Day: May 18, 2006

New Emails Show FEMA Covering Its Ass in Miami A Year Before Katrina

Trish

People in Florida scratched their damp, sweaty heads in the fall of 2004 after four hurricanes in six weeks left much of the state without hot coffee in the morning, light before sunup or after sundown, or fuel for cars — the only source of charged cell phones, air conditioning and radio news.

People, that is, except in Dade County.

Miami was spared in 2004, although a year later God made an honest county of it by sending both Katrina and Rita. So how come FEMA’s intrepid director Michael Brown awarded so much aid to Dade County in 2004? That’s what one Florida newspaper wanted to know. South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

FEMA awarded more than $21 million in Miami-Dade for Hurricane Frances, the Labor Day weekend storm that struck 100 miles away.

Newly released e-mails of former FEMA Director Michael Brown show top federal officials scrambling to explain millions in disaster aid going to Miami-Dade County residents for a 2004 hurricane that missed the county and coaching Brown “not to appear defensive”…

“We need you calm cool and collected,” former FEMA chief of staff Patrick Rhode wrote in 2004 after the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had awarded more than $21 million in Miami-Dade for Hurricane Frances, the Labor Day weekend storm that struck 100 miles away. “We need our best spokesperson … to combat these issues in a diplomatic way to wave the flag for the admin -“

The 29 pages of emails were released this week only after a direct order from U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra on behalf of the Sun-Sentinel. In an amazing feat of foreshadowing, FEMA staffers kick around various strategies for covering up glaring malfeasance. Left out is any indication of why the agency actually gave so much money to Miami. Was it because South Florida is a gushing fountain of funding for Republican candidates across the nation? Or was it just because FEMA was totally and completely inept? Tough call.

“Should we say the density in population in Miami-Dade versus the other affected counties (just sheer numbers) to somewhat explain the disparity in funding,” [FEMA Press Aide LeaAnne] McBride wrote to seven FEMA officials. “However, FYI — the reporter and those she contacted have driven around looking for physical damages to justify the funding and that will not be seen because those type of damages just did not occur in Miami-Dade.”

The email makes crystal clear that whatever else was going on, politics was the biggest determining factor in FEMA staff’s decisions. McBride’s advice to Brown shows just how caught up in election year issues they were.

In another e-mail, McBride wrote Brown, “Be cautious not to appear defensive or show that the ridiculous questions get under your skin when you’re at the press conf today [Sun-Sentinal Reporter] Megan [O’Matz] will show up. Just don’t want your expressions to give away your exasperation with this non-issue the way that the President’s did in the first debate.”

No indeed. Brown could have done a lot worse than the blinking, lip-twitching, murder-on-his-tiny-mind-revealing the president was doing. Still, one wonders. The email shows an agency whose soul was long ago sold. More unsettling is the thought that we are still at the mercy of shallow cynics more concerned with CYA than with actually helping people like us.

Pat Robertson’s Weather Predictions: In 1998, He Warned Orlando of God’s Wrath But a Hurricane Hit His Home in Va. Beach Instead

Jon Ponder

Surf’s up: Pat Robertson has made another dire weather prediction. This time he says God has told him that He will soon smite godless liberal Oregonians with a tsunami:

The Rev. Pat Robertson says God has told him that storms and possibly a tsunami will hit America’s coastline this year. The founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network has told viewers of “The 700 Club” that the revelations came to him during his annual personal prayer retreat in January.

“If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms,” Robertson said May 8. He added specifics in Wednesday’s show. “There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

But if Robertson’s track record as a divine weathercaster holds true, Oregonians may have less to fear than do the citizens in the Tidewater Virginia area that is headquarters to Robertson’s rightwing political and religious enclave. In 1998, Robertson predicted all sorts of disasters would smite central Florida:

After Orlando … city officials voted in 1998 to fly rainbow flags from city lampposts during the annual Gay Days event at Disney World, Robertson issued the city a warning: “I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. … [A] condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs, it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”

Instead, God smote Robertson by hurling Hurricane Bonnie directly at Virginia Beach that August:

Overnight, Bonnie drifted out into the Atlantic southeast of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina … Rough surf pounded the Atlantic coastline as far north as New England, while 12- to 15-foot swells were reported along the Virginia coast. Winds as high as 90 mph snapped ship mooring ropes and left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity on Friday in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk area.

