Bush: To all the people of New Orleans I say......

[Atlas]

[Atlas]

[DBruleU]

You guys are clever. Just do a shop job on hundreds of Bush pictures, and hope you can get a fallowing from it.

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Originally Posted by DBruleU

You guys are clever. Just do a shop job on hundreds of Bush pictures, and hope you can get a fallowing from it.

Are you a farmer?

.

[DBruleU]

Originally Posted by Bronco_Beerslug

Are you a farmer?

.

oops, typo. If you're gonna be critical of my typing, please start with spiders first. You'd have more fun there.

[Rohirrim]

What is Bush's position on Roe V. Wade?





He doesn't care how they get out of New Orleans.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by Bronco_Beerslug

Are you a farmer?

His chickens are coming home to roost...

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The last few weeks have been irrefutable proof that America is being wrecked and mismanaged by the most incompetent, dangerous and out of touch boobs ever to obtain power. Any American with even a tiny amount of conscience who watched those images from New Orleans shook their heads with disbelief and shame that something like this should happen within our own borders in these modern times. As pictures of floating corpses glared at us through our TV sets, we were treated to photo-ops of our supposed leader golfing, blithering about Social Security, eating cake and strumming a guitar. Meanwhile, our Secretary of State shopped for shoes and took in a show while the Vice President shopped for a house in a ritzy Maryland neighborhood.

And just as it was four years ago before the smoke had cleared in Southern Manhattan, the Bush people are running from any sense of responsibility or accountability before the waters are gone from New Orleans . Oh sure, I know Bush came out later the same week and assumed responsibility for any short-comings by the federal government, but that ploy was devised to address his pathetic numbers rather than any altruistic intentions. They still shamelessly accuse those who point to the pathetic response of the federal government of playing the "blame game" and "pointing fingers" while they and their media mouthpieces do exactly the same thing when referring to State and Local officials. But there are other unfortunate similarities regarding Bush and Company's actions that also remind us of what happened four years ago besides their chronic fear of accountability.

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/dave3_035.htm

[W*GS]

Wait a sec - Bush promises to spend and do whatever it takes to rebuild New Orleans, and that means he's telling them to eff off?

Did any of you see his speech the other night? From what I gather, the floodgates of federal dollars and programs have opened and NO will be awash in taxpayer-supplied cash. Isn't that what liberals want? An endless supply of federal money?

Perhaps you folks are just miffed that he out-liberaled most liberals with his plans for the Gulf Coast. If I was a Republican, I'd be mortified at Bush's promises, and the costs thereof. As a taxpayer, I'm none too happy.

[ant1999e]

It'll never be good enough for them.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by ant1999e

It'll never be good enough for them.

Because a crook and a failure like Bush sets the bar way, way too low for a great country like America.

Your denial and your insistence on putting party before country prevents you from seeing this.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Wait a sec - Bush promises to spend and do whatever it takes to rebuild New Orleans, and that means he's telling them to eff off?

Did any of you see his speech the other night? From what I gather, the floodgates of federal dollars and programs have opened and NO will be awash in taxpayer-supplied cash. Isn't that what liberals want? An endless supply of federal money?

Perhaps you folks are just miffed that he out-liberaled most liberals with his plans for the Gulf Coast. If I was a Republican, I'd be mortified at Bush's promises, and the costs thereof. As a taxpayer, I'm none too happy.

So far, judging by the contracts already put out, Bush's cronys are the only ones who will be raking in that dough.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by The O'W*GS Factor

Wait a sec - Bush promises to spend and do whatever it takes to rebuild New Orleans, and that means he's telling them to eff off?

Um, I think he was referring to those four days after the hurricane when Smirk sat on his ass while God knows how many people perished in New Orleans, Einstein.

But don't let such a subtle distinction interrupt your kneeling and bobbing for BushCo.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Um, I think he was referring to those four days after the hurricane when Smirk sat on his ass while God knows how many people perished in New Orleans, Einstein.

I see. No amount of taxpayer-supplied moneys and programs will be enough to erase Bush's failures of those four days.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

But don't let such a subtle distinction interrupt your kneeling and bobbing for BushCo.

I can see how you and Fred Phelps belong to the same political party. Assuming you have the gumption to be a registered Democrat, that is - and not just a one-note do-nothing.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by The O'W*GS Factor

Bush promises to spend and do whatever it takes to rebuild New Orleans...

...except ask his rich friends to share the costs or sacrifices, that is.

Just like his nation-building fiasco in Iraq.

Tax cuts for corporations, millionaires, and billionaires are priority #1.

