New Orleans - Apocalypse Now!

I have also travelled throughout North America, spent most of my time in Canada though. But did notice the attitude as soon as I crossed the boarder into the states.

The Canadians were beautiful people, similar to Australians (passive, friendly). The Americans were up themselves, rude and arrogant. IMO

This is a national disaster, and an international tradegy so help needs to be given to all, no matter the race, colour, income level.

Knobby22 said:

We are so lucky to live in Australia.

Click to expand...

Like many here I've had the opportunity to travel extensively.
Ive been to poor Mexican, Asian and Indonesian countries.
I've seen the mind boggling Rich and the desperately poor in the US.

Trust me we are living in Nirvana!!
To be able to call Australia home is something you can be proud of.
To be able to come home is a highlight of any travel for me.

krisbarry said:

The Americans were up themselves, rude and arrogant.

Click to expand...

I think that's a rather gross generalisation. While some are like that, they certainly don't own the copyright on those traits.

I personally know some Americans, from both the north and south, who are some of the nicest people I've known. And most of them are currently steaming out their ears over the way their government is handling the disaster in NO.

GP

The US government and American people are different things and should not be taken as being the same.

Many people have objections to the US government, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with ordinary American people. In much the same manner many people have objections to the Australian government but just because our government is doing something doesn't mean that ordinary people necessarily agree.

I’ll probably sidetrack the issue a bit, but nobody went there to attack, rape and murder people.
They were there, they were their own people, just used the opportunity to do evil things.

Also there is difference between looting = stealing items of no value to immediate survival, and taking = food and water and some garments, blankets medicines, bandages, to survive until help arrives.

Complains about filth, rubbish are also puzzling.
Nobody went there and made mess for them it was them to make mess themselves and complain that City Services did not collect rubbish as they always did?

I remember last pictures from rubbish tip after last celebrations at Gallipoli.
Actually appalling, but one doesn’t have to go that far to see human filth at its worst in National Parks, beaches, frankly everywhere.

I know that disaster in N.O. was enormous and damage is hard to imagine, but I strongly believe that in such times we are masters of our destination and at least we should do the best we can in the circumstances.

Easier to say than do, and just my rant.

Those looters had better be careful!

DOW up 141 points last night, I really expected it to bucket after the enormity of what has transpired was given time to settle in.

I am amazed at how resilient the market has been during this virtual apocolyspe;

300 000 homes distroyed, 10 000 or more fatalities, a whole city evacuted, severe flooding across the city and in some places buildings are under 30 feet of water, massive fires of what's left above water, damage bill to exceed 130 Billion

Whilst both events were horrific this makes 911 look like a walk in the park.

Yippyio,

It has amazed me also and while I dont really know the demographics of America I have put into into Australian terms to try and rationalize it.

I wonder if sydney or canbera or the likes was to sufer to the same extent as new orleans I think the repocusions would be quite serve but if it was to happen to perth I think it would merely bring australias awareness to the fact that perth is in australia to a higher %.

Overall it just goes to show that more often than not the market does the exact oposite of what you are sure it should.

Let's look at it in US eyes.

A lot of poor people died. So what! They don't buy anything.

A lot of infrastructure has to be built and the US government will have to pour money into the domestic economy. The money should spread around.
Shareholders will get richer.

Finally, Fox and CNN are now showing pictures showing what a great job the government is doing and how they are the greatest people ever, God Bless America.



From my viewpoint , the country is psychotic.

You've also got to remember that New Orleans is the gateway for the Gulf oil to go inland and for their agriculteral exports coming out of the Mid west through the Mississipi river going out. Imagine the damage to the economy if you couldn't get your agricultural exports out although I'm not sure what percentage of exports go through New Orleans. But nothing will be going through there in the next three months at least.

Yippyio said:

DOW up 141 points last night, I really expected it to bucket after the enormity of what has transpired was given time to settle in.

I am amazed at how resilient the market has been during this virtual apocolyspe;

300 000 homes distroyed, 10 000 or more fatalities, a whole city evacuted, severe flooding across the city and in some places buildings are under 30 feet of water, massive fires of what's left above water, damage bill to exceed 130 Billion

Whilst both events were horrific this makes 911 look like a walk in the park.

Click to expand...

There was strong buying in the futures which looks typical of what the PPT (plunge protection team) have been doing. Pure market manipulation IMO. Someone will be left holding the bag at the end of the day.

Warren Buffet is holding cash for a good reason.

I can't say I've ever read a blog before, but I was sent a link to Interdictor's Live Journal. It's well worth scrolling back to the 28th/29th and reading the comments on his posts. It's about a guy, his fiancee and a small group of people that decide to ride out the storm in the 11th floor of an office building.

Some links to some great photos and definately a whole lot more accurate and candid than you'll get from the major media outlets. At one stage CNN was pumping out news that the whole of New Orleans' CBD was under several feet of water when you could log into this guys webcam and clearly see that it wasn't. Crazy stuff...

