NOLA shrinks by 29 Percent

From the New York Times:

"The Census Bureau reported on Thursday that 343,829 people were living in the city of New Orleans on April 1, 2010, four years and seven months after it was virtually emptied by the floodwaters that followed the hurricane.

The numbers portray a significantly smaller city than in the previous census, in 2000, though it should be said that New Orleans had been steadily shrinking even then. In 1990, it was the 24th-biggest city in the country, in 2000, the 31st, and now it has surely dropped from the top 50."

Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows
CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
February 3, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04census.html

No "Home Sweet Home"

Thu, 26 Aug 2010
Greg Palast
palast@gregpalast.net

No "Home Sweet Home"
Five years after Katrina

Matt Pascarella and I encountered Patricia Thomas while she was breaking into a home at the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. It was her own home. Nevertheless, if caught, she'd end up in the slammer. So would we. Matt was my producer for the film, Big Easy to Big Empty, and he encouraged my worst habits. I'd worked for the New Orleans Housing Authority years back and knew they wanted the poor black folk out of these pretty townhouses near the French Quarter. Katrina was an excuse for ethnic cleansing, American style. Matt and I skipped cuffs on this shoot, but were charged later by Homeland Security (see below). While I recorded the story of hidden evils on film, Matt gathered a story which no camera can capture. Here it is. - Greg Palast

by Matt Pascarella
August 26th, 2010

Four years ago, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I sat with Patricia Thomas. Greg Palast and I had just helped her break into her home in the Lafitte Projects. She had been locked out for a year. She showed us her former home, her belongings scattered everywhere, and wrestled out endless stories of post-Katrina life: how she struggled to find shelter over the last year, how they came and put bars on her doors and windows and locked her out, how it was "man made."

I picked up a photo of her at Mardi Gras, taken a few years earlier, and compared it to what she looked like now. In the picture her hair was longer, her face younger, her smile deeper. Now her arms were wasted and thin, her eyes sunken into her face, and her bottom front teeth were gone. On most days, she told me, she wore her dead mother's dentures, but today she had forgotten to put them in. Her own teeth broke off when escaping the rising waters. She had fallen face first onto the concrete slab that was her front porch. The very spot where we were sitting was where it had happened. Over my left shoulder, running the length of the building, was a scar, a stain from the water line.

August in Louisiana is unbearably hot for a Northern boy. Beads of sweat poured from my face, down my neck. Patricia went inside, found an old roll of paper towels in a kitchen cabinet and brought me one. The quilted paper had a kitschy design - a giant heart with words that said, "Home Sweet Home."

I looked at her and wondered how this could happen in my country.

A few weeks before, I was in Mexico City with Palast covering the Presidential Election. A presidency had been stolen. People were on the streets screaming "Vota por Vota, Casilla por Casilla!" Count the votes! "Vote by Vote, box by box!" I had seen the aftermath of a massacre in a small village outside Mexico City. I had seen people from all over the country rise up in anger taking to the streets. I had seen the Zapatistas march and Subcomandante Marcos himself flanked by young women acting as a protective barrier. I had seen the house where Trotsky was stabbed in the back of the head with an ice pick.

When I finally left Mexico City, I remember being deeply confused. The kind of confusion that tears at the soul and has the ability to completely dismantle any preconceived notions of how to view the world. I was inspired to see so many people fighting for democracy, and yet a deep depression sunk in as the plane took off. I knew their efforts would not matter. I had seen the American 'consultants', the DC hacks, in the offices of the ruling party and I knew it was over.

Now, here I was - back home in the United States - outside a decimated house near the levees, trying to understand why a New Orleans native, Brod Bagert, was calling a friend who worked with the fire department. Brod was asking his old friend what the number "5" below the giant orange spray-painted X on the front of the house meant. But Brod already knew what it meant.

Here I was watching Brod, one year later, trying to convince himself that what had happened to his neighbors didn't actually happen. After many long days of hearing countless horrifying stories and walking through miles of destruction, I now stood next to a grown man who was desperately trying to lie to himself simply because the alternative was too painful. I couldn't hold back the tears. It was the first, and only, time in my professional life that I had to walk away from an interview. I hid out behind a smashed up, rotted out BMW and cried.

After a few minutes I returned to Brod. He hung up the phone, looked at Palast and me, and slowly choked, "Five people died here."

He finally gave in to what had happened here: the sprayed "9-16" above that X meant that those five bodies had been left to decompose for nearly 19 days before being discovered by rescue crews.

Brod rubbed his eyes and we went inside the house. His fathomless sadness hardened into anger. We walked through a sand dune littered with toys into what was once the living room. I tried not to imagine the mom and dad and kids as water crushed them against the ceiling; as they clawed for one more breath.

Brod took us down the street to his home, that is, the sticks that were left of his home. He was breathing hard, he was shaking. "Old ladies watched the water come up to their nose, over their eyes and they drowned in houses just like this, in this neighborhood, because of reckless negligence that is unanswered for."

I think back now, to those words, spoken four years ago and wonder if it will ever be answered.

We then met Stephen Smith. He worked at the Marriott hotel, but had no car and no way to get out when the Mayor said to get out. Stephen pulled a dozen neighbors to a bridge over the rising water for four days as helicopters whirled overhead. Four days in the humid sun. No food. An old man gave his grandchildren his only bottle of water; then the old man died of dehydration. Stephen now works in a grocery store in Houston where FEMA ultimately dumped him. His kids live in Baton Rouge.

The next day Palast and I drove up to Baton Rouge to confront the company that was contracted to come up with an evacuation plan for the City of New Orleans. They had refused all of our interview requests, so we showed up at their offices to request a copy of the plan in person. We were quickly thrown out, they threatened to call security. They knew what we knew: There was no plan.

We drove out to the town of Baker. There, we surreptitiously passed through a security checkpoint before funneling into a massive FEMA trailer park. Here we met Pamela Lewis who told us her story of escaping the flood. Despite having MS, she pushed a boat with her 86-year-old mother, other relatives and neighbors through the streets of New Orleans. When she got to a bridge, armed men yelled at her, called her a nigger, and commanded her to turn around. They didn't want a boat full of black people coming into their neighborhood. She then managed to make it to the Superdome where she was sprayed down by hoses, tossed on a bus, and then told to pay a fare and get off. She had no idea where she was.

We finished filming. Pamela stood in front of the car next to her trailer, and I locked eyes with her. I put the car in reverse and backed out, leaving her there, alone, not knowing what she was going to do with her life.

We drove back to New Orleans, passing an Exxon Oil Refinery - the only thing near Pamela's trailer park. Several weeks later, at the request of Exxon, Homeland Security would file a criminal complaint against me and Palast under the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act for filming "critical infrastructure." The only thing critical about that refinery was the pollution it was spewing near what had become a refugee camp.

Five years have gone by and it is rare if a week passes that I don't think of New Orleans. Nearly two thousand people lost their lives. An entire city was decimated. People were killed by the very police officers who were supposed to be protecting them. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and livelihoods. To this day there are some still living in FEMA trailers. Patricia died a few years back in a horrible car accident; Lafitte, her home, has since been demolished.

My job was to go, to report, and then go home. My job was to leave Patricia, Pamela, Brod and countless others whom I had encountered, behind - to place them in a compartment in my mind, and to move on to the next story. Yet I never quite managed to do that with New Orleans. Maybe it was easier for me to cope in places like Mexico, but New Orleans was America. It happened in my country. All of the people I met in New Orleans - their images, their words - have, over the years, crystallized into a vivid sense of disenchantment with the romantic narrative of America I was taught as a child.