[W*GS]

Whoaaah
Sep 15th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Mr Bush is doing better, but throwing money at the problem may make a bad mess worse

This week saw something of a turning point for both New Orleans and George Bush. Down on the Gulf coast, some sense of order returned to the flooded city (see article). Meanwhile, the president began to act presidentially. Mr Bush belatedly took “responsibility” for the failures of the federal government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He also belatedly pushed out Michael Brown, a horse expert whom he had foolishly appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The arguments about who got what wrong will have a big impact on American politics (see article). But the main priority for Mr Bush should be avoiding any further mistakes—and there are worrying signs. “Nothing can salve the wounds like money,” a White House official told Time magazine last week. That is the prevailing wisdom in Washington, DC, as politicians rush to atone for their earlier incompetence. Some $60 billion has been pledged for post-hurricane relief and reconstruction (with far, far more to come) and some contracting rules about competitive bidding have been loosened.

When it comes to immediate relief, this is understandable. Some of the cash will no doubt be wasted through cronyism and fraud, but America has been shamed by its inability to look after the destitute. The bigger problem lies ahead with the money that is supposed to go to reconstruction. That is partly because the numbers are far larger. But it is also because throwing money at the Gulf coast now may set America up for an even bigger mess when the next natural disaster strikes.

Consider the question of how to rebuild New Orleans. Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, recently suggested that some areas of the city could be bulldozed; so great was the outcry at this cruelty that he had to issue an apologetic clarification. This is nonsense. Many of the worst-hit areas were not just unusually vulnerable to flood; they were also among the most squalid places in the country. They should not be brought back.

Even if Mr Bush thinks he has a responsibility to rebuild a new New Orleans, some transparent weighing of costs and benefits is needed. Too much federal cash for reconstruction will encourage yet more development along the hurricane- and flood-prone Gulf coast. And the “moral hazard” extends well beyond the South: the more cash that is spent rebuilding New Orleans, the more foolhardy Californians will be about where they build in their earthquake-prone state, confident the government will bail them out if the “Big One” strikes.

A big part of the problem is America's system of insurance against natural disasters. Hurricanes are covered by the private market but, since 1968, the federal government has been responsible for the provision of flood insurance. The reasoning was that, since flood victims expected to be bailed out by the government anyway, they might as well pay up front.

The division between flood and hurricane now sets up the spectre of endless lawsuits between insurers and the homeowners over whether the damage was caused by wind or water. Meanwhile, although federal flood insurance was both subsidised and supposedly obligatory for most mortgage holders, remarkably few people on the Gulf had federal cover: less than a fifth along Mississippi's coast and only 40% in New Orleans. People bet that if a hurricane struck, the government would bail them out. In California, for much the same reason, only one in five homes is insured against earthquakes.

The cleanest approach would be to get rid of federal flood insurance entirely and let the private market price the risks of living below sea level or in flood-prone areas. The problem is that the inevitability of government bail-outs will persuade many not to pay up. An alternative would be to make natural-disaster insurance (covering floods, earthquakes, avalanches and so on) obligatory, with premiums more closely reflecting the risk. The system could be run for profit by the private sector, with the government, in effect, acting only as an insurer of last resort. This would cost homeowners money and force them to be more careful about where they live; but that, surely, is the point.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

One big sham

New Orleans as Potemkin Village

Three cheers for Maureen Dowd for exposing the sham of President' Bush's Jackson Square speech to the nation announcing his "recovery plan" for New Orleans, and a big fat raspberry for the electronic media-and for Dowd's own New York Times-for failing to mention it in their "hard-news" coverage of the speech.

For those who missed it, Bush, dressed in a pressed, blue, open-collar dress shirt (not "badly tailored" this time), was backed by a beautifully blue-lit St. Louis Cathedral. What Dowd pointed out in her 9/17 column, was that the lighting was flown in by the White House advance team, along with generators (most of New Orleans is still without power). To spare the American public from seeing the darkened ghost town of the surrounding French Quarter, the Bush advance team also flew in military camouflage netting, which was strung up behind the president to block out all buildings but the cathedral.

As Dowd pointed out, the setting, on TV screens, resembled nothing so much as the Disney castle-an appropriate metaphor for the whole Bush presidency, with its focus on imagery, stagecraft and hocus-pocus.

What boggles the mind is how our national media has become so inured to this kind of manipulation that reporters don't even bother to mention it. Viewers are left in the dark about the way they are being deceived.

Continued: http://counterpunch.org/lindorff09172005.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Pillaging, looting — Republicans are the real pros

Now comes the real looting!

The $200 billion that President George W. Bush has earmarked for rebuilding the Gulf of Mexico region is chum for the big-ticket, GOP contributors. It will bring in the Great White contract-seeking sharks from Maine all the way to Iraq.

Compared to this impending Category 5 feeding frenzy, the hurricane looting that so transfixed media cameras was barely a summer breeze. Fox News, for example, spared no cameras in videotaping the looting. The poor of New Orleans were caught wet-handed in the muddy floodwaters of Katrina scavenging for food and drink, and yes, the criminal element were photographed floating off with pilfered weapons and appliances.

