Honestly, now that Obama is the nominee........

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

We did do the job the first time in 1991. Saddam had nothing but smoke and mirrors left when we went in there this time. Also, the United States does not go around executing leaders of other countries, if that's what you're referring to by your doing the job comment. Just remember, you are young and the world and history still has a lot to teach you.

Well, you should learn your history then before lecturing someone else. The US did not go in to Iraw unilaterally in 1991. We had a UN mandate and the authority to assassinate Saddam. The US also DOES go around assassinating leaders. Remember Nuremberg? In fact, there is a current civil suit against Henry Kissinger right now because of an action he took as part of the Nixon administration to assassinate the leader of a South American country and the family of the interpreter sued Kissinger because he died in the process. Back to your original point, if we had assassinated Saddam in 1991 and set up a government (as we had a UN authorization) when the Iraqi's were more willing, we would have done the job. We didn't do that. Even Former President Bush has admitted on a Nightline interview 5 years ago that he wished he had assassinated Saddam. Apparently, you don't know your history. Don't underestimate me either.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by BombaySapphire3

and this coming from someone that more than likely voted for the abomination that is George W Bush twice?

Yes, I like the guy for the most part. He's made a few HUGE blunders. Most people hate him because they don't know what the president actually does or is supposed to do. He generally gets the blame for pretty much everything that goes on, whether deserved or not. Most people blame the president for everything from their property taxes to the economy. Neither of which the president can directly control.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Well, the govt. says it all the time. On the order of 1,400 legal rights are conferred upon married couples in the U.S. Typically these are composed of about 400 state benefits and over 1,000 federal benefits. Among them are the rights to:

joint parenting;

joint adoption;

joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents); status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent;

joint insurance policies for home, auto and health;

dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support;

immigration and residency for partners from other countries;

inheritance automatically in the absence of a will;

joint leases with automatic renewal rights in the event one partner dies or leaves the house or apartment;

inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship (which avoids the time and expense and taxes in probate); benefits such as annuities, pension plans, Social Security, and Medicare; spousal exemptions to property tax increases upon the death of one partner who is a co-owner of the home;

veterans' discounts on medical care, education, and home loans; joint filing of tax returns;

joint filing of customs claims when traveling;

wrongful death benefits for a surviving partner and children;

bereavement or sick leave to care for a partner or child;

decision-making power with respect to whether a deceased partner will be cremated or not and where to bury him or her;

crime victims' recovery benefits;

loss of consortium tort benefits;

domestic violence protection orders;

judicial protections and evidentiary immunity;

Federal and state benefits like Social Security survivir benefits

and more

Most of these legal and economic benefits cannot be privately arranged or contracted for. For example, absent a legal (or civil) marriage, there is no guaranteed joint responsibility to the partner and to third parties (including children) in such areas as child support, debts to creditors, taxes, etc. In addition, private employers and institutions often give other economic privileges and other benefits (special rates or memberships) only to married couples. And, of course, when people cannot marry, they are denied all the emotional and social benefits and responsibilities of marriage as well.

Moreover, here is an interesting article:

Why This Is A Serious Civil Rights Issue

When gay people say that this is a civil rights issue, we are referring to matters of civil justice, which often can be quite serious - and can have life-damaging, even life-threatening consequences.

One of these is the fact that in most states, we cannot make medical decisions for our partners in an emergency. Instead, the hospitals are usually forced by state laws to go to the families who may have been estranged from us for decades, who are often hostile to us, and can and frequently do, totally ignore our wishes regarding the treatment of our partners. If a hostile family wishes to exclude us from the hospital room, they may legally do so in most states. It is even not uncommon for hostile families to make decisions based on their hostility -- with results consciously intended to be as inimical to the interests of the patient as possible! Is this fair?

Upon death, in many cases, even very carefully drawn wills and durable powers of attorney have proven to not be enough if a family wishes to challenge a will, overturn a custody decision, or exclude us from a funeral or deny us the right to visit a partner's hospital bed or grave. As survivors, estranged families can, in nearly all states, even sieze a real estate property that a gay couple may have been buying together for many years, quickly sell it at the largest possible loss, and stick the surviving partner with all the remaining mortgage obligations on a property that partner no longer owns, leaving him out on the street, penniless. There are hundreds of examples of this, even in many cases where the gay couple had been extremely careful to do everything right under current law, in a determined effort to protect their rights. Is this fair?