I sit here now, thumb through my old notebook that is labeled in black marker "NOLA" and find the paper towel Patricia gave me. It still reads, next to that big, faded heart, "Home Sweet Home."
*********
Matt Pascarella produced the Greg Palast investigation, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans.

Pascarella is currently a journalist with the Palast Investigative Fund which is offering the film as download FREE of charge during this week of commemoration. Or, for a donation, receive the DVD signed by Palast.

The Palast Fund requests your tax-deductible donations. We are returning to New Orleans to finish the investigation we started.

http://www.gregpalast.com/

New Orleans' Cuisine Crisis: Is It Safe to Eat the Po'Boy?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1996569,00.html

New Orleans' Cuisine Crisis: Is It Safe to Eat the Po'Boy?
By Steven Gray / New Orleans
Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010

Not quite two weeks ago, on June 5, Sal Sunseri opened the first New Orleans Oyster Festival. Postponed a few years because of Hurricane Katrina, the affair, in the city's French Quarter, included contests for wine and oyster pairings as well as oyster shucking — basically, cracking open the shell to expose the slippery gray meat for slurping. On June 10, however, the Sunseri family business, P&J Oyster Co., which in 134 years had become the chief oyster purveyor to some of the city's most esteemed restaurants, effectively closed. Not only was it running short of the delicacies, but people were afraid to eat them. "We're mourning," Sunseri says.

Few cities treat seafood with the high reverence of New Orleans, where shrimp is often eaten for breakfast (with buttery grits), oysters for lunch (on a po'boy, or sandwich) and crawfish for dinner (étouffée). But those traditions may become a casualty of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The oil spill that has brought President Obama to the region for the fourth time in the past month has closed nearly one-third of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing. It is potentially catastrophic for Louisiana's core $2.4 billion seafood industry, which provides much of the nation's fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs.

The region's angst is understandable. New Orleans' main highway, Interstate 10, is lined with billboards showing mounds of fried seafood. Castnet Seafood, a shop in the largely residential New Orleans East section, is still teeming with customers buying shrimp, fish and oysters to store in their freezers. But the owner, Kent Bondi, fears that soon, "that rush is going to come to a complete end." And there is the vexing question: Is the seafood safe to eat? A recent Castnet customer returned with a bag of fish, saying, "It smelled like oil," and demanded a refund. Bondi told her flatly that the catfish was farm-raised, so there was no chance it had been tainted by oil. "It's psychological," he says of the fear.

But people can be forgiven for their questions. The images — thousands of gallons of oil spewing each day from the Gulf of Mexico, plus oil-soaked fish, turtles and pelicans — are hard to ignore. It's scaring even some of the most ardent seafood devotees. "We won't be able to turn around our brand perception for five years or more," predicts Ashley Roth, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Seafood and Marketing Board. The board has launched a multipronged ad campaign in major newspapers boasting that Louisiana's seafood is indeed safe to eat because most of the state's waterways remain untouched by oil. Meanwhile, a delegation of local chefs is being sent to Washington State and even Finland to evangelize about Louisiana's seafood cuisine; a crawfish boil is scheduled for Dijon, France, this summer.

The challenge isn't just one of perception but supply. There are a couple of reasons for this. While an estimated 70% of Louisiana's coastline remains open to fishing, many shrimpers, oystermen and fishermen have signed up to be among the 13,000 people hired by BP or its contractors to clean up the spill. By one estimate, only 1% of the men who usually harvest oysters are actually doing so — mainly because the cleanup jobs can be lucrative (some pay $2,000 a day).

Meanwhile, many of the oyster beds have been closed as a precaution against the arrival of the oil. Some of the beds, however, have become victims of caution. Shortly after the spill began, authorities opened some of the vent-like structures built by the Army Corps of Engineers in order to push freshwater out toward the Gulf and keep the oil from entering the river and surrounding marsh. That meant sharply decreasing salinity in some of the waters where oysters are harvested — killing the beds.

Cliff Hall, co-owner of the New Orleans Fish House, one of the city's largest suppliers, is buying West Coast oysters and more imported shrimp than he'd like. "We want to support our local fishermen," he says, "but there's no other choice." Many seafood suppliers had depleted their stock, anticipating a robust fishing season, which typically begins in May. So the crisis, he says, "couldn't have come at a worse time." The pinched supply has driven up the price of oysters about 25% in the past week. "It's going to hit a stopping point of what the consumer will tolerate," says Hall.

For another sense of how the crisis is playing out, consider one of New Orleans' premier restaurants, Commander's Palace. The restaurant's shrimp costs have soared 40%, to about $9.50 per lb., since the oil crisis began. So far, the executive chief, Tory McPhail, has not passed along the added expense to consumers. The higher cost, he says, "forces us to look at our menus, be more value-conscious and do things we wouldn't normally do." One example: maximizing the use of shrimp. It is broken into two parts: the head and tail. McPhail's team breads and then fries the tail, which is the meatier half. The head is roasted at 400°, to dehydrate it, at which point it is ground into a powder. The powder is then used to significantly strengthen the flavor of seafood in a bisque, even with the decrease of shrimp tails in the stock.

So, the bottom-line question: Is it safe to eat seafood in New Orleans? Managers of restaurants, grocery stores and markets quickly point out that their livelihoods depend on serving safe food. Much of the seafood is carefully inspected using one of the most powerful tools: the human nose. And if the seafood looks odd, the chefs don't bother with the ingredient. Robert Buchannan, director of the Center for Food Safety and Security at the University of Maryland at College Par, offers a simple piece of advice: "If the seafood tastes like a petroleum product, it'd be smart not to eat it." The good news is, New Orleans offers a range of po'boy substitutes, like the muffuletta, with salami (cotto and Genoa), smoked ham, mozzarella and an oily olive salad stuffed into a thick round of bread. Sadly, it isn't diet-friendly. But not much in New Orleans is.

Is oil spill becoming Obama's Katrina?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-05-27-Spill-poll_N.htm

Is oil spill becoming Obama's Katrina?
5-27-10
By Mimi Hall, Rick Jervis and Alan Levin, USA TODAY

The hurricane that drowned New Orleans and cast George W. Bush as out of touch swept across the Gulf Coast nearly five years ago. Now, as oil laps ashore in the very same region, local officials are asking: Is there another government-Gulf Coast disconnect? Is BP's oil spill becoming this president's Katrina?
President Obama will face questions today at his first news conference since oil started gushing five weeks ago.

Frustrated Gulf Coast residents say they understand that only BP can plug the leak. But they want to know why the federal government didn't act faster to stop the oil from reaching shore, why BP hasn't been forced to skim more oil from the surface and why their request hasn't been approved to build new barrier islands to help keep the oil at bay.

The Obama administration's response is "dysfunctional, there's no chain of command, no one's in charge," says Parish President Billy Nungesser in Plaquemines, La.

The public isn't impressed either.

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that six out of 10 adults say the federal government is doing a "poor" or "very poor" job handling the spill. A majority — 53% — say the same about Obama.

And 50% of those polled say protecting the environment now should be a higher priority than promoting economic growth. Those choosing the economy: 43%.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says the administration has been waging an "all-out, all-hands-on-deck battle to protect the Gulf Coast" and ensure that the British energy giant responsible for the spill cleans it up.

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod says the government is "doing everything conceivable" to limit the damage. "The Katrina analogy suggests that we didn't or haven't recognized from the beginning the profound nature of this problem, and that is just flat out wrong," he says. "Can we do better? You should always strive to do better."

BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, however, conceded Wednesday on NBC's Today show that his company has "let people down" by allowing the oil to reach delicate marshland and shoreline. "We are going to redouble our efforts," he promised.

A range of critics is demanding to know why the federal government hasn't already forced BP to do better — or just taken over. "The response to the oil coming ashore should be federalized and put in the hands of professional emergency managers and not oil companies," says Deano Bonano, homeland security chief in Jefferson Parish, La.

Comparisons to Katrina are limited: More than 1,800 people died when the storm hit and flooded the Gulf Coast in August 2005; 11 men died on the Deepwater Horizon rig when an explosion ruptured the well on April 20.

In both cases, however, local residents complained about what they say is an anemic response from Washington. "The response to this," Nungesser says, "has been worse than Katrina."

The White House, citing a 1990 law that requires oil companies to clean up their messes, says the government is offering help and overseeing the effort — but they're insistent that the cleanup is BP's responsibility.

The oil company is taking the brunt of the blame. The new poll of 1,049 adults, taken Monday and Tuesday, finds more than seven in 10 people say BP is doing a poor job. The survey has a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points.

Democratic strategist James Carville, who lives in New Orleans, and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., are among the critics who acknowledge that the government doesn't have the technological know-how to plug the well and stop the gusher. They contend, however, that the administration has resources — oil-catching booms, manpower, planes and boats, barges and skimmers — that can collect and clean up the oil. Such moves would limit the damage to a fragile ecosystem that supports a way of life for many, including those working in the $2.4 billion seafood industry.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says the government is limited by the Oil Pollution Act, passed in the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off the Alaskan coast. Peppered with questions at a recent news briefing about whether the government couldn't simply "federalize" the response and take over from BP, Gibbs said, "No."

Mindful of the frustration, however, the White House is taking a more aggressive approach. On Wednesday, Obama spoke about the spill during an event on the economy in Fremont, Calif. "Let me reiterate," he said. "We will not rest until this well is shut, the environment is repaired and the cleanup is complete."

Today for the first time in 10 months, he will hold a full-fledged news conference. On Friday, he will head back to Louisiana, his second trip this month to inspect the damaged area.

Scalise says Obama's increased engagement is overdue. "We don't need a finger-pointer-in-chief," he says. "We need a quarterback on the field."

Angry residents push back

The White House has sent out memos to the news media outlining the government-wide response to the spill from the start. Lengthy e-mails outlining everything from the number of Small Business Administration loans approved for Gulf Coast businesses hurt by the spill to the phone number to report "oiled wildlife" have been issued daily, detailing all the steps federal agencies and BP have taken to try to mitigate the ecological damage.

Wednesday's memo says about 1,300 vessels and dozens of aircraft have been shipped to the Gulf Coast, along with more than 1.85 million feet of the containment boom that helps stop oil from getting to shore and about 840,000 gallons of dispersant used to break up the slicks.

Angry Gulf Coast residents are pushing back, much as they did post-Katrina, when Washington officials said they had the situation in hand. Now those in the region say there's a disconnect between what the White House says is happening on the ground and what they see.

In Louisiana, officials say the response has been bogged down in bureaucracy, hobbled by rules and procedures that hamper decision-making. Responders also have lacked equipment, they say, even as oil has invaded marshes and beaches.

Just getting enough oil-stopping boom has been a problem, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says.

State officials three weeks ago requested 5 million feet of boom from the Coast Guard, he says. As of Monday, only 815,000 feet of it had been delivered and 680,000 feet set up in the water, he says. Requests for more boom or other oil-fighting equipment are often routed to a BP subcontractor for approval, then sent through two command centers, which Jindal says delays Coast Guard approval for up to two days.

"We don't have 24 to 48 hours," the governor says. "This oil is moving too quickly."

Another Jindal complaint: a slow government response to his state's proposal to build a 94-mile-long string of sand berms across Louisiana's coast to keep the oil at bay.

The $350 million barrier plan was hatched by Plaquemines Parish officials shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as a way to keep out future storm surges and could work equally well to block out the oil, says P.J. Hahn, director of coastal management for the parish.

The plan would take four to six months to complete, but 12 dredges working simultaneously on the project would bring relief to coastal marshes almost immediately, says Nungesser, the Plaquemines president.

On May 11, Louisiana requested an emergency permit for the plan from the Army Corps of Engineers that would bypass lengthy environmental impact reviews. Corps and Coast Guard officials have voiced concerns, and the matter is still under review.

"We understand the importance and significance of this emergency permit request, and it is a top priority," the Army Corps said in a statement.

Last week, Nungesser says, he and his staff discovered globs of black oil seeping into marshes near Venice. He says they alerted officials at the BP/Coast Guard command center, who dispatched a team to fight off the oil — five days later.

"There's definitely some confusion about who's in charge," says G. Paul Kemp, a coastal ecologist with the National Audubon Society. "We hear from shrimpers that they're under contract (to help) but they're not, they don't know what they're supposed to be doing or whether they're going to be doing anything, and this is at a time when it would seem we need pretty much everybody working round the clock on this."

In other instances, locals have taken matters into their own hands.

On Saturday, after two days of begging BP for help in fending off an approaching tentacle of oil, officials in Jefferson Parish commandeered about 50 idle boats that had been hired by the oil giant and began cleaning a local bay themselves, Bonano says.

"Numerous times we told them we had oil in a certain location and they said they had skimmers in that location," Bonano says. "We sent up a helicopter and there was nothing there."

A 'significant' PR problem

Those kinds of stories have prompted calls by environmentalists such as David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for the government to take over the response from BP.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who served in the Bush administration but had left office before Katrina hit, says the White House ought to give the Coast Guard "carte blanche" to run the show along the Gulf Coast and summon whatever it needs to get the cleanup done — from the private sector, from the Navy, from anywhere it can. "It's better to overextend yourself," he says, when it's not clear just how bad the damage will be in a crisis.

Instead, the Obama administration "has been slow off the mark," Ridge says, and now the White House is facing a "significant" public relations problem.

Gibbs says the government has provided considerable expertise and other assistance; named Thad Allen, who retired as commandant of the Coast Guard on Tuesday, as the government's incident commander; and "pushed relentlessly for BP to do what is necessary to contain what is leaking."

Pettit, an NRDC lawyer, says another law trumps the 1990 oil pollution law and gives the government sweeping authority to respond. He says that under the Clean Water Act, the nation's primary law dealing with polluted water, the president "shall direct" efforts to clean up if a discharge of oil "poses a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United states."

"The Coast Guard has the right to run the entire operation," Pettit says. "They haven't chosen to. Why not?"

Allen, the administration's point person in the Gulf, says that's just what he's doing as he directs BP's clean-up efforts. "If I need to, I call Tony Hayward myself," Allen says of the company's CEO. "They're the responsible party, but we have the authority to direct."

He says it wouldn't make sense to push BP aside and take over completely. "Well, to push BP out of the way would raise the question: to replace them with what?"

'An absolute outrage' any oil has come ashore

Tom Copeland, who helped lead an impromptu effort by Alaskan fishermen in 1989 to attack the Exxon Valdez spill, has an idea.

Copeland says an effective oil-skimming armada is expensive and requires a huge infrastructure of barges to haul away the toxic goo but can make a significant dent in even a giant slick.

"With a spill like this and the good weather that we've had, it's an absolute outrage that any oil has been allowed to come ashore," he says .