Senate Committee Erupts in Shouting as Anti-Gay Constititutional Amendment Is Approved

Jon Ponder

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) voted to move an anti-gay constitutional amendment that he didn’t agree with out of his committee for a vote by the full Senate — and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) lost it:

A Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, after a shouting match that ended when one Democrat strode out and the Republican chairman bid him “good riddance.”

“I don’t need to be lectured by you. You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I,” [Specter] shouted after [Feingold] declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.

“If you want to leave, good riddance,” Specter finished.

“I’ve enjoyed your lecture, too, Mr. Chairman,” replied Feingold, D-Wis., who is considering a run for president in 2008. “See ya.”

Amid increasing partisan tension over President Bush’s judicial nominees and domestic wiretapping, the panel voted along party lines to send the constitutional amendment which would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages to the full Senate, where it stands little chance of passing.

Democrats complained that bringing up the amendment is a purely political move designed to appeal to the GOP’s conservative base in this year of midterm elections. Under the domed ceiling of the ornate and historic President’s Room off the Senate floor, senators voted 10-8 to send the measure forward.

Among Feingold’s objections was Specter’s decision to hold the vote in the President’s Room, where access by the general public is restricted, instead of in the panel’s usual home in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Specter later said he would have been willing to hold the session in the usual room had he thought doing so would change votes.

Not all those who voted “yes” support the amendment, however. Specter said he is “totally opposed” to it, but felt it deserved a debate in the Senate.

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman,” reads the measure, which would require approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states.

Socialists: NSA Spying a Blueprint for Mass Repression

Buck Banks

From left field: If you want a different perspective on what’s happening in the mainstream media’s coverage of the National Secret Agency’s domestic spying program, truck on over to the World Socialist Web Site. Columnist Patrick Martin writes that “the media commentary has deliberately downplayed the sinister nature of the program. This is a deliberate cover-up of what is without question the most wide-ranging invasion of privacy by the federal government in US history.”

Maybe Martin has a point. Several, actually. Like most socialists, he’s rather long-winded, so I’ve performed the valuable service of extracting his main points in a more succinct, edited form. Read the full version here.

There has not been a single serious media commentary questioning why a supposedly “narrowly focused” program should collect data on an estimated 225 million Americans.

Computer programs used by NSA to analyze phone call databases it purchased from the big telecommunications companies are an advanced form of the “social-network analysis” software used by commercial and political marketing firms to profile potential advertising targets. Phone trees are traced to identify nodes and determine common interests and activities among those targeted.

The purpose is to select targets for more intensive electronic surveillance or arrest and detention.

‘This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any US administration.’
— Bruce Afran

Every person who has ever telephoned a 900 number, for instance, now has that fact permanently recorded in a government database, making him or her vulnerable to blackmail by federal agents. Likewise for those whose phone records suggest problems with gambling, narcotics abuse, or even extramarital affairs.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth provided the NSA with the calling records on 224 million land-line and cellular telephone customers — 80 percent of the land-line and 50 percent of the wireless users in the U.S.

The three companies connected 500 billion telephone calls in 2005 alone, and over two trillion since 9/11. Information on all these calls — number calling, number dialed, time and duration — is now in the NSA database, along with historical information of unknown but vast dimensions.

No previous regime, no matter how dictatorial — not Nazi Germany, not Stalinist Russia — was able to compile such an all-encompassing record of the private activities of its citizens.
[…]

Rightwing House Chairman Says Bush Flipflopped on Immigration Bill

Jon Ponder

House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Penn.), who was one of the House manager of the Clinton impeachment, is upset with his former Dear Leader, who he says pushed to have draconian measures inserted in an immigration bill last year but changed his mind this year:

Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Committee and would be the House’s chief negotiator on any final immigration package for Bush’s signature. He said it was the White House that had requested two controversial felony provisions in the bill the House passed last winter.

“We worked very closely with White House in the fall in putting together the border security bill that the House passed,” he said. “… What we heard in November and December, he seems to be going in the opposite direction in May. That is really at the crux of this irritation,” he said of Bush.

So Mr. Bush was for turning 12 million undocumented residents into felons, but now he is against it.