If our partners are arrested, we can be compelled to testify against them or provide evidence against them, which legally married couples are not forced to do. In court cases, a partner's testimony can be simply ruled irrelevant as heresay by a hostile judge, having no more weight in law than the testimony of a complete stranger. If a partner is jailed or imprisoned, visitation rights by the partner can, in most cases, can be denied on the whim of a hostile family and the cooperation of a homophobic judge, unrestrained by any law or precedent. Conjugal visits, a well-established right of heterosexual married couples in some settings, are simply not available to gay couples. Is this fair?

These are far from being just theoretical issues; they happen with surprising frequency. Almost any older gay couple can tell you numerous horror stories of friends and acquaintences who have been victimized in such ways. One couple I know uses the following line in the "sig" lines on their email: "...partners and lovers for 40 years, yet still strangers before the law." Why, as a supposedly advanced society, should we continue to tolerate this kind of injustice?

These are all civil rights issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ecclesiastical origins of marriage; they are matters that have become enshrined in state laws by legislation or court precedent over the years in many ways that exclude us from the rights that legally married couples enjoy and even consider their constitutional right. This is why we say it is very much a serious civil rights issue; it has nothing to do with who performs the ceremony, whether it is performed in a church or courthouse or the local country club, or whether an announcement about it is accepted for publication in the local newspaper.

____________________________________________

So, to say (general speaker not really you though you implied it) that all rights can be done by contract is untrue. Moreover, why should gay and unmarried straight people have to pay thousands of dollars to obtain some, but not all, of what married people get for free based solely on a religious argument?




My point had nothing to do the R's. I was refuting (successfully) your statement about marriage liscenses and the prohibition of marriages in general.

A lot of states, including my own, DO confer a lot of these rights on gays. We have most of these on the books. A lot of what you said is just plain wrong. Gay partners CAN get protection orders, CAN sue for wrongful death, can get Health Insurance, CAN adopt, etc. If you think that getting married is free, you never had to pay for a wedding! LOL! Anyway, I think we agree more than not. Like I said before, I would like to remove marriage from the legal lexicon. All of these rights should be transferable through contracts, in my prefect world that is.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I don't really care about the parents' rights. I am more for the woman's rights. She has to carry the baby and we have to (usually) pay for it.

Not with you there either. If we're going to have abortion rights, I think the man should have say in that matter also. If he doesn't want to support the child, he should have a say in aborting it. Otherwise, it's a sexist law. I mean, a woman who doesn't want to be a mother is called pro-choice, but a man who doesn't want to be a father is called a dead-beat or any variety of other things. I mean, you can deduct alimony, and alimony can be subtracted from your income for low-income housing qualifications, etc. However, child support cannot be. The law is set up in a very discriminatory fashion. If you don't want a kid, do what every married woman does and stop having sex.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

If the blacks were still in the back of the bus -- would you say the same thing? All, for a few more dollars in your pocket? That is a little alarming to say the least. How many times do you have to touch the hot stove before you realize it burns?

What are you talking about? You forget that the Republicans passed the 1964 Civil Rights bill, while Bobby Kennedy was wiretapping MLK. If it were up to the Democratic party, the blacks would STILL be on the back of the bus.

If you study social psychology at all, you will see that welfare programs are basically racist. Affirmative Action is racist. Not against whites, but against the blacks it supposedly helps. Take for example salmon that are hatched in hatcheries. The wild salmon will not mate with them and they do not do as well in the wild because they never had to fight for survival. Then take a look at the human debris left behind after Katrina. People with a survival instinct left. Those without did not, and there was quite a bit of publicity about the fact that a lot of them stayed because they were waiting for welfare checks. These people stayed poor because we made it easy to be poor and encouraged them to stay on welfare because human nature always follows the path of least resistance. If the choice was starvation or improving one's self, they would do it.