Copeland says he equipped his fishing boat with a vacuum pump from a sewage hauling truck, which sucked up thousands of gallons of oil a day. Hundreds of boats could be similarly outfitted and on the Gulf within days, he says. Yet Copeland contends that it's not BP's interest to collect large quantities of oil after a spill, since that would require expensive disposal as a toxic waste.

BP has hired about 275 boats to clean up the oil since last month's explosion, says company spokesman Graham MacEwen. He called the dispute over the idle boats in Jefferson Parish a "misunderstanding" and says the company is committed to doing everything possible to pick up oil.

Some people give BP credit — though not for its cleanup efforts. A.J. Fabre, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, praises the company for covering industry losses. Last week, Fabre says, the company gave shrimpers $5,000 checks.

As of Tuesday, BP said 25,227 economic claims had been opened and it had paid out $29.4 million to those affected by the spill. The company said no claims have been denied.

"BP is the only oil company that's ever stepped forward and opened their checkbooks," says Fabre, a shrimper for 40 years. "You just come in with your tax statements and your trip tickets and they cut you a check. That's unheard of."

Other business owners, however, are feeling the sting. Floyd Lasseigne, a fourth-generation Grand Isle, La., oyster fisherman and shrimper, is worried about how he's going to pay his annual $5,000 house insurance payment in late June now that he's out of work.

He puts most of the blame on BP but says the government should do more. "It's way too slow of a response," he says. "That oil is still pouring in."

Besides fishing, Grand Isle survives on revenue from the tourists that pour into town for each of the 23 fishing rodeos held throughout the year. The first one, the Speckled Trout Rodeo, kicks off this Memorial Day weekend. But with the fishing grounds closed, it's unclear whether people will come just for the party.

Arthur Bradberry, owner of Artie's Sports Bar, says his business has dropped more than half since the spill began.

"They're all running around here and no one seems to know what's going on," he says of the federal and BP officials. "They should've done more from the start. They waited too late. Now, of course, they all want to blame each other."

Contributing: Peter Eisler and Donna Leinwand

Sex & Drugs & the Spill

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10krugman.html

Sex & Drugs & the Spill
PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 9, 2010

“Obama’s Katrina”: that was the line from some pundits and news sources, as they tried to blame the current administration for the gulf oil spill. It was nonsense, of course. An Associated Press review of the Obama administration’s actions and statements as the disaster unfolded found “little resemblance” to the shambolic response to Katrina — and there has been nothing like those awful days when everyone in the world except the Bush inner circle seemed aware of the human catastrophe in New Orleans.

Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.

For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.

Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.

And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right.

In any case, now is the time to make that break — and I don’t just mean by cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service. What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.

Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”

Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 10, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

Family of Secrets

From Amazon.com:

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years
Russ Baker
Paperback: 592 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (November 10, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608190064
ISBN-13: 978-1608190065

How did the deeply flawed George W. Bush ascend to the highest office in the nation, what forces abetted his rise, and—perhaps most important—have those forces really been vanquished by Obama’s election? Award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker gives us the answers in Family of Secrets, a compelling and startling new take on the Bush dynasty and the shadowy elite that has quietly steered the American republic for the past half century and more. Baker shows how this network of figures in intelligence, the military, oil, and finance enabled—and in turn benefited handsomely from—the Bushes’ perch at the highest levels of government. As Baker reveals, this deeply entrenched elite remains in power regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Family of Secrets offers countless disclosures that challenge the conventional accounts of such central events as the JFK assassination and Watergate. It includes an inside account of George W.’s cynical religious conversion and the untold real background to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Baker’s narrative is gripping, sobering, and deeply sourced. It will change the way we understand not just the Bush years, but a half century of postwar history—and the present.

About the Author

Russ Baker is an awardwinning investigative journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and Esquire, and has served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization, operating at www.whowhatwhy.com.

Praise for Family of Secrets:

“One of the most important books of the past ten years.”
— Gore Vidal

“A tour de force … Family of Secrets has made me rethink even those events I witnessed with my own eyes.”
— Dan Rather

“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight—from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today's headlines—this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism.”
— Roger Morris, former senior staff member, National Security Council, and author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

“Left-wing paranoia? Baker, a solid investigative journalist, works hard to back up his claims – a reader could choke on the complex, interwoven details in Family of Secrets. He's a man on a mission, desperate to stop the “methods of stealth and manipulation that ... reflect a deeper ill: the American public's increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.”
— San Diego Union-Tribune

“Prodigiously industrious investigative journalist Russ Baker…. connects the dots between the Bushes and Watergate.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

Praise for Russ Baker:

“In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know.”
— Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers’ Journal (PBS)

“Russ Baker has the three most important attributes of any great investigative reporter: He is skeptical, he is fearless, and he is indefatigable. Whenever he examines anything—including the most allegedly wellcovered topics—he breaks important new ground.”
— David Margolick, author and contributing editor, Vanity Fair

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University
May 5, 2010
Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the devise voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

Obama Tries to Head Off Katrina Comparison in BP Spill Response

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/obama-tries-to-head-off-katrina-comparison-in-bp-spill-response.html
Obama Tries to Head Off Katrina Comparison in BP Spill Response
May 06, 2010
Julianna Goldman

(Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration is trying to head off criticism over its handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with a two-pronged strategy: Showcasing every move in its response and pinning blame squarely on BP Plc.

President Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, yesterday dismissed complaints from a Republican lawmaker as “badly informed,” and the White House released a 6,300-word compendium of presidential briefings, actions by Cabinet officials, and daily deployments of personnel, ships and booms.

BP, which leased the oil rig that exploded and sank to start the spill, is referred to as the “responsible party” five times in the White House document, a message that has been repeated by the president and his aides.

In the background are memories of Hurricane Katrina and the bungled reaction that dogged President George W. Bush.

“The White House rhetoric has been profoundly aggressive,” said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management strategist who heads Washington-based Dezenhall Resources Ltd. “What it tells you is the White House fears that Obama can be held accountable for this spill in the same way that Bush was held accountable for Katrina.”

While Bush’s ill-timed praise in 2005 for Michael Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for doing a “heck of a job,” came to define his administration’s inaction, this White House is seeking to define its response as keeping the “boot on the throat” of BP.

Putting on Pressure

A presidential adviser said the rhetoric is aimed at putting pressure on BP to cap the leak and act in good faith toward Gulf Coast residents.

BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward said on May 4 the economic cost of the spill would exceed the $75 million federal limit on damages, and told lawmakers that all “legitimate” claims would be honored. He said the company would “have the resources to deal with” the costs of the cleanup, which aren’t covered by the liability cap. The administration and some lawmakers support a “significantly” higher cap.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, which BP leased from Geneva- based Transocean Ltd., sank on April 22, causing three breaches in the well that have been leaking 5,000 barrels of oil a day. While the company stopped one of the leaks yesterday, the spill estimates haven’t changed. By the third week of June, the leak could surpass the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

From ‘Day One’

Administration officials say there has been a full-scale response since “day one” when the rig exploded on April 20. Still, a hastily assembled meeting of top advisers and a call to the president aboard Air Force One on April 28 to discuss a new breach in the well mark the moment of the response’s escalation.

Cabinet and White House officials, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, were gathered in the Situation Room for an update when Coast Guard representatives told them about the additional breach.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer and Gibbs were pulled from a staff meeting to join the others in the Situation Room. Over the next several days, the president spoke publicly on the spill, Cabinet officials were dispatched to the Gulf Coast, and federal officials began to brief the press.

