighters FEMA attracted to Atlanta aren't being put to better use. He also questioned why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - of which FEMA is a part - has not responded better to the disaster.

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"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

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.

Lies Beget Lies

The Katrina aftermath certainly seems to aptly encapsulate the sorry state of the formerly democratic nation occupying the space between Mexico and Canada. Despite bountiful prior evidence that the White House is infested by the most criminal, dishonest, unpatriotic, and anti-American cabal in all history, George's failure to deal with this Katrina tragedy will I predict be one of the most prominent notes in his pathetic historical record.

Anyone be-brained and still willing and able to think for themselves has by now been exposed to bountiful evidence that the bureaucracy George Bush, our self-acclaimed "Commander-in-Chief" is in charge of, dropped the ball. Okay, that's putting it too kindly. George's organization, in effect George's gov-corporation, has flat out blown it, on a level that is from what I can tell unprecedented in the history of our presidency. It seems almost certain now that thousands died needlessly as a direct result of the President's congenital cowardice and incompetence and the resulting disinterest and ineptitude of the people he has owed debts to for covering up his lifelong personal failures and alas paid off with government sinecures.

But I believe that is still being too kind. To put it plainly, our president is a war criminal and a perpetrator of genocide, personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Please make a point of saying that out loud with someone else present.

The Washington Post, once a paper that could at times surprise us by at least trying to report the news, albeit typically with a pro-business, pro-administration bias, given their corporate ownership, is flat on their face today after swallowing whole yet another White House lie. It's hard to imagine this stuff continuing to happen. "Sucker" would be a compliment for these folks. Unlike the president, who has never made a mistake of any sort in his own admission, the paper at least attempted to correct the record. It will take more than that though to convince any thinking reader (presumably, no matter how improbable, there are still a few) that this now hang-dog, largely sycophantic paper can be trusted.

Newsweek magazine apparently foolishly swallowed the same lie from the Rove-managed disinformation campaign. No admission by the magazine yet of their "mistake" as far as I have heard. The White House lies, the mainstream media echoes without any actual journalism. That's where democracy as we know it is dying.

As an aside, reports continue that the federal government is to obscene degrees flagging information as secret and thus attempting to hide their operations from the view of the voters. In the past of course the voters were the clients and in charge here. Given what we have seen in the last five years, there can be no doubt that tax dollars increasingly wrung from the poor and middle class are being spent in desperate attempts to hide the increasingly implausible facade of lies that are the essence of George and Karl.

Keep asking questions!! "Question authority" is a more critical watchword today than ever before. Most of our "authorities" these days belong behind bars from what I can tell.

Josh Marshall is once again my source:

Talking Points Memo

As noted, the Washington Post got burned today by a "senior Bush official" who told them that Gov. Blanco of Louisiana had never declared a state of emergency in the site -- a claim the Post printed as fact. Yet the claim was demonstrably false and by late afternoon the Post had been compelled to print a correction.

This week's Newsweek contains the same false claim -- and though their recital of the anecdote is unsourced, common sense suggests that someone or some operation fed them both the same line, which neither organization checked out before running.

Monday's Times, not surprisingly, confirms that the White House damage control operation is being run by Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett.
Add it up.

And who will report this out?