Bush Takes Responsibility, Nation Faints

I think it's a first... Bush has actually spoken the words (undoubtedly having had to be cajoled into doing so by his "handlers"), saying "I take responsibility," for his administration's failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He's really on a roll now, trying to scramble for anything he can grab in the specter of plummeting approval ratings. It's almost amusing to behold, but I really wish it hadn't come to this. As personally gratifying as it is to see Bush fulfill his destiny as a complete presidential failure, the reality is that his incompetence is costing this country dearly, so I'd rather see him succeed than not. Unfortunately, I just don't think that's in the cards.

I read an interesting article the other day expressing a desire for our gas prices to stay where they are and even steadily climb over the next few years. It actually made a pretty valid point, which is this: sustained high gas prices are really the only thing that's going to wean this country off its well-nigh unslakable thirst for oil, thus decreasing our level of dependence on foreign oil, much of it from countries with whom the U.S. has tenuous, if not outright antagonistic, relations.

Let's play this out in a little scenario. Gas prices hover around the $2.80-3.00 mark for the next year or so, then start climbing. Perhaps the government even imposes a tax... say, 20¢ a gallon. God knows we'll need something to pay down the astronomical deficit Bush is going to leave this country holding. Meanwhile, the government is also simultaneously holding car makers to an ever-increasing standard of fuel economy. By 2010, the average price for a gallon of gas is running about $5.25. A few things will happen:

• Offensively, ridiculously, needlessly large SUVs will be about as prevalent as the black-footed ferret. Smaller SUVs will remain, and their fuel efficiency will be in the 25-30 mpg range, perhaps higher.
• The street value for a 2004 Ford Excursion will be about $355.00.
• There will be a nationwide renaissance in mass transit.
• Suburban sprawl, and the newly-hatched "exurbs," will slow, or stop their rampant expansion. Who will want to drive 130 miles a day roundtrip to work if gas is over $5 a gallon?
• More work-from-home opportunities.
• Demand for fossil fuels will drop... not precipitously, mind you, but the reason consumption isn't so insane in European countries is because those governments tax the hell out of gasoline. $6 a gallon will curb almost anyone's desire to do a ton of driving, won't it?
• As demand for oil drops, and as federal standards for fuel efficiency increase, auto manufacturers will continue to develop and exploit existing technology and develop new technology, both from the gentle coercion of lawmakers, and from the driving force of consumer demand.

So if all of these admittedly good things can come from high-priced gasoline, why were we paying less than a dollar per gallon just a few short years ago? For some reason, Americans (and I'm not excluded from this assessment) seem to think it's our constitutional right to have cheap oil. I have a small to midsize SUV which gets a whopping 16 mpg in city driving, so I'm as distraught by the prospect of $60 fillups as anyone. However, that vehicle sits in my garage undriven about 90% of the time. It's used only when the roads are snowpacked or I specifically need to haul something that won't fit into my little 2-seater sports car, which gets a much more palatable 29-30 mpg. Again, although it hurts me and many others in the short term, the continuing message I see is that expensive gasoline is ultimately good for the country.

Don't get me wrong... this isn't something that will happen in a year, or even in a decade. The oil-thirsty infrastructure in this country has been built over many decades, and it current estimates are that even if a flood of 40 mpg hybrid cars were snapped up by consumers, it will take about 15 years to effectively "turn over" the inventory that's on the roads today. So the shift will be very, very gradual. The reality is, this isn't something we're doing for ourselves; it's a move we need to make for the future generations of Americans. If a domestic hurricane can create such havoc on our oil supply, imagine the effect if a couple of OPEC nations, emboldened by the exponentially increasing Chinese demand for oil, decide to effectively "cut off" their supply to the U.S. Now is the time to start taking those first steps to reduce -- not eliminate, because that's not really possible -- our overwhelming dependence on foreign oil. Katrina may have exposed this need far more effectively than any politician or statistician could have ever done.

Two Cents

No, not my two cents' worth... which is what I usually spew forth in here. But check this out:

Since Katrina hit and gas prices spiked dramatically, crude oil priced have decreased steadily. "Plunged" is actually the way several media outlets have phrased it. At its peak, a barrel of light crude was up over $70. It's trading today at $64.20. Gasoline futures have dropped below $2 a gallon. The stock market is rallying tremendously in the wake of these indicators.

So have prices at the pump dropped accordingly? Of course not.