This is coming from a guy who was homeless twice and was dirt poor for a long time. I could go on and on about hitchhiking 40 miles to school (which I really had to do) and a bunch of other crap. What it boils down to is that if you really want to succeed in this country, you can. We don't need the government dehumanizing people with racist welfare programs designed to leave people in poverty and dependance. People like to talk about failed policies, how about the war on poverty? We've had 60 years of generation after generation living in squalor on welfare because we are handing a guy a fish every day instead of teaching him how to fish. This is why I support the idea of mandating college as a condition to be on welfare. It's the antidote to the racism of the Democratic party.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . Most people hate him because they don't know what the president actually does or is supposed to do . . . .

Actually, I think most hate him because around 5,000 of our soldiers are dead and many times that wounded - and all for a war he lied to get us into. That was all him - no one else, save for Cheney.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

What are you talking about? You forget that the Republicans passed the 1964 Civil Rights bill, while Bobby Kennedy was wiretapping MLK. If it were up to the Democratic party, the blacks would STILL be on the back of the bus . . . .

Last I checked Kennedy (who introduced the bill on July 11, 1963) and LBJ (who railroaded the bill) were Democrats Moreover, the House and Senate were overwhelmingly D controlled. This does not support your argument in any way.

If you are refering to the Southern Democrats' attempt to block the passage of the Act, these same people (the religious far right) are now in control of the current R party. This also does not in any way support your argument.

On edit - - here is a history lesson

The Civil Rights Movement: 1963-1968

President Lyndon Johnson foresaw the end of the Solid South when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The New Deal Coalition began to fracture as more Democratic leaders voiced support for civil rights, upsetting the party's traditional base of conservative Southern Democrats and ethnic Catholics in Northern cities. After Harry Truman's platform gave strong support to civil rights and anti-segregation laws during the 1948 Democratic National Convention, many Southern Democratic delegates decided to split from the Party and formed the "Dixiecrats," led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond (who, as a Senator, would later join the Republican Party [and who has an illegitimate child with a black woman HYPOCRITE ] ). Over the next few years, many conservative Democrats in the "Solid South" drifted away from the party. On the other hand, African Americans, who had traditionally given strong support to the Republican Party since its inception as the "anti-slavery party," shifted to the Democratic Party due to its New Deal economic opportunities and support for civil rights—largely due to New Deal relief programs, patronage offers, and the advocacy of civil rights by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Although Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried half the South in 1952 and 1956, and Senator Barry Goldwater also carried five Southern states in 1964, Democrat Jimmy Carter carried all of the South except Virginia, and there was no long-term realignment until Ronald Reagan's sweeping victories in the South in 1980 and 1984.

The party's dramatic reversal on civil rights issues culminated when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On doing so he commented, "We [the Democrats] have lost the South for a generation." Meanwhile, the Republicans, led again by Richard Nixon, were beginning to implement their Southern strategy, which aimed to resist federal encroachment on the states, while appealing to conservative and moderate white Southerners in the rapidly growing cities and suburbs of the South. Southern Democrats took notice of the fact that 1964 Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act, and in the presidential election of 1964, Goldwater's only electoral victories outside his home state of Arizona were in the states of the Deep South.

The year 1968 was a trying one for the party as well as the United States. In January, even though it was a military defeat for the Viet Cong, the Tet Offensive began to turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Senator Eugene McCarthy rallied anti-war forces on college campuses and came within a few percentage points of defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of the former president, entered the race. Johnson stunned the nation on March 31 when he withdrew from the race; four weeks later his vice-president, Hubert H. Humphrey, entered. Kennedy and McCarthy traded primary victories while Humphrey stayed out the primaries and gathered the support of labor unions and the big-city bosses. Kennedy won the California primary on June 4 and may have been able to wrest the nomination from Humphrey, but he was assassinated in Los Angeles. (Even as Kennedy won California, Humphrey had already amassed 1000 of the 1312 delegate votes needed for the nomination, while Kennedy had about 700. ) During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, while police and the National Guard violently confronted anti-war protesters on the streets and parks of Chicago, the Democrats nominated Humphrey. Meanwhile Alabama's Democratic governor George C. Wallace launched a third-party campaign and at one point was running second to the Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon. Nixon barely won, with the Democrats retaining control of Congress.