‘Pretty Good Job’

Obama told his advisers he wanted to travel to the area and was prepared to cancel his appearance at the May 1 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, advisers said. Personnel on the ground said it would be better if he visited May 2.

Former government officials, engineers who have studied the spill and crisis-communication strategists give the administration credit for its response so far.

“They’ve done a pretty good job,” said Admiral James Loy, former commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and now a senior counselor at the Cohen Group in Washington. “I think it’s quite clear that the responsible party here is BP.”

The government’s response depended, in part, on information from the companies involved in the spill, which didn’t appear to know the magnitude of the problem right away, said Turgay Ertekin, a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania.

“I do not know whether the government itself could do anything else,” Ertekin said.

‘Slow to Respond’

Republican leaders yesterday criticized the administration’s actions, while questioning whether BP should shoulder all the blame.

Representative Mike Pence, the House Republican conference chairman, said the administration has been “slow to respond” with equipment. Gibbs called the Indiana lawmaker “badly informed.”

Marina Ein, a crisis communications strategist and president of Ein Communications in Washington, said the administration is likely to find itself on the defensive for inadequate regulations to ensure necessary backup for such a spill.

“It was stunning for most of us to read how little was in place to prevent this kind of a calamity,” she said.

Still, she said, the administration’s “acting tough and providing as much backup information as they can to the media and the public, I think, is doing the right thing.”

--With assistance from Kristin Jensen and Edwin Chen in Washington. Editors: Mark McQuillan, Joe Sobczyk

To contact the reporter on this story: Julianna Goldman in Washington at jgoldman6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Kirk at jkirk12@bloomberg.net

Thank Dick Cheney and His Meetings for Lack of Safeguards on Oil Rigs

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/papantonio-thank-dick-cheney-and-his-meeti

Papantonio: Thank Dick Cheney and His Meetings With Oil Industry Execs for Lack of Safeguards on Oil Rigs
By Heather
Saturday May 01, 2010

As Karoli already noted, Halliburton has been tied to the Deepwater Horizon spill. Mike Papantonio implicated Dick Cheney as well on Ed Schultz's show. As Papantonio pointed out and The Wall Street Journal reported, the Leaking Oil Well Lacked [a] Safeguard Device:

The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.

The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week.

...U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated.

...The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

...An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said. The Deepwater Horizon had a replacement cost of about $560 million, and BP says it is spending $6 million a day to battle the oil spill. On Wednesday, crews set fire to part of the oil spill in an attempt to limit environmental damage.

Some major oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell PLC and France's Total SA, sometimes use the device even where regulators don't call for it.

Papantonio laid the blame squarely in Dick Cheney's lap and said this was one of the deregulations of the energy industry that was negotiated during his secret meetings with oil industry and other energy executives during George Bush's first term in office and called this the biggest under-reported aspect of this disaster. It would be nice if the media would look into this and start asking some more questions about why these companies were allowed not to have this last resort safeguard. I'm not holding my breath with most of them but maybe we'll see more information on this from the likes of Amy Goodman, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

In the mean time most of the media is busy repeating the GOP talking point that this is "Obama's Katrina" like Mrs. Greenspan and Grandpa Pat on MSNBC.

Who Dat? Dat's the Super Bowl Champs!

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/527623/who_dat_dat_s_the_super_bowl_champs

Who Dat? Dat's the Super Bowl Champs!
by Dave Zirin

The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl 44. I can’t believe I’m even typing the words. Five years ago this was the team considered most likely to be moved to Los Angeles. Four and a half years ago, after the levies broke, the concern was not whether there would be a Saints, but whether there would even be a New Orleans. Remember that after Hurricane Katrina, the Speaker of the House, Republican Rep. Dennis Hastert said, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” But now Hastert is on the political scrap heap and New Orleans is the home of the Super Bowl champs. I’m not sure whether it feels like a dream or positively preordained. If nothing else, it’s an emotional release from all the idiocy that surrounded the big game. From the military cheerleading, to Tim and Pam Tebow’s vapid Focus on the Family ad, to the Who’s halftime act which clearly violated the Geneva accords: none of it matters now. We’ll go back to building resistance to Obama’s wars. Tim Tebow will go back to being the next Eric Crouch. And the Who will go back to Madame Tussaud’s. For right now, it just doesn’t matter because the New Orleans Saints won the damn Super Bowl.

Quarterback Drew Brees will get a lot of love after a 32-for-39 MVP performance. But this was no one-man-band. This was about a head coach in Sean Payton who, with his team down 10-6, exercised a wicked sense of daring and ordered the first non-fourth quarter onside kick in Super Bowl history. This was about a Saints defense that bent but didn’t break, freezing Peyton Manning's Colts at 17 points. This was about an offense that was crisper than potatoes at the bottom of a deep fryer. This was also about a stadium in Miami that sounded nearly as loud as the Louisiana Superdome. But most of all this was about a Crescent City that refuses to die.

As Leigh, a friend and blogger from New Orleans, said to me, “The energy in this entire town is incredible. People here have been ready for this for decades...but the way the media is treating the Saints as underdogs isn't a surprise to any of us. The people of New Orleans have been subjected to those attitudes for a long time ourselves, and we still are in too, too many ways, but we're still here. And those who are still unable to return here due to the displacement caused by the storm, or the recession, or other circumstances - they'll return in one way or another, because this is a town that can teach the rest of this country how to live. It always has, and it always will, despite it all.”

Leigh’s pride runs across NOLA tonight. The same week that Education Secretary Arne Duncan outrageously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans", the city has delivered a counterpunch to Duncan as well as any and all doubters. Their ascendancy means that the arduous post Hurricane recovery work has gotten more publicity in the last two weeks than it’s received in the last two years. This is maddening but many New Orleans residents wouldn’t have it any other way. As Saints linebacker Scott Fujita’s wife Jaclyn said, “The people of New Orleans love the Saints not because they provide a distraction from their fall but because they are a reflection of their rise.”

Whether you believe that or not, the proof is in the very vibe of the city. The French Quarter is hopping tonight. The Ninth Ward is hopping tonight. Algiers is hopping tonight. People in New Orleans are feeling damn good right now, and to scoff at that is to scoff at the very resiliency that makes us human. Community activist and former Black Panther Malik Rahim who has lived in the city for three decades and still works in Algiers, told me, “I haven’t seen people this happy since Katrina. No question about it.” That doesn’t mean all – or even some – questions about the future of New Orleans are solved by a Saints Super Bowl win. Jobs, housing, and the right of return for displaced residents still need to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

But it does mean that folks of the Big Easy are feeling fearless tonight. Every last person – from Bush to Brownie - that wrote this city off has to now bend down and kiss the ring. President Barack Obama, who often seems allergic to saying the words “New Orleans” must now greet the team at the White House and acknowledge both the Saints and the city that bears their name. Even if tomorrow is unbearably hard, we have today. And today feels mighty fine.

Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Silver Lining for Vikings Fans (Politically)

by Dave Zirin

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/521374/silver_lining_for_vikings_fans_politically

This is a day to empathize with the agony amongst the long-suffering fans of the Minnesota Vikings. With a trip to the Super Bowl in their buttery grasp, they fumbled it all away. In a game they largely dominated from start-to-finish, the Vikes lost in overtime to the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship Game, 31-28. Miscues, interceptions, and some questionable calls will have Vikings Nation asking "what if" for the next nine months.

