Andy Reid impersonator on Philadelphia’s 610 WIP this morning, commenting on yesterday’s Eagles loss to the Saints:

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“9th ward diagonal car 1″
Matt Cohen, August 26, 2006

Last year, I posted the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” and linked various phrases to images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The degree to which Dylan’s words fit the events unfolding before us was uncanny.

A year later, New Orleans remains a city crippled not only by a natural disaster, but by a man-made one: a Republican administration that sat on its ass and ate birthday cake while a city drowned has compounded that frightening lack of human decency by breaking promise after promise to those in the region.

Of course, only a fool would think that that has been an accident. Bush put Karl Rove in charge of the administration’s post-Katrina strategy, an act of bad faith of such magnitude that one recoils from the sheer monstrosity of it. As Dan Froomkin noted at the time:

And that is exactly what has come to pass: a bungled recovery process that has allowed the wreckage of the storm to fester under the hot Louisiana sun. And it’s all being done with political objectives in mind, as Frank Rich noted in the The New York Times this past Sunday:

All across the media landscape, the Bush administration is being shown for what it is: a callous political machine that cares only for its own survival.

That is going to be brought home over the next two days, as President Bush attempts to whitewash his response to the storm with a series of PR stunts. After all, you don’t introduce new products in August: you just shine up the old lies and put them out on the shelf in some new packaging.

As noted here a few days ago, Matt Cohen, who blogs at 1115.org, decided to take a first-hand look behind the Bush administration’s spin. Traveling down to New Orleans with his camera, Matt has posted a powerful set of pictures on flickr that document the all-too-slow recovery of New Orleans (I thank him for granting me permission to use a few of his images here), and he has just written a searing account of his trip through the 9th Ward.

It’s called A Victory Lap for Broken Promises:

It’s an amazing post that showcases the best of what blogs can do. Please go and read it.

Of all of the images that Matt has posted, the one below struck me most deeply:

9th ward this was home, Matt Cohen, August 26, 2006

“HOME This was HOME,” the spray-painted eulogy reads. The house still stands, but the home inside it is gone, for now. It will be vanquished permanently, if the Bush administration has its way.

And that is something that we will never forget.

Update: Please visit Shakespeare’s Sister for many more perspectives on the first anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. In her post, Shakes argues convincingly that “Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success.”

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Crooks and Liars has the video of a story about New Orleans that aired on NBC and MSNBC last night. It’s a must-watch report.

In testimony to the Senate, FEMA official Marty Bahamonde revealed that on August 31st, he had sent urgent messages from his blackberry, telling FEMA Director Michael Brown about the deteriorating conditions in New Orleans. The situation is “past critical,” Bahamonde wrote from the Superdome, where he was reportedly Brown’s “eyes and ears.” “Estimates are many will die within hours.”

He never got a response from Brown, but someone did forward to him an email written on the same day by Brown’s press secretary; it reveals where FEMA’s attention was as thousands struggled for their lives in New Orleans:

Bahamonde’s response?

It’s gratifying to see that people like Bahamonde have the courage to speak up about this. But you know it’s just a matter of time until the administration starts to slime him, and distance itself from the press secretary.

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I went digging and came back with these gems in my hand.

Read the rest of this entry »

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With Michael Brown spouting revisionist history on Capitol Hill, now seems like a good time to remind ourselves of FEMA’s criminal incompetance during the Katrina aftermath. Under Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, and George W. Bush, this agency actively and explicitly prevented help from reaching victims in need.

From an earlier post:

Update: Terrance has a list of some other things we need to remember as the right attempts to reframe Katrina.

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Larger Version

made with The Strip Generator

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Bruce Chambers, Orange County Register (click for larger view)

Tom Watson asks us to look at this photo, which seems to sum up so much of the heartbreak, tragedy, and heroism in the aftermath of Katrina.

The Post-Gazette and The OC Register (registration required) have the full story behind this photograph; Will Bunch adds additional details — including FEMA’s criminal obstruction of such rescues — in this Attytood post.

Will writes:

One of Tom’s commenters dubbed this photograph “Our modern day Pietà.” I can think of no better description for it.

In a previous post, On Looking at Photographs of the New Orleans Dead, I wrote that “only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.”

But the error contained in the title of that post is now clear: for it is not only photographs of the dead that reveal the painful cost of this administration’s criminal negligence, but also photographs of the near-dead, the barely-living, and the just-hanging-on.

When you look at this photo, keep Will’s post in mind: the men and women bearing Edgar Hollingsworth’s frail body saved his life by actively disobeying FEMA orders.

If there is hope to be found in this photograph, it is in the faces and actions of these rescuers. Their determination to do what is right, in the face of so much that is wrong, is nothing less than inspiring.

But one has to wonder how many others were passed by because they did not have the strength to cry out for help.

Edgar Hollingsworth is expected to survive.

The prognosis for the dignity of our nation is much less sanguine, as long as our leaders continue to ignore the weak and the poor.

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Caught between grief and rage, anger and shame, I’ve been searching for something that would begin to release the knot in my chest.

I once was lost, but now I’m found:

George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People (MP3). (By The Legendary K.O. Produced by Kanye West. Words by Big Mon and Damien a/k/a Dem Knock-Out Boyz) [Via All-Spin Zone]

Download, listen, and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Because George Bush isn’t the only Republican who hates “naygers”.

This is the soundtrack to the revolution.

Blast it from the fucking rooftops.

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Rick Bowmer/AP

Some will see these photographs as an exploitation of tragedy; others will see them as unduly macabre;

and some will recognize that only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.

Found via Talk Left and Pam’s House Blend, they are graphic and disturbing. Click on them at your own risk:

Ogrish.com: Pictures of the New Orleans dead 1
Ogrish.com: Pictures of the New Orleans dead 2
Stern.de Photographs of New Orleans

Avoid them at your nation’s risk.

In an essay that appeared in an 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War dead — the first wartime photographs that brought the reality of war to American breakfast tables. Holmes wrote:

We cannot allow the dead of New Orleans to be locked in a secret drawer or buried in the recesses of our cabinet. Not if we want our republic to rise from its knees and live again. Not while these people hold the reins of power.

There are too many stories yet to be told. We need to hear them. We need to see them.

But even that is not enough.

Clearly, the federal officials purportedly in charge of the disaster recovery efforts bear the heaviest burden for these deaths. The President who appointed them, and those who continue to support him, have revealed themselves for the callous, inhumane, immoral creatures that they are.

But I can’t help feeling that we are part of the problem, too. By continuing to participate in this corrupt and morally bankrupt society, we all bear some measure of the burden.

We live in a country whose President openly wonders “what didn’t go right?” as FEMA orders 25,000 body bags.

He will never know, because he will never face these dead.

But we can, and we must.

The last five posts I’ve written, and then deleted, have all been titled “What’s the Point?” In the face of our failed efforts to make a change before this disaster, I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question, but the one thing I do know is that everything is different now. After Katrina, things cannot continue to go on as they did before. Something has to change. Everything has to change.

We need action. We need to open the doors of this cabinet of horrors, this grotesque nation of repulsive privilege and old bigotry.

We need a revolution.

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From the New York Times

I don’t even know where to start.

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