The degree to which the Southern Democrats had abandoned the party became evident in the 1968 presidential election when the electoral votes of every former Confederate state except Texas went to either Republican Richard Nixon or independent George Wallace, the latter a former Southern Democrat. Defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey's electoral votes came mainly from the Northern states, marking a dramatic shift from the 1948 election 20 years earlier, when the losing Republican candidate's electoral votes were mainly concentrated in the Northern states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...ent:_1963-1968 (which has the rest of the history)

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

A lot of states, including my own, DO confer a lot of these rights on gays. We have most of these on the books. A lot of what you said is just plain wrong. Gay partners CAN get protection orders, CAN sue for wrongful death, can get Health Insurance, CAN adopt, etc. If you think that getting married is free, you never had to pay for a wedding! LOL! Anyway, I think we agree more than not. Like I said before, I would like to remove marriage from the legal lexicon. All of these rights should be transferable through contracts, in my prefect world that is.

Just because some rights are conferred by some states (which the R, not D, party overwhelmingly opposes in every way possible mind you) - that does not make it any better in the long run. That is like asking the cop that is beating you to slow down instead of asking him to stop In the end, without Federal protection, gays will continue to be discrimminated against because the current R party uses them as scapegoats. Look at McCain's "gays should never adopt" BS. There is no empirical evidence to support this law no matter how many times McCain says it. So, we see more religious BS.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . Affirmative Action is racist . . . .

I think the reasons behind Affirmative Action have run the course. I do not think anyone under the age of 50 needs to be paid back through a leg up for the wrongs of the past.

I think Affirmative Action should stay in place (with better safeguards) but be based on poverty alone. I think more people are better served that way.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

He didn't say that about the war. He said that he cares about American casualties and that he would win the war no matter how long it takes.

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

The basic problem here is that we went to war in the first place, but it would be horrendous to pull out now. I mean, do you know what happened when we pulled out of Vietnam?

Yes. I watched it on the news every night. I don't think there's a single person here who would tell you they weren't glad that clusterfukc was over. There are always going to be consequences.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Well, you should learn your history then before lecturing someone else.

I wasn't lecturing you. I was trying to tell you to keep an open mind.

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

The US did not go in to Iraw unilaterally in 1991. We had a UN mandate and the authority to assassinate Saddam. The US also DOES go around assassinating leaders. Remember Nuremberg? In fact, there is a current civil suit against Henry Kissinger right now because of an action he took as part of the Nixon administration to assassinate the leader of a South American country and the family of the interpreter sued Kissinger because he died in the process. Back to your original point, if we had assassinated Saddam in 1991 and set up a government (as we had a UN authorization) when the Iraqi's were more willing, we would have done the job. We didn't do that. Even Former President Bush has admitted on a Nightline interview 5 years ago that he wished he had assassinated Saddam. Apparently, you don't know your history. Don't underestimate me either.

Getting a bit defensive are we? Nuremberg was a series of military tribunal trials. Not sure what your point is there.
As far as Kissinger goes, you reap what you sow with that piece of ****. I'm not talking about whatever covet ops he was mixed up in. And I'm sure there were plenty. Show me any one document that says the United States government condones the assasination of any foreign head of state. I submit you cannot.
Also I'd like to get furhter into why the United States did not march into Baghdad in '91. But I'm a bit pressed for time.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Most people hate him because they don't know what the president actually does or is supposed to do. .

He stole the presidency. Is that constitutional?

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

You forget that the Republicans passed the 1964 Civil Rights bill,

Hilarious. Where'd you get that one from?

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . Then take a look at the human debris left behind after Katrina. People with a survival instinct left. Those without did not, and there was quite a bit of publicity about the fact that a lot of them stayed because they were waiting for welfare checks. These people stayed poor because we made it easy to be poor and encouraged them to stay on welfare because human nature always follows the path of least resistance. If the choice was starvation or improving one's self, they would do it . . . .