Yes, there is misery in Minnesota. But there is also a silver lining, and I'm not talking about the joy in Green Bay at the spectacular fall of Minnesota QB Brett Favre. Vikings owner Zygi Wilf was locked and loaded to arrive at the Minnesota State Legislature on February 4 - three days before the Super Bowl - to press for a new $1 billion stadium with $700 million to be paid by the taxpayers. The Vikings, like many teams, is holding up the specter of moving the franchise to Los Angeles if they don't get a nine-figure welfare check. With the state's phony populist absentee governor Tim "Glass Jaw" Pawlenty saying little more than, "We have to keep the Vikings no matter what," Wilf was ready to roll the state's taxpayers. But now that the team has failed to reach the Big Game, the wind is out of Wilf's sails and Zygi is no longer coated with stardust. This isn't to say that Wilf won't emerge triumphant, but without the team in the Super Bowl, it's much more apparent that he will have a fight on his hands.

As Minnesota resident and dogged stadium opponent Willard Shapira wrote, "Most communities around the U.S. have caved in to such outrageous demands but socially concerned Minnesotans are fighting the Vikings tooth and nail. Others around the U.S. battling big-money and establishment power politics would take heart from a public victory over the Vikings and their gang of arrogant, plutocratic conspirators in business, politics and the media."

Remember that Minnesotans repeatedly rejected the Twins billionaire owner Carl Pohlad's efforts to get a new baseball stadium on the public dime. Despite their votes, Pawlenty rammed the $500 million facility through the legislature and it opens for business this spring. Now the owner called "the Big Bad Wilf" wants his piece of the public pie, recession be damned. The Vikings failure to make the Super Bowl makes his effort far more perilous.

On the flip side, and ever so ironically, New Orleans first trip to the Super Bowl makes it a near impossibility for the Saints owners, the Benson family, to fulfill their pre-Katrina dreams of moving their franchise to the City of Angels. If they made that move, I'm convinced that the Crescent City would implode with grief. Now, as a Super Bowl team, that move becomes a political impossibility.

Therefore in one tense contest to see who would ascend to the Super Bowl, two sets of owners saw their most treasured dreams to burn tax payers and break hearts go up in smoke. That's something all fans should cheer. Even in Minnesota.

Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Robertson says Haiti paying for 'pact to the devil'

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/01/13/haiti.pat.robertson/index.html

Pat Robertson says Haiti paying for 'pact to the devil'
January 13, 2010
Pat Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Robertson says native Haitians made deal with the devil for freedom from France
Robertson is evangelical Christian who has made similar comparisons
He once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina

(CNN) -- Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a "pact to the devil" brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Officials fear more than 100,000 people have died as a result of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Robertson, the host of the "700 Club," blamed the tragedy on something that "happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it."

The Haitians "were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever," Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. "And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' "

Native Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and declared independence.

"You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other." Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States. Soon after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 and wreaking unprecedented devastation on New Orleans, Louisiana, Robertson weighed in with his own theory.

"We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America," Robertson said on his September 12, 2005, broadcast of "700 Club."

"I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he [the author] used the term that those who do this, 'the land will vomit you out.' ... But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?"

Orleans-Area Residents 'Vindicated' by Katrina Ruling

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575763,00.html

New Orleans-Area Residents 'Vindicated' by Katrina Ruling Against Army Corps of Engineers
Thursday, November 19, 2009

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans-area residents have been "vindicated" after a historic ruling that found the Army Corps of Engineers negligent in failing to prevent Hurricane Katrina flooding, an attorney in the case said Thursday.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the corps' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding during Katrina in August 2005.

Lawyer Joe Bruno, who represented plaintiffs in the case against the Corps of Engineers, praised the decision and said those affected by the devastating storm have been "vindicated."

Another speaker at the news conference said residents are finally seeing justice served and vowed that the decision will stand.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval sided with five residents and one business who argued the Army Corps' shoddy oversight of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet led to the flooding of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

He said, however, that the corps couldn't be held liable for the flooding of eastern New Orleans, where one of the plaintiffs lived.

Duval awarded the plaintiffs $720,000, or about $170,000 each, but the decision could eventually make the government vulnerable to a much larger payout.

The ruling should give more than 100,000 other people, businesses and government entities a better shot at claiming billions of dollars in damages.

Bruno, one of the lead plaintiffs lawyer, said the ruling underscored the Army Corps' long history of failure to properly protect the New Orleans region.

"It's high time we look at the way these guys do business and do a full re-evaluation of the way it does business," Bruno said Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

“Why I Support the National Equality March”

“Why I Support the National Equality March”:
NFL’s Scott Fujita Speaks Out for Gay Rights
By Dave Zirin

Scott Fujita is a star linebacker for the unbeaten New Orleans Saints. He is also a 2001 graduate from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA in political science. In addition to playing for the Saints, he is also is someone proudly raising his family in post-Katrina New Orleans. In the following interview, Scott speaks out about why he is supporting the October 11th National Equality March for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights in Washington DC.

Dave Zirin: Scott, you made the decision to lend your name and endorse the National Equality March. Why did you choose to do that?

Scott Fujita: I think for me it was a cause that I truly believe in. By in large in this country the issue of gay rights and equality should be past the point of debate. Really, there should be no debate anymore. For me, in my small platform as a professional football player, I understand that my time in the spotlight is probably limited. The more times you have to lend your name to a cause you believe in, you should do that.

Dave Zirin: You’ve said to me in previous discussions that one of the reasons why this issue really resonates with you is because of the issue of adoption, and who gets to adopt children in the United States. Can you speak about that?

Scott Fujita: A year ago or two years ago, I remember reading about an initiative that was proposed in the state of Arkansas. It was some kind of measure that was aimed at preventing adoptions by single parents. Now, the way I read that and the way that I translated that language was that only heterosexual, married couples could adopt children. As an adopted child that really bothered me. I asked myself, what that is really saying is that the concern with one’s sexual orientation or one’s sexual preference outweighs what’s really important, and that’s finding safe homes for children, for our children. It’s also saying that we’d rather have kids bounce around from foster home to foster home throughout the course of their childhood, than end up in a permanent home, where the parent, whether that person’s single or not, gay or straight. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s a home that’s going to be provided for a kid who desperately needs a home. As an adopted child, that measure really bothered me. It just boggles my mind because good, loving homes for any child are the most important thing.

Dave Zirin: Now Scott, what makes your stance newsworthy is that people don’t really think of the National Football League as a gay friendly place. How present is homophobia in the locker room on a day in and day out basis?

Scott Fujita: You know people do call it homophobia, and even that term alone is interesting to me. Because I don’t even know how they call it homophobia, because that’s a fear of the same. It’s more heterophobia. It’s a fear of something different from yourself. Is there still some of that in the locker room? Absolutely. People tell me, hey, that’s pretty courageous. You come out in favor of gay rights. I don’t think it’s that courageous. I think I have an opinion, that I wish was shared by everybody, but I honestly believe that it’s shared by more [football players] than we know because a lot of people just won’t speak out about it. I’m hoping that what [Baltimore Ravens linebacker] Brendon [Ayanbadejo] did, and things like what I’m doing, speaking out a little bit, hopefully more people will step up and acknowledge the fact that hey, its ok to talk about this. Just because I’m in favor of gay rights doesn’t mean that I’m gay or doesn’t mean I’m some kind of “sissy” or something. That’s the language that you hear in locker rooms. I know these guys well. I know for the most part, guys are a lot more tolerant than they get credit for but they’re not comfortable yet speaking out about it. It’s going to come in time. By in large, it’s an opinion that’s shared by more people than are realized. I just wish it was shared by everybody.