It did not matter to Fox that there were no clerks handy when the displaced flood victims broke through the store doors for succor certain to be written off as insurance losses.

There's no excuse, of course, for hoodlums yielding to the temptations of thievery. But then, such calamities sometimes bring out the worst instincts in the most solid of citizens. New Orleans policemen, for example, were reportedly observed removing plasma televisions from vacated stores.



Such sightings recall accounts of several members of the super-impeccable New York City police and fire departments looting expensive jewelry and even jeans from lower Manhattan stores after the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center.

Such pilferage in New Orleans, as terrible as Fox News made it out to be, will pale in insignificance compared to what's in store when the Bush administration lets the contracts to the GOP contributors to rebuild the Crescent City and the gulf states. Such looting on the grand scale will likely prove too sophisticated for U.S. media analysts, who gag on a gnat and swallow an elephant.

What should not be lost here is that this gargantuan expenditure of $200 billion plays squarely into the hands of the macroeconomic policymakers of the Bush administration.

Stealing chapter and verse from Reagonomics, the Bush budgetmeisters insist on tax cuts for the wealthy without curtailing federal spending. In Reagan's case, as blueprinted by David Stockman, the money was lavishly spent on exotic cold-war military hardware such as the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative. The Bush administration has emptied the federal strongbox by leading the nation into a needless quagmire of a war in Iraq.

President Bush's emptying of the national purse has been nothing short of breathtaking.

Inheriting a national surplus of $232 billion from the Clinton administration in 2000, Bush has run up an extraordinary deficit of some $7.95 trillion. Were this debt spread equally to every man, woman and child citizen of the U.S., each of us would owe $26,797.

Does this bother the president? Not in the least. Bush's plan for rebuilding the gulf states was cavalierly revealed to the American people Thursday night without actually mentioning the cost.

Some of the money, Bush emphasized, will finance a Workers Recovery Account of up to $5,000 that evacuees could draw on for job training and child care. Very nice. Other funds would allow for low-income citizens to build homes through a lottery system, and for states that took in displaced residents to be reimbursed. However, the lion's share of the federal money will be used to cover "the great majority of the cost" of repairing the damaged infrastructure in the gulf region of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

As the president pronounced his massive federal rebuilding plan, the cash registers could be heard ringing in the plaza of the French Quarter where Karl Rove had so meticulously posed Bush in shirtsleeves before the statue of the seventh president of the republic, Andrew Jackson. Interestingly, this macho, slave-owning major general who never attended college was famous for building a strong federal government that the current GOP decries as anathema.

Still, the Bush administration is well on its way to weakening the government so dramatically that its successor will be hard- pressed to reverse the trend. This tilt toward federal bankruptcy, as with Reagan, will cripple the prospects for future social programs.

For now, the Bush administration will enable the oil companies to continue their looting, the rich to retain their fabulous tax breaks, and the mega- builders, such as Halliburton, to lap up the no-bid contracts and spiral up the cost overruns. This looting will never make it onto Fox TV, or much of the rest of the media for that matter.

God, what a country!

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/...7119237.column

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Inheriting a national surplus of $232 billion from the Clinton administration in 2000, Bush has run up an extraordinary deficit of some $7.95 trillion.

This is more than a wee bit deceptive.

The federal debt declined only slightly under Clinton - more due to restraint by the GOP-controlled House (which has sadly gone away). The annual deficit under Bush has increased to rather staggering absolute amounts, true, but not anything out of the ordinary for a politician by historical standards.

I'd like to know where this "$7.95 trillion" comes from, as that implies that under Bush, the federal deficit is well over $1 trillion every year since 2001. That's not true. If you count in all the extra spending that Bush and the GOP has tossed in during Bush's term, I still don't see how that number comes out. In any case, the unfunded future liabilities of the federal government are in the tens of trillions of dollars - mainly due to income transfer schemes like Socal (In)Security and the unchecked growth of Medicaid and Medicare. Bush and the GOP have done nothing about those things (and in fact have made them worse) but then no President since the inception of those programs has had the guts to fix them, Clinton included. Laying the federal government's financial problems all at Bush's feet is nothing more than partisan deception.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

President Bush to America's Millionaires: I Will Keep You Safe from Katrina Sacrifices

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-e...ica_b_7505.html

[W*GS]

Anyone who cites Arianna Huffington should be embarassed.

But, as usual, LABF proffers little more than op-ed pieces. What else is new?

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Bush Refuses To Grant Medicaid Waivers to States For Katina Victims!

Once again, Bush's words bely his actions.

Standing in front of pretty lights with a nice speech was just camouflage.

Bush has refused to grant Medicaid waivers to states for poor hurricane victims:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092102510.html

This man has no regard for human life.