Honestly, if you are not going to research anything before stating, this is going to become tedious.

1. I agree New Orleans was a ridiculous welfare state. But, I helped some of those kids get out of that.

2. If you could not get out of the city, you were to go to the Superdome and ride out the storm. This was the plan in place for many a year.

3. I relaize many could have gotten out if they had tried. I am not talking about htem. But, many (some say a majority) of the people who did not leave could not leave. Many were poor and elderly with no family to go to and no transportation to get them there. Many were younger but had no funds to go anywhere.

4. If W had gotten off of his a$$ and Rove had quit trying to wrangle control of the state from Gov. Blanco, help would have arrived at least a day earlier. But, the R's wanted it to be there show. Notice how Haley Barbour, the R gov. of Mississippi, was not asked to give up control of his state before help could be provided. Hmmm - wonder why

5. That you refer to them as human debris demonstrates a maturity level unfit for my dialogue.

Here is an article demonstrating how Rove played politics while people died. I know people died because I knew some of them. My brother rescued people as well and saw people die. Whatever.

How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned
Hurricane Katrina posed a huge test to Bush's administration. But instead of bailing out Louisiana, Karl Rove played Blame the Democrats.
By Paul Alexander

Jun. 06, 2008 | On Monday, August 29, 2005, at about 6:00 a.m., Hurricane Katrina slammed into the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A category 5 hurricane until just before landfall, it was one of the worst storms ever to hit the Gulf Coast. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, had been briefed extensively about what to expect when the storm hit, which was why, on the Friday night before the storm reached the coast, she signed papers declaring Louisiana to be in a state of emergency. Based on what she had been told by her advisers and what she knew from being a native Louisianan, she understood that Katrina, creeping gradually toward land with sustained winds of a strength rarely seen in a hurricane, could prove to be catastrophic for Louisiana, and particularly for New Orleans.

Over the weekend, Blanco and her staff monitored the storm from an emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge. As the storm was hitting on Monday morning, Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, met with the governor and her staff. Brown had arrived in Louisiana the night before, supposedly ready to deal with the disaster. When he got to the headquarters that morning, Brown told Blanco he was prepared to help. "He showed up Monday morning," says Bob Mann, a senior aide to Blanco, "and gave us the feeling we would have everything we wanted and needed. He was nothing if not an effective bull****ter." Specifically, there was talk of FEMA buses. "Michael Brown told me he had 500 buses," Blanco says. "They were staged and ready to roll in."

Meanwhile, as a deadly storm of historic proportions ripped into three Gulf Coast states that Monday, Bush, on a working vacation at his ranch in Crawford, stuck to his schedule for the day. He traveled to Arizona, where he gave a stay-the-course speech about the war in Iraq. He even made himself available for a photo op after the speech, posing with a guitar next to someone wearing a sombrero, seemingly unaware that the Gulf Coast of the United States was in the throes of a horrific natural disaster perhaps unparalleled in the nation's history. For a president who often seemed to care more about developments in Iraq than those at home, here was a singular moment. Never had Bush appeared to be so out of sync, at least when it came to events unfolding in the homeland. To make matters worse, in this case the disaster was not happening on the other side of the world or even the other side of the country, but in a state next door to Texas.

On Tuesday, Bush was still out of touch with what was happening and seemingly unaware of the seriousness of the events unfolding on the Gulf Coast, especially in New Orleans. A major American city had filled up with water, but Bush had not departed from his planned schedule. In Coronado, California, at a naval base near the USS Ronald Reagan, Bush delivered a speech to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Japanese in World War II. But Bush used the occasion, as he had repeatedly of late, to give yet another stay-the-course speech about Iraq. On this day, he compared the ongoing military action in Iraq to the allied struggle against German fascism and Japanese imperialism in terms of its moral significance. "The terrorists of our century are making the same mistake that the followers of other totalitarian ideologies made in the last century," Bush said. "They believe that democracies are inherently weak and corrupt and can be brought to their knees." It was not terrorists who had brought three states in the American South to their knees, but an act of nature that, judging from his actions on Monday and Tuesday, had not fully engaged the attention of the president.