An economic assessment of the damage from stratfor.com.

http://www.stratfor.com/news/archive/050903-geopolitics_katrina.php

Quote:

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize

By George Friedman

September 01, 2005 22 30 GMT -- The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.

Couldn’t they move NO to higher ground, or at least build on stilts?

Need a lot of stilts...

So its stilts.

Also they could flood it permanently and make it Venice of the Blues or something similar and be the World biggest flooded City of Wet Orlean or something along those lines.

Very interesting report but I think they have seriously understated the importance of natural gas from the area.

Since there is literally no surplus gas in North America (before the storm) and the only partial substitute immediately usable is refined petroleum, itself now in short supply, substantial loss of gas over the medium term would mean outright loss of national production in much the same manner as lack of transport.

Depending on the weather and hence gas demand for heating, it's quite possible that substantial shutdowns of US industry may occur during the coming Winter due to insufficient gas. That's in addition to the fact that a the gas-based petrochemicals industry in the US has been somewhat gutted in recent years by lack of gas anyway. So the effects could easily spread across manufacturing in general.

I'm not doubting that the transport issue is serious, it's absolutely critical, but there's a potential problem with natural gas too that's largely being ignored so far. The extent of the gas problem obviously depends on the overall loss of production.

Happy said:

they could flood it permanently and make it Venice of the Blues or something similar

Click to expand...

How about Atlantis?

GP

Well, I hope all of those ungratefull refugee's feel suitably guilty for daring to think that they were hard done by.

Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome complex in Houston on Monday, said: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She commented during a radio interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace."

FEMA DELAY WAS INTENTIONAL.

Heres some interesting stuff.

http://prisonplanet.com/Pages/Sept05/060905FEMA.htm

"FEMA, which has endlessly drilled for such situations [like Katrina] has been complicit in hindering outside efforts to help in the wake of the disaster.

Former FEMA officials have admitted that Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Ronald Castleman, the former regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said they were bewildered by the slow FEMA response.

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts has agreed that FEMA has deliberately withheld aid, and cut emergency communication lines, and automatically made the crisis look worse in order to empower the image of a police state emerging to "save the day".

FEMA is now simply a federalized front group for the corrupt money hoarding Department of Homeland Security, the Orwellian titled agency that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with limiting the freedoms of people all over the country."


Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury on New Orleans: "Americans Are Being Brainwashed"
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/050905roberts.htm


THEY LIED !
FEMA + Chertoff Briefed on Danger of Severe Flooding.
Hurricane Center Director Tells Paper He Briefed Brown and Chertoff on Danger of Severe Flooding.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054595


Katrina+Louisiana Petroleum Reserves:
http://www.pannexresearch.com/katrina/LAOil.gif


FEMA BACKGROUND:
http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon6.html

Is all this just incompetence ?

FEMA so far is accused of cutting emergency communications lines in 3 counties.

Mobile Hospital Turned Away
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/5/171122/0018

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84aa35cc-1da8-11da-b40b-00000e..

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/5/105538/7048

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec..

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec..

FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15147862&BRD=

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/3/171718/0826

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509..

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-050902dale..

FEMA turns away generators
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html

FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18470

That last one above is real -- not satire but straight from FEMA's website.



The Bush/Cheney mal-administration allowed this violence to occur in
America 2005.
WHY ?

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411319/608687

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/murder-and-mayhem-
insuperdome/2005/09/03/1125302772301.html?oneclick=true#

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/men/news/s/172/172478_anarchy_and_a
gony_in_new_orleans.html

It was like something out of Lord of the Flies - one minute
everything is calm and civil, the next it descends into chaos
A man has been arrested for raping a seven-year-old in the toilet.

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

"A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her
screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get
help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and
he jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead."

"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom
without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats." ”” Eye
witness account

"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one
National Guard soldier told Reuters.

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

Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37,
said men had wandered the cavernous convention centre in recent
nights raping and murdering children.

She said she found a dead 14-year-old girl at 5am this morning, four
hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the
convention centre.

"She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said
through tears. "Another child, a seven-year-old boy, was found raped
and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."

Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the
abuse and murder of children, but they could not be independently
verified.

Many complained bitterly about why they received so little for so
many days, and they had harsh words for Bush.

"I really don't know what to say about President Bush," said Richard
Dunbar, 60, a Vietnam veteran. "He showed no lack of haste when he
wanted to go to Iraq, but for his own people right here in
Louisiana, we get only lip service."

One young man said he was not looking forward to another night in
the convention centre and wondered when conditions would
improve. "It's been like a jail in there," he said. "We've got
murderers, rapists, killers, thieves. We've got it all."

