Day: March 20, 2009

Drought in America: Yes It’s That Bad

Trish

If like me you have a yard, and if like mine it crunches underfoot, then this site can help you decide whether it’s your imagination or you really should be sniffing the wind for wildfires.

Drought.gov offers a fascinating array of maps that tell you more than you want to know about the status and outlook for your area, at least more than you want to know if your area is like mine. And judging by most of the maps, it is.

For example, there’s a “Seasonal Drought Outlook” map that shows drought conditions forecast to persist or intensify in most of Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, and California between now and June. There are a handful of areas that will improve, including Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, which only demonstrates that the word, “improve” is relative. That area that has been so dry for so long the people wouldn’t remember what to do if lawn watering and burn bans were lifted.

There’s even a drought photo gallery, where you can see shots of dry lake beds, low water levels, and plants that look like the ones in my yard.

Drought.gov shows you how endlessly fascinating an absolutely dreadful and dismal subject can be.

Return of the Blame Game: GOP Decried It During Katrina, Now Fingerpointing Over Bonus Caps Is All They’ve Got

Jon Ponder

The Republicans’ campaign to gin up outrage over AIG bonuses has at least two purposes, neither of which has anything to do with bonus caps. Their over-arching motive is to damage the Democrats at any cost. In the short term, however, Republicans are agitating about the bonuses to shift public attention from the fact that it was their “trickle up,” anti-regulatory ideology that caused the U.S. economy to crash.

Republicans are masters at message discipline — a dark art liberals are too independent-minded (and disorganized) to master.

The GOP’s blame-shifting campaign now has striking similarities to the tactics they deployed — quite successfully — to silence calls for investigations and even impeachment of George Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In September 2005, as the floodwaters in the streets of New Orleans receded and calls for investigations into the Bush administration’s failed response to the disaster rose, these same Republicans successfully staved off political retribution by trivializing Democrats’ calls for accountability as “playing the blame game.”

The tactic was hatched in the White House political office, then under the direction of Karl Rove. It was first floated by former Pres. George H. W. Bush on CNN’s Larry King on the first Monday night after the storm, on Sept. 5, 2005. “The media has a fascination with the blame game,” Poppy told King, “and instead of looking for what can we do to help now there’s a lot of why didn’t we do something different?”

The next day, it was power of repetition to flog the “blame game” theme:

McClellan told reporters six times that their questions about how the government failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amounted to a “blame game.” Twice he used the twisted neologism “blame gaming,” as in: “The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later.”

For the next three or four news cycles, Bush’s foot soldiers in Congress crowded the airways repeating the magic words “blame game” as often as possible. The messaging quickly found permeated the media. A New York Times headline read, “After Failures, Government Officials Play Blame Game.”

In a column on Sept. 9, the late great Molly Ivins connected the dots between the Republicans’ systematic destruction of FEMA, the federal response agency, and the cascading disaster after FEMA failed to respond in New Orleans after Katrina swept through:

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House Dittohead Caucus Votes Overwhelmingly Against Taxing AIG Bonuses

Jon Ponder

The Dittohead Caucus in the U.S. House — which includes every GOP representative — followed their dictates of their leader, Republican Party boss Rush Limbaugh, and voted overwhelmingly against a bill that would impose a heavy tax on bonuses received by executives at financial institutions that are on the dole from U.S. taxpayers.

Earlier this week, the GOP boss asserted his support for the $400 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars that AIG — in which taxpayers now have an 80 percent ownership — planned to give as “retention” bonuses to the same traders whose risky schemes contributed to the collapse of the world economy:

LIMBAUGH: “Let me tell you something, folks. I am all for the AIG bailouts, and I am all for the AIG bonuses. Well, I’m not for the bailouts, well, in a way I’m for the bailout because I’m for the bonuses.”

In lockstep with Limbaugh, 113 out of the 198 Republicans in the House voted against taxing the bonuses of the financial industry fatcats. Six out of 235 Democrats also voted against the tax.

The measure passed 328-93, and is now moving to the Senate.

The PSA That Wasn’t: Bill McCollum Runs for Something

Trish

A lot of questions are being raised about this “public service announcement” (PSA) from Florida’s Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum.

For one thing, why did he skirt Florida’s procurement laws to hire his own 2006 campaign media consultant to produce the PSA and buy the media? The tab, so far, is $1.4 million.

McCollum is the perpetual candidate, almost always out-gunned. He hitched his star to the Bill Clinton blow job scandal and expected to see it rise like…well, never mind

The other thing is, what’s the ad, er, PSA, really selling? According to McCollum’s office, the spot publicizes a web site where parents can get help with the questionably “rampant” problem of online sexual predators. McCollum’s name hangs on the screen in huge letters at the start of the piece while the web site URL is grayed out at the bottom of the screen and typed in fleetingly at the end.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum appears in nearly every frame…

McCollum said he hired his former campaign consultant, Chris Mottola, because the state’s competitive bidding process was ”very slow, very complicated.” He cited an exemption in state law that allows him to use a no-bid contract for “artistic services.”

The ad shows McCollum speaking directly to the camera…

”The development of the ad is artistic. It’s how you present it,” McCollum said. “You got 30 seconds to be able to tell somebody something.”

But what’s he telling them?

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