As it turned out, the federal government's attempts to respond to the storm and flooding appeared frozen by inadequacy and ineptitude. Thousands of people were stranded in their homes, unable to make a better escape than to their rooftops to wave for help and hope emergency personnel in helicopters might rescue them. Tens of thousands of refugees were holed up downtown in the Convention Center and the Superdome, yet FEMA was unable to bring in even food, water, or ice, not to mention buses to evacuate them. Touring the Superdome on Tuesday night, Blanco was disturbed by what she witnessed: in short, no federal assistance whatsoever. All she saw was the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana State Police -- certainly not enough of a law enforcement presence to be able to maintain order without additional guardsmen and troops.

If Bush had not seen what was taking place by Tuesday, Karl Rove had. The first evidence of Rove's involvement in the Katrina disaster occurred on Tuesday afternoon. "Rove understood what a nightmare this was for the president," Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana says, "so he went into high gear on the spin thing they're so good at in the White House. Rove had David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana. I was at a press conference and David Vitter walked up to the mike and said, 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.' I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, 'Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?' I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man."

Despite his expertise being politics, the administration had made Rove a central player in the handling of the disaster. "A light switch in the White House didn't get turned on without going through Rove," says Adam Sharp, an aide to Landrieu. "It was clear that Rove was the point person for the White House on this disaster."

That fact was proven precisely by what Vitter had done and said at the press conference. "As soon as Vitter said he had just gotten off the phone with Rove and other Republican officials," Landrieu says, "he started in on the first talking point to come out of the ordeal. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, I can't believe the White House has already given David Vitter talking points to talk about this.' We weren't going to blame anyone. We weren't going to blame the president. I mean, is there a Republican talking point for how to get people water? But that was Karl Rove."

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

Rove and Nagin were communicating through e-mail. "I heard Nagin was bragging about being in touch with The Man," Blanco says. "Nagin took the position that they were the people who could help the most to do what he wanted. People get highly complimented when they have contact with the White House." In this case the trade-off for Nagin was his willingness to cooperate with Rove. "I knew Ray Nagin could be easily manipulated," Landrieu says. "I could feel it. We were all working together in a relatively small building. We were in close proximity. But I could see where Rove was going. Blame Blanco. Blame the levee board. Blame the corruption in New Orleans. 'The reason the city is going underwater is because the city is corrupt,' Rove was saying. 'But don't blame the Republicans or George W. Bush or David Vitter. We are the white guys in shining armor, and we are going to come in and save the city from years of corruption.' That was their story and they sold it very well."

Rove sold the story, as he had in the past, through the media. On Wednesday, while Blanco was trying to get help from the White House, her staff began receiving calls from reporters questioning her handling of the disaster, almost all of them citing as their sources unnamed senior White House officials.

"One story," Blanco aide Mann recalls, "would say the governor was so incompetent she had not even gotten around to declaring a state of emergency when she had actually done so three days before the storm. It was obvious to us who was behind this attack based on inaccurate information that was being shoveled to Washington reporters who were identifying their sources as senior Bush administration officials." Blanco adds, "People at Newsweek told me the White House called them to say I had delayed signing the disaster declaration. The assumption was that their source was the political director -- Karl Rove." Not only was the attack on Blanco in print, it was also on television. "All of a sudden," Blanco says, "a whole lot of talking heads showed up on television repeating the misinformation over and over, making it the truth."

On Wednesday afternoon, Blanco called Bush and told him she needed "everything you've got." Since Bush promised to help, Blanco believed that assistance was arriving in the person of Army lieutenant general Russel Honore, who met with the governor. After a long and cordial discussion, Blanco asked Honore how many troops he had brought with him to Louisiana at the order of the president. "Just a handful of staffers," Blanco heard him say, much to her amazement. "I am here in an advisory capacity."