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

People left homeless by Hurricane Katrina told horrific stories of
rape, murder and trigger happy guards in the two New Orleans centres
that were set up as shelters but became places of violence and
terror.

Police and National Guard troops on Saturday closed down the two
centeres -the Superdome arena and the city's convention centre- but
them penned them in outside in sweltering heat to keep them from
trying to walk out of the city.

Military helicopters and buses staged a massive evacuation to take
away thousands of people who waited in orderly lines in stifling
heat outside the flooded convention centre.

The refugees, who were waiting to be taken to sports stadiums and
other huge shelters across Texas and northern Louisiana, described
how the convention centre and the Superdome became lawless hellholes
beset by rape and murder.

Several residents of the impromptu shantytown recounted two horrific
incidents where those charged with keeping people safe had killed
them instead.

In one, a young man was run down and then shot by a New Orleans
police officer, in another a man seeking help was gunned down by a
National Guard soldier, witnesses said.

Police here refused to discuss or confirm either incident. National
Guard spokesman Lt. Col Pete Schneider said "I have not heard any
information of a weapon being discharged".

"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told
Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds
of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street
to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of
them, and he jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him
dead."

Wade Batiste, 48, recounted another tale of horror.
"Last night at 8 pm they shot a kid of just 16. He was just crossing
the street. They ran him over, the New Orleans police did, and then
they got out of the car and shot him in the head," Batiste said.

The young man's body lay in the street by the Convention Centre's
entrance on Saturday morning, covered in a black blanket, a stream
of congealed blood staining the street around him. Nearby his family
sat in shock.

A member of that family, Africa Brumfield, 32, confirmed the
incident but declined to be quoted about it, saying her family did
not wish to discuss it. But she spoke of general conditions here.

"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom
without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They
keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave," she said
through tears.

People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children
stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused
to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to
the makeshift morgue.

People trying to walk out are forced back at gunpoint - something
troops said was for their own safety. "It's sad, but how far do you
think they would get," one soldier said.

"They have us living here like animals," said Wvonnette Grace-
Jordan, here with five children, the youngest only six weeks
old. "We have only had two meals, we have no medicine and now there
are thousands of people defecating in the streets. This is wrong.
This is the United States of America."

One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of
punishment from his commanding officer said there was a lack of
medical attention at the centre, "They (the Bush administration)
care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here."

The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, "We are doing the best we
can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in
Iraq."

Across town at the Superdome, where as many as 38,000 refugees
camped out until Wednesday night when evacuation buses first came,
the 4,000 still there were corralled outside, hoping to get on four
waiting buses with seats for only 200.

The scene at the sports stadium was one of abject filth. Crammed
into a small area after the building was shut to them on Saturday,
those remaining sat amid heaps of garbage, piled in places waist
high. The stench of human waste pervaded the interior of the now
vacant stadium.

One police officer told Reuters there were 100 people in a makeshift
morgue at the Superdome, mostly people who died of heat exhaustion,
and that six babies had been born there since last Saturday, when
people arrived to take shelter.

At the arena, too, there was much talk of bedlam after dark.

"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one
National Guard soldier told Reuters. "Then the crowd got the man and
they beat him to death."

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


http://www.waynemadsenreport.com

So did the resident of Gulfport, Mississippi who shouted at Dick Cheney during a photo op in his town, "Go f*** yourself Mr. Cheney . . . Go f*** yourself." Its the language that only a wicked crook like Mr. Richard Head can understand. A reporter asked Cheney if he was hearing a lot of that during his photo op trip to the Gulf Coast. Cheney responded, "It's the first time I've heard it . . . it's part of the job." Well, this is part of my job, "Go f*** yourself Mr. Cheney!"

PS: The person who told Cheney to copulate with himself is reported to be Dr. Ben Marble, an ER physician who lost his home in the hurricane.

And Laura Bush thinks criticism of her husband for his pitiful response to the disaster is "disgusting." No, Laura, what is disgusting is the fact that you are nothing but a sated GOP Stepford Wife, willing, just like Eva Braun, to close your eyes to the fact that you are married to and coo over one of the most dangerous despots in the world.

When Bush was a young lad, he enjoyed putting firecrackers in the rectums of frogs, lighting the firecrackers, tossing them in the air and watching them explode. There are now photos of dogs and cats in New Orleans left to fend for themselves by FEMA officials. Evacuees were forced to leave their pets to their fate. Yesterday, there was a photo in the Washington Post of two 5 year old twin girls "behind bars" (a crowd control barrier) in a Dallas evacuation center. One was without shoes. Thirty bodies were found in a New Orleans area nursing home (right wing says these people should have driven out of town on their own). Anyone who abuses animals is also likely to abuse children and the elderly. Mr. Bush appears to match that profile. Being a criminal sociopath may be just one reason to invoke the 25th Amendment and get this maniac out of the White House. And have the SPCA separate Barney from Bush immediately.