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The bad news for the Bush administration and the GOP generally just keeps on coming. The question will soon be who in that party is not guilty of something illegal?

Something tells me the National Guard's recruiting troubles may soon be over.

For a limited time only, if you sign up to be contacted by a Army National Guard recruiter and to have them harass you for the rest of your prime killing years, you can get 3 free iTunes downloads!!!

Sweet!

The National Guard looks like so much fun! Rockin' out, chatting on your celly in sassy casual wear with other upstanding white kids.. what's not to love?

You have to check a box next to this statement to get your free tunes: "Yes, I understand that the Army National Guard will send me information about great new Army National Guard benefits! I also understand that I will be contacted by a recruiter, and that's OK with me!"

Great new benefits?! Better than free tunes, dude? Sign me up!

I could play with this, or just sit and watch it, for hours.

Okay maybe 5 minutes.

Don't forget to grab him with his mouse when he gets stuck, or whenever you want.

Holy shit! Is it Christmas?

First George Bush asks people to stop driving so much (what was THAT about?) and now this. My goodness.

Another killer storm slams into the Gulf Coast, but this time, George Bush is all over it.

Notice the headlines from CNN.com. Bush is not only completely involved and proactive this time, he's actually the one making the announcements about what happened.

Really pathetic. Of course, it's good that the government is responding to this one as it should, and that all the assets were pre-positioned and they're actually assessing the damage right after it happens.

But the headlines putting Bush's name into every announcement are a pathetic ploy to save his battered image. And knowing the level of critical thinking around here, it'll probably work.

By popular (okay, singular) demand, I'm bumping Monday's post down with this entertaining video of Bill O'Reilly having a meltdown while interviewing Phil Donahue.

Lots of pointing and yelling. "Don't you denigrate his service!"

O'Reilly is truly a prince among assholes.

See the video at Crooks and Liars.

Or, if you're a nerd and want to be bandwidth-nice, here's a bittorrent.

Yes, Fareed Zakaria, yes.

As Barack Obama said yesterday, "we need some adult supervision on the budget." The Republicans are out of control. They're selling us all out, and our children, and our children's children. As long as the administration and its friends stay rich and happy.

Congress refuses to not make permanent even one of their tax cuts. Dropping the repeal of the estate tax would alone nearly pay for the Katrina reconstruction. But no, not an option.

So-called conservatives who support these policies had better come up with another name for themselves. You're not a conservative if you support this administration. Not even close.

Anyone have some suggestions for the renaming of conservatives? "Hypocritical Assheads" springs to mind, but that applies to too many other people too. Something more elegant...

Senator James "Spawn of the Devil" Inhofe (R - OK), has a new idea about why the levees in New Orleans may have failed. Because of those damned environmentalists!

This all started when John Berlau of the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" (lovely name, that.) wrote an article in the National Review suggesting that the dirty hippies were to blame.

This simple logic —that the water that flooded New Orleans was from the lake, not the river— is apparently lost on Berlau. From his article:

Difficult to ascertain? Really? It's difficult to ascertain whether a delay in raising levees on the Mississippi River caused the levees on Lake Pontchartrain to fail? I'm no hydro-engineer, but that seems pretty easy to ascertain to me.

No, "difficult to ascertain" is just code for "the truth would destroy my thesis" and ruin my chance to go on TV and accuse environmental groups of murder.

Yeah, see, it doesn't matter that the lawsuits he's describing had absolutely nothing to do with the flooding of New Orleans, it's the mantra of these groups— it's their attitude— that somehow undermined the dikes and inundated the city. They might not have done anything in this case, but they did similar stuff elsewhere that might have caused something like this, had they done it here. It didn't cause anything similar anywhere else either, but you know, it could have, if such a thing had happened.

See how it's all their fault?

Strangely, Mr. Berlau didn't mention the fact that the White House has cut $400 million from the Army Corps of Engineers funding requests for flood control in the New Orleans area.

That can't be related.

No, it's got to be the hippies. Always getting in the way of Competitive Enterprise.

Apparently, this is a real photo of a note George W. wrote to Condi Rice during a U.N. Security Council meeting.

"Sure, Mr. President. Take the hall pass, and don't dawdle. I'm timing you."

His note seems awfully wussy and wishy-washy for such a "decisive" man. "I think I may need a bathroom break?"? That's not even a question. "Is this possible?"

Jesus, man, you're the President. Just stand on your desk and whiz on the french ambassador.

(via Marshall)

Responsibility taking aside, Newsweek has a good piece detailing the president's failure in responding to Hurricane Katrina.

Like so many major tragedies, this was a "failure of imagination." That phrase was, I think, first used to describe the Apollo I disaster, where 3 astronauts suffered a fiery death on the launch pad during a routine test, nearly dooming the entire moon landing program. They couldn't open the hatch from the inside—nobody thought they would ever have to. And they died.

When you look back on these kinds of failures, it always seems so obvious. How could someone make a spacecraft hatch that couldn't be opened from the inside? Well, it was designed to operate in space, and they just didn't imagine the situation.

The disastrous response (or lack thereof) to Hurricane Katrina, though, was different. They did imagine this, that's the problem. There were reports written, warning issued. People knew this was possible, even likely. The failure of imagination here comes in