On Thursday, as New Orleans remained underwater, with countless thousands of people stranded in their homes, on their rooftops, or at the Convention Center or Superdome, there was still no federal help. What continued unabated, though, was the assault on Blanco, questioning her handling of the disaster. "We were in life-and-death mode and every minute counted," Blanco says. "I found my staff having to do public relations in the middle of the most disastrous days Louisiana has ever experienced. The talking heads had been turned on. My staff was saying, 'My God, governor, they are crucifying you politically.' I finally pulled all of my staff together and said, 'We are wasting our energy. We do not have a stable of talking heads. We cannot control the national media. We have lifesaving missions to accomplish, so let's do it.' My staff was upset with me."

Blanco sought out Michael Chertoff. She found him in one of the emergency headquarters trailers. "Turn off the talking heads," she told him point-blank. "People are dying while you people are playing politics. Turn them off." It was Thursday, and so far the FEMA buses had still not arrived to help evacuate people from the Convention Center and Superdome, nor had Bush sent any federal troops, who were desperately needed in the search-and-rescue efforts. Instead of sending help, the administration had come up with a ploy. "I was on a conference call with the White House," Adam Sharp says, "where they were saying: If you want any help, you have to turn over all control of your state to the president. We won't help until you give us control of your National Guard and your law enforcement agencies, until Louisiana becomes a federal territory. They were using this as the excuse for their delaying on the issues. They kept trying to put it on Blanco. But no governor would ever give control of her state to the president."

On Friday, Bush finally traveled south. His first stop was Mobile, Alabama, where he met with Bob Riley, the Republican governor whose associates were engaged in a collaboration with Karl Rove to politically destroy Don Siegelman, the Democratic former governor. During the stop in Mobile, Bush went out of his way to congratulate Michael Brown, saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Bush was willing to make such a public statement in support of Brown, carefully staged in a holding area for a national press corps that included a wall of television cameras.

It was especially perplexing that he would make this statement now because the day before Bush had read a news report, handed to him by an aide, that contained information about events on the ground in New Orleans that Michael Chertoff had not shared with him that very morning in his briefing. Chertoff himself had been briefed by Brown. Worse still, Brown had at first been unaware that 25,000 people had gathered at the Convention Center -- a fact so disturbing that some Republicans had begun to call for his firing, a move Bush seemed unable to make. "Mr. Brown," the New York Times later reported, "had become a symbol of President Bush's own hesitant response."

From Alabama, it was on to Mississippi for Bush. There, he met with an old friend, Haley Barbour, the Republican governor. Significantly, Bush had nothing but praise for Riley and Barbour, neither of whom he asked to consider federalizing their National Guard troops. Finally, Bush traveled to Louisiana, still in the throes of disaster five days into the crisis -- and still receiving no help from the federal government. In New Orleans, Bush met with Nagin and Blanco, along with other officials, aboard Air Force One at the Louis Armstrong international airport. The events aboard Air Force One began with a meeting of several officials, including Landrieu, Vitter, Nagin, and Blanco, as well as selected congressmen and staff members. Rove was onboard, too, "lurking," as Blanco would put it, "around the halls." In the meeting Nagin, extremely agitated, kept insisting, "Do something! Do something!" It was not clear exactly what he wanted done or who he wanted to do it, nor was it evident whether Nagin had any idea that his clandestine e-mail communications with Rove during the week may have contributed to the Bush administration's lack of response. They certainly had not helped. Finally, Bush asked to meet with Blanco alone in his office on Air Force One.

"Kathleen," Bush said in their meeting, which was attended by Joe Hagen from Bush's staff but no one from Blanco's staff -- a fact that troubled Blanco -- "I'm going to need you to sign a waiver that the Louisiana National Guard needs to be turned over to the federal government. I can't take them from you but I'm going to need you to federalize them."

Blanco had no intention of signing a waiver. She was concerned about a variety of legal ramifications that could result from her signing over her National Guard, but her main fear was that, without the leverage Blanco had as a free agent in what had now turned into a protracted negotiation with the administration, she would have no means to force Bush to provide any assistance at all. Blanco told Bush she would not sign a waiver. "You need to give General Honore some soldiers," Blanco told Bush. "Where has the federal government been for five days? If I sign this, it's going to look like I've been wrong."

Bush appeared to be confused by what Blanco was saying.