Dave Zirin: Do you have any concerns that teammates, fans, people will say Scott Fujita may be married and have kids, but maybe on the down low he might really be gay? Do you have concern that teammates, bloggers, the press will talk that kind of smack about you either behind your back or to your face?

Scott Fujita: No, I have no concern about that whatsoever. I know who I am. My wife knows who I am. I don’t care one way or the other Dave. I imagine that when some of this gets out guys in the locker room might give me a hard time, and they always give me a hard time. They call me the Pinko Communist Fag from Berkley. I’m used to it. I can take it all.

Dave Zirin: You made an interesting comment to me off air about the utter illogic of people who claim to promote God and Jesus but stand four square against any kind of national equality. Can you speak about that please?

Scott Fujita:. I completely respect everyone’s choice of religion. Just because I’m not a very religious guy doesn’t make me right or wrong, or them right or wrong. Everybody has a right to believe in whatever they want. But, I don’t like when people use God or Jesus Christ in this whole debate, if you could even call it a debate. Jesus Christ to me, is probably the most compassionate and revolutionary thinker of all time. Look at his teachings. Look at what he preached. He would not endorse any type of inequality, this type of inhumanity. He would not be on board with that. So please, spare me that argument and saying that hey, the Bible says that it ain’t right, or hey, Jesus Christ wouldn’t buy into this kind of thing. Don’t give me that. That’s not even an argument.

Dave Zirin: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Scott Fujita: I’m excited about this. You know what Brandon did was great. What he wrote in the Huffington Post was very well said. I’m glad he did it. I know people are applauding him right now for being so courageous. It’s courageous to a certain extent, but its just an opinion. I wish more people shared the opinion that he and I have. Like I said, I think more people do than we realize. I just wish more people would be as open as we have been about it. I always describe myself as a pretty open minded and tolerant guy. But the one thing I am most intolerant of is intolerance. That’s the one thing, you want to get under my skin, to start talking about some intolerant stuff, and I’m quick to talk about it.

Dave Zirin: Oh, if that’s the case, then we should just expect you guys to beat the Redskins forty two to nothing when you’re in town. The Redskins name will get you all riled up and you’ll have 20 tackles right?

Scott Fujita: (Laughs) Now you’re trying to get me in trouble.

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .

Lessons to Be Learned From Mistakes of 9/11

http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2009/09/new-book-by-dean-joh-20090908

News Release
CATEGORIES: Politics, Law and Public Policy; Social Sciences
New Book by Dean John Farmer of Rutgers Law School–Newark Details Lessons to Be Learned From Mistakes of 9/11
September 08, 2009

Newark, NJ – The nation’s top-down command structure was abysmally ill-prepared to respond to the surprise attacks of September 11, 2001 and, as the bungled response to the much-anticipated Hurricane Katrina underscored, remains a bureaucratic hindrance to the “on the ground” way in which crises are actually experienced and most effectively addressed. Equally important, misleading accounts by the administration and the military of key aspects of the air and ground response on 9/11 have set the country up to fail in response to future threats.

That’s the conclusion presented by John J. Farmer, Jr., former Senior Counsel and Team Leader to the 9/11 Commission and now Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark, in The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, published today by Riverhead Books. Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge, says that “all Americans should read” the book, which he describes as “a highly recommended historical curative for our times.” Brinkley praises the “keen analytical insight” with which Farmer “rips the lid off of many mysteries pertaining to both the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.” Kirkus Review concludes that the book “makes excellent use of declassified primary-source documents from 9/11” and describes it as “an important systematic brief on how an elaborately constructed national-defense system was penetrated . . . .”

The Ground Truth draws on Farmer’s experience with the 9/11 Commission as well as recently declassified tapes and transcripts to show a disturbing disconnect between what those in charge of the country’s security knew and what was actually happening on the ground and in the skies. Dean Farmer, one of the principal authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, includes critical evidence omitted in recent reports by the Departments of Defense and Transportation. The Commission, believing that civilian and military officials had not been completely forthright in their information to Congress, the media, and the Commission itself about significant aspects of 9/11, had requested the reports.

“At some level of government,” says Dean Farmer, “at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11. We owe the truth to the families of the victims of 9/11. We owe it to the American public as well, because only by understanding what has gone wrong in the past can we assure our nation’s safety in the future.”

The Ground Truth narrates the government’s growing awareness of and reaction to the al Qaeda terrorist threat in units of time as it was lived – from years down to the final minutes and seconds to intervene and respond, vividly portraying key moments. The final section considers the nature of government in crisis. Dean Farmer offers seven lessons to be learned from the responses to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, with perhaps the most important: “A government reshaped by the lessons of its prior experiences requires candor.” And the “ground truth”? It’s that the fault for failing to detect or interdict the attacks lay in the nature of modern government itself. “Unless we change government, unless we plan to respond to crises the way we now know they are experienced,” says Dean Farmer, “we will fail to protect ourselves, with horrifying consequences.”

John Farmer became Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark on July 1, 2009. In addition to his work for the 9/11 Commission, he has served as Attorney General of New Jersey, Chief Counsel to Governor Christine Todd Whitman, as a federal prosecutor, a law enforcement expert to the special envoy for Middle East regional security, and a founding partner of a New Jersey law firm.

Contact: Janet Donohue
973-353-5553
E-mail: jdonohue@andromeda.rutgers.edu

The Problem with New Orleans Getting the Bowl

By Dave Zirin

Only in New Orleans could this be classified as "a return to normalcy." The Crescent City, torn asunder by Hurricane Katrina, stamped by federal neglect and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's neoliberal experimentaion, will once again collide with the freewheeling, hard-partying frenzy of the NFL's crown jewel: the Super Bowl.

It was announced this week that New Orleans will host their tenth Super Bowl in 2013, to the cheers of journalists with bionic livers and expense-account executives the nation over. It's also being celebrated across the sporting spectrum as an act of altruism. It shouldn't be, but that hasn't stopped the soundtrack of salutations.

ESPN's Len Pasquarelli wrote, "The Super Bowl was made for New Orleans. And as anybody who has attended a championship game there knows, New Orleans was made for the Super Bowl.... Great move owners!"

Governor Jindal said, "This is a huge win for New Orleans but also the entire state of Louisiana." Previously, Jindal has decried federal spending on disaster relief, which is somewhat like a governor of Nevada making a push to outlaw gambling.

The NFL wants to play up the choice as an act of post-Katrina missionary work, with commissioner Roger Goodell saying, "I think this is a great statement about the spirit and people of New Orleans and the great relationship the Saints and the NFL have in that community."

"No city has been through more than New Orleans," said Rita Benson LeBlanc, a part owner of the New Orleans Saints. "This is just a true testament to what an entire community can do."

Pasquarelli added, "Playing host to a Super Bowl should address some of the city's lingering problems." By "lingering problems" he must mean sky-high poverty and unemployment. Much has been made about the city's comeback, on the basis of healthy employment numbers (relative to the rest of the country) and a mini-construction boom buoyed by post-Katrina reconstruction.

But many New Orleans residents still feel compelled to celebrate any infusion of business, particularly the business of unlimited expense accounts and debauchery the Super Bowl inevitably brings with it. This is because the poverty in the city is still persistent. In March, the metro area lost jobs for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. And New Orleans, with some families still living in federal trailers and others still trying to return, remains the murder capital of the United States.

This is because the city has become profoundly dependent on its service economy since 2005.

This is also because the Obama administration has to date done nothing to help the Gulf Coast despite his repeated assurances to do otherwise. A look at politifact.com shows a depressing litany of broken promises straight from Obama's mouth on everything from strengthening the levees to rebuilding hospitals and schools.