Even though they seem to have no problem ratcheting up gas prices 50-60¢ a gallon overnight (forgetting that the gas they have in their tanks onsite has already been paid for at a much lower price), gas stations never really drop their prices nearly as quickly or as significantly as they raise them.

In the wake of a week of plummeting oil prices, the most substantial drop in pump price I've seen has been two lousy cents a gallon. Most stations haven't dropped their prices at all. If this isn't taking advantage of a situation, I don't know what is. Given that the largest component of the cost of a gallon of gas is the price of crude oil, the gas we're paying $3 a gallon for should really be costing us about $2.75 or so (based on the 9% drop in crude oil cost in the last week).

In other news, it turns out Bush staffed FEMA largely with his buddies and people to whom he owed favors. Experience and legitimate qualifications were purely secondary criteria. As bad luck would have it, many of them had neither. The Bush-appointed head of FEMA, in fact, had virtually no emergency management experience, and it looks like some of his credentials were falsified altogether. Amazing, isn't it?

White House Spin Cycle in Full Operation

It's open season on George Bush.

I don't think anyone is surprised, at this point, that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will doubtlessly turn into a partisan slugfest. Everyone is trying to deflect blame when, in truth, there's more than enough of it to go around. Likely thousands dead over a four-state trail of destruction will almost always provide fertile ground for finger-pointing. Democrats are finally emerging from cowering in silence in the shadow of 9/11, and they're going after Bush like rabid pit bulls. As much as White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, who is just such a little namby-pamby fucking stooge that I can't even articulate it politely, wants to whine about this not being the time to point fingers, and that this president is more interested in helping people in need than assigning blame, blah, blah, snorrrre... well, folks, the reality here is that the Bush administration is very much to blame for a great deal of this mess, and Bush probably isn't nearly as interested in truly helping people as he is in counting the days until his next vacation.

Bush's presidency is really amassing a troubling body count, isn't it? God only knows how many thousands and thousands of people have been killed as a direct result of his blundering, stupid invasion of Iraq. Now, as a direct result of his refusal to give more than 2% of the Department of Homeland Security's budget to FEMA, and as a direct result of him ignoring repeated requests for funds to strengthen New Orleans' levees (in 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers' budget called for $22 million and Bush ponied up $3.9 million, effectively cutting almost 82% of their funding), we're about to heap a few more thousand corpses onto Bush's narrow little monkey shoulders. Additionally, there were surely plenty more people who died in the five days between the time the hurricane hit and five days later, when the first of any meaningful Federal aid arrived. And still, as you can tell by watching and listening to Bush speak, he just doesn't get it.

Quite contrary to Truman's famous saying that, "The buck stops here," Bush is so enmeshed in his world of fantasy, so completely detached and insulated from the world that the rest of us inhabit, that he has no issues at all not really passing the buck, but rather just ignoring it altogether. After all, this is the president who waited two days (on vacation, mind you) before remotely publicly addressing the devastation wrought by Katrina. I've been wondering where our arrogant bastard of a vice-president has been throughout all this; now I see he's been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to "assess relief efforts." Frankly, given Cheney's track record of assessing terrorist threats and the WMD situation in Iraq, I'm not entirely sure he can be trusted worth a damn to accurately assess and report on anything, particularly something that could be very damaging to the Bush administration. It should come as a shock to no one that Cheney says relief efforts are, "very impressive."

Continuing on, in a stunning repeat of their desire to censor and sanitize the consequences of their administration's actions (or inactions), Bush's people are disallowing any footage or pictures to be taken of the dead as recovery efforts get underway. Requests for journalists to accompany recovery teams have been rejected. The theory? If we don't show the endless parade of coffins coming back from Iraq, and if we don't show the hundreds of dead bodies floating in the putrid waters in New Orleans, it's almost like it didn't happen at all!

Finally, is anyone else just laughing at the prospect of Bush himself heading up the inquiry into what went wrong in the Katrina aftermath? Does that strike anyone as just completely preposterous? Wouldn't that be like Clinton presiding over the inquiry into his own Whitewater affairs? Here, Bush is the top dog, the ultimate symbol of culpability in this whole mess. For him to preside over any sort of formal inquiry is inappropriate in the extreme.

Naturally, Corporate America is as ready and willing as ever to coddle and protect Bush. NBC not only cut the live feed as soon as Kayne West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," on a Katrina victims benefit show, but they didn't air any of his speech at all to West Coast viewers, who got to see a recorded and censored version of the show. The NFL is warning all of its musical performers for opening games not to say anything disparaging about Bush, and is implementing a 10-second delay to ensure nothing negative is said. FOX--who really should just go on ahead and change their name to "GOP"--refused to air a paid political ad for a Democrat in New York because they say it's "disrespectful" to George Bush. What kind of a country are we turning into here? Because it's sounding more and more like a totalitarian dictatorship, in spite of Bush prattling on and on about democracy and freedom being so fucking wonderful that he'll start a war to foist it onto other nations. I guess my thought is that if freedom is so great, we should at least occasionally practice it here at home. Instead, George Bush heads up inquiries into the failures of... George Bush. Media outlets censor with impunity. Corporate giants tell people what they can and cannot say. TV stations refuse to air negative commentary about Bush.

Hope you're all paying attention... especially the knuckleheads who voted this orangutan back into the White House.

George Bush to blame for the New Orleans disaster?

So just yesterday I was saying that no one could reasonably blame Bush for any of this Hurricane Katrina mess.

Was I being too hasty? Perhaps so.

Somewhat shockingly, George Bush made the stupid comment today (that will doubtlessly come back to haunt him, as Eleanor Clift from Newsweek discusses here) that nobody thought the levees protecting New Orleans would break. This is not only patently false, it's an outright lie.

An article that came to my attention today at work describes how (and I've read this in other places since seeing this article; it's all a matter of public record) the Bush administration repeatedly ignored FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when they asked for funding for protecting New Orleans from a catastrophic hurricane and for strengthening the levees to hold back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Not only did Bush deny the funding request, he proceeded to cut the budget's existing funding by 80% in 2004. Why? So he could funnel those funds into the unwinnable war in Iraq. There's nothing specific to back up the redirection of those funds, but it's pretty widely known that this business in Iraq has been an ungodly drain on our national financial resources.

Additionally, another article discusses how computer models as recently as last year predicted (with pretty grim accuracy, I might add) virtually everything that's been playing out in New Orleans. It goes on to say that many experts believe that shunting FEMA under the thumb of the newly created Department of Homeland Security was a major mistake. You could attribute that to the clarity of hindsight if it were only just now that this was being said, but in testimony before Congress in March 2004, a former FEMA director said the following: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.'"

Finally, one of the most damning articles I read was a very detailed editorial from The Denver Post. If you click on none of the other links in this blog entry, read this one. For me, the most stunning fact was this: "The key levee that failed and allowed flood waters to inundate New Orleans was scheduled to be strengthened two years ago. But funds for that and other improvements were diverted in 2003 as bills came due for the war in Iraq. Earlier this year, the Bush administration made further cuts in hurricane- and flood-control funding."

That this happened in New Orleans really hasn't come as a shock to anyone who studies such things. It's a major city, built below sea level, right in a high-risk hurricane zone, with the wetlands protecting it disappearing at a rapid rate. It wasn't a matter of whether or not this would happen -- just when. In fact, a remarkably, eerily prescient article in Scientific American outlines just what could occur if a major hurricane slammed into the New Orleans area. Much of what's mentioned is what's happening now. And instead of dealing with this head on like a competent leader, the frighteningly disconnected-from-reality Bush -- in the two days immediately following Katrina's landfall -- spent his time being on vacation, then flying to San Diego for a photo-op session.

Even a comprehensive multi-part feature in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2002 sounded the alarm bells at the inevitable disaster. This is a fascinating and highly recommend read, albeit a bit morbid doing it after what has happened in the past few days. It's really a dirty shame the federal government didn't take this threat seriously.

So, instead of ponying up around $250 million to reinforce and strengthen the levees that protect New Orleans over the past couple of years, now -- thanks to Bush & Co. -- American taxpayers can look forward to unloading about 100-200 times that amount, easily, to repair and rebuild a destroyed city. I grew up in Cajun Country, and even if they get the stagnant, toxic water out of there, even if they get the power back on, even if they rebuild the power grid and urban infrastructure... much of what made New Orleans such an inimitable and important part of the American landscape has been lost for a very, very long time, if not forever. I can't gauge the number of years it would take before the city is truly back. And it may never be. Many people will doubtlessly take their insurance money and leave. Their homes and jobs are gone. The city is uninhabitable and will be for many, many months. We've still got two solid months to go in one of the most active hurricane seasons in recorded history. And we may very well be witnessing, effectively, the loss of an entire major U.S. city.

And it was very likely within the power of the Bush administration to prevent it.

Wait 'till this shit hits the fan.