"Well, I have no intention of turning over my National Guard to you," Blanco said. "Anyway, the evacuation of the Superdome is now well underway and after that we will begin finishing the evacuation of the Convention Center." This was true. While the administration had bickered over politics, Blanco had expanded the size of her National Guard by accepting deployments of guardsmen from all of the other 49 states.

By federalizing her guardsmen, Blanco would have been admitting that it was the state that was unable to handle the disaster, not the federal government. The Bush administration could have argued that they had had to save the day for Blanco because she was not up to the task. However, if Blanco did not take the bait, the scheme was dead. Blanco wondered about Bush's confusion. Was he really confused or just trying to get her to sign the waiver?

It didn't matter. Not only did Blanco refuse to sign, she gave Bush a two-page letter detailing everything the state needed to cope with the disaster -- troops, buses, supplies, money, and more. It would not be until several days later, when Blanco's aides released the letter to the press and got frantic phone calls from Rove's aide Maggie Grant, that it became clear that Bush had taken the letter Blanco had personally handed to him -- and lost it.

Finally, that day on Air Force One, when it became apparent that Bush would not be able to manipulate Blanco, he ended the meeting. Then, he took a private meeting with Nagin, who had taken his first shower since the storm hit on Air Force One. Afterward, Bush was taken on a tour of the city by helicopter, which included a visit to the 17th Street Canal. Blanco accompanied Bush in his helicopter, along with Nagin. Landrieu, Vitter, and Rove had followed in a second helicopter. Behind them in a third was a pool of reporters from the national press corps.

"We landed at the 17th Street Canal," Landrieu says. "The story that day Karl Rove was feeding was: 'The president is on the job, the president has taken control, the president is going to rebuild, and despite the fact that the government and all these babbling fools down here can't do anything, the Corps of Engineers is on the job.' So we landed at the canal, five minutes from my house. I was so excited because they were finally doing something. The Corps of Engineers was there, and they had dump trucks and sandbags. All the cameras were there for the president, who was doing one of his famous press conferences about how he was going to do everything. So I thought, 'At least the guy is doing something, so show your manners and be good and smile.'"

On Saturday in the Rose Garden, Bush announced the deployment of federal troops to Louisiana -- without the benefit of Blanco signing a waiver. He also tried to backtrack to explain why his administration had botched the rescue effort so badly. "The magnitude," Bush said as Rove and Cheney stood nearby watching, "of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

While Blanco and her aides watched the federal government do little, they completed the rescues of thousands of people stranded at the Convention Center and the Superdome on their own by commandeering buses from around the state and transporting people from downtown New Orleans to various surrounding cities -- using only the National Guard under Blanco's command. When the federal troops finally did start arriving over the weekend, the refugees had been cleared out. The troops made a show for the media, but they were too late. The damage had been done.

After one of the most agonizing weeks in American history, with Bush and his key department secretaries embarrassed on national television, the blame, despite Rove's efforts to the contrary, ended up being placed firmly on the federal government. The administration, not Blanco and the state of Louisiana, took the hit, especially Michael Brown, who became a poster boy for ineptitude and was forced to resign from his job. Following Katrina, Bush's approval rating began to slip even more. "In the middle of the worst disaster in American history," Adam Sharp says, "the president was nowhere to be found and was still clearing brush on the ranch, when the previous iconic image people had of him was standing in the still-smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center 24 hours after the attacks and saying, 'I can hear you.' People were asking, 'Where is that moment here?'"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Of all of the stories and subplots, there would be one that, in many ways, symbolized the whole of Katrina, what it revealed about the Bush administration, and how it would affect the lives of so many people. On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here.' He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, 'We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It's awful what's happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can't understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can't get into the Superdome to help. They can't get out. People are drowning in their homes.'

"So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it." There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.

"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I've been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life."

Copyright © 2008 by Paul Alexander. Reprinted by permission of Modern Times/Rodale Inc. All rights reserved.


-- By Paul Alexander

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2...ina/print.html

And Nero played his violen . . .

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

Hilarious. Where'd you get that one from?

Sean Hannity