As New Orleans resident and commentator Harry Shearer wrote:

“The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes that New Orleans is now enjoying its second consecutive federal administration which, far from offering to fix what it broke, far from offering a hand of support, is merely offering one finger.”

This is why, in the absence of alternatives, the Super Bowl money train looks all the more seductive.

Scott Fujita, a star linebacker for the Saints who lives within the New Orleans city limits, said to me, "I'm thrilled about it.... You'd be hard-pressed to find a city that throws a better party, or a city that deserves the business more than New Orleans." He is correct on both counts. But this is one party that will come with a price tag which should make us more than skeptical. To paraphrase John Reed, the NFL never wants something for nothing. It will mean at least $85 million more in taxpayer money for Superdome improvements, including more luxury suites plus other bells and whistles. This investment is being pushed hard by Jindal and the New Orleans business community. Jindal is very fond of saying that "government can't solve our problems." However, it can provide Jindal's corporate backers with more luxury suites.

The Super Bowl decision perpetuates the status quo in New Orleans. The city will be forced to rise and fall on the basis of an external service economy. Jobs and wages will fluctuate rapidly based on whichever circus happens to be in town that week. Taxpayer dollars will pour into amenities for moneyed tourists and not into building the kind of stable industrial base that can stabilize the community. This will be another sporting shock doctrine.

Saints owner Tom Benson said after the announcement, in a moment of unvarnished truth, "It won't be all trickle-down, but it will definitely help." Someone needs to ask, When the Super Bowl party leaves town, who will really be helped and who will be left on the sidelines?

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

The Katrina Myth

Please Send As Far and Wide As Possible!
8/29/2008
Chica Bruce
chica@bruce.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k

The Katrina Myth; the truth about a thoroughly unnatural disaster
August 29, 2008

http://www.levees.org

Few people understand what really happened in New Orleans or what caused it. Fewer still realize that they too may be living under a similar or an even greater threat. This video exposes the key myths and misunderstandings about the New Orleans flood.

McCain Spiritual Adviser Recants Earlier Statement

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/04/26/mccain-spiritual-adviser-recants-god-damned-nola/

McCain Spiritual Adviser Recants Earlier Statement That God Damned New Orleans with Katrina
Jon Ponder Apr. 26, 2008

John McCain’s spiritual adviser, John Hagee, has apparently gotten the word from on high and has now recanted his assertions that Katrina was God’s curse on New Orleans because it hosted an annual gay event:

“As a believing Christian, I see the hand of God in everything that happens here on earth, both the blessings and the curses. But ultimately neither I nor any other person can know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina. I should not have suggested otherwise. No matter what the cause of the storm, my heart goes out to all who suffered in this terrible tragedy. There but for the grace of God go any one of us.”

Hagee first declared that God damned New Orleans in September 2006:

“I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades.” He later added, “I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Just last week Hagee reaffirmed this assertion:

HAGEE: The topic of that day was cursing and blessing. Moses taught in the book of Deuteronomy that everything in life is either a blessing or a curse. There are days that things happen that at the time look like a curse. In the passing of time, they may become what appears to be a blessing. An illustration is Joseph, when he was sold into slavery it looked like a curse, it looked like the worse day of his life. When his brothers came into Egypt looking for food, what looked like a bad day 13 years before turned out to be a blessed day. What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it’s called a curse.

The timing of Hagee’s statement on April 22 was embarrassing for McCain because it pulled focus from his campaign stop in New Orleans two days later.

Hagee is best known for espousing the belief that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon referred to in the Book of Revelation.

Topics: Louisiana, Republicans, Campaign 2008, Jesusland

Hagee Says McCain Sought His Endorsement

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003728364

Hagee, in 'NYT' This Sunday, Says McCain Sought His Endorsement
By Greg Mitchell
Published: March 20, 2008

NEW YORK In an interview that will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, "It's true that [John] McCain's campaign sought my endorsement."

McCain has attempted to distance himself from some of Hagee's views, much as Barack Obama is doing in relation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

Interviewed by Deborah Solomon, Hagee refused to discuss his statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for a gay rights parade in New Orleans, calling it "so far off-base." He claims, "Our church is not hard against the gay people. Our church teaches what the bible teaches, that it is not a righteous lifestyle. But of course we must love even sinners."

He also said that charges that he had bashed the Catholic Church ("false cult system," etc.) have been "grossly mischaracterized....I was referring to those Christians who ignore the Gospels."

Asked what he thinks of Obama, he answers, "He is going to be difficult to beat, because the man is a master of communication. If he were in the ministry, he would make it in the major leagues overnight."

He also denies that he is a strong supporter of Israel because of any coming "Rapture" in the holy land.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell is editor. His new book is "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failld on Iraq."

Soft Shoe in Hard Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16dowd.html

March 16, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Soft Shoe in Hard Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”

He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.

“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

Dude, you’re already in the ditch.

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy. Yet the more terrified Americans get, the more bizarrely carefree he seems. The former oilman reacted with cocky ignorance a couple of weeks ago when a reporter informed him that gas was barreling toward $4 a gallon.

In on-the-record sessions with reporters — and more candid off-the-record ones — he has seemed goofily happy in recent weeks, prickly no more but strangely liberated and ebullient.

Even though he ordinarily hates being kept waiting, he made light of it while cooling his heels for John McCain, and did a soft shoe for the White House press. Wearing a cowboy hat, he warbled a comic Western ditty at the Gridiron Dinner a week ago — alluding to Scooter Libby’s conviction, Saudis getting richer from our oil-guzzling, Brownie’s dismal Katrina performance, and Dick Cheney’s winsome habit of withholding documents.

At a dinner on Wednesday, the man who is persona non grata on the campaign trail (except for closed fund-raisers) told morose Republican members of Congress that he was totally confident that “we can retake the House” and “hold the White House.”

“I think 2008 is going to be a fabulous year for the Republican Party!” he said, sounding like Rachael Ray sprinkling paprika on goulash. That must have been news to House Republicans, who have no money, just lost the seat held by their former speaker, and are hemorrhaging incumbents as they head into a campaign marked by an incipient recession and an unpopular war.

If only they could see things as the president does. Bush, who used his family connections to avoid Vietnam, told troops serving in Afghanistan on Thursday that he is “a little envious” of their adventure there, saying it was “in some ways romantic.”

Afghanistan is still roiling, as is Iraq, but W. is serene. “Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever,” he said, echoing that great American philosopher Dan Quayle, who once told Samoans, “Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.”

W. bragged to Republicans about his “considered judgment” in sending more troops to Iraq and again presented himself as an untroubled instrument of divine will. “I believe there’s an Almighty,” he said, “and I believe a gift of that Almighty to every man, woman and child is freedom.”

Although the president belittled the Democrats for their policy of “retreat,” his surge has been a temporary and expensive place-holder for what Americans want: a policy to get us out of Iraq.

“Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started?” Michael Kinsley wrote recently. “The answer is no.” Gen. David Petraeus told The Washington Post last week that no one in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.”

Maybe the president is just putting on a good face to keep up American morale, the way Herbert Hoover did after the crash of ’29, when he continued to dress in a tuxedo for dinner.

Or maybe the old Andover cheerleader really believes his own cheers, and that prosperity will turn up any time now, just like the W.M.D. in Iraq.

Or perhaps it’s a Freudian trip. Now that he’s mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies.

Whatever the explanation, it’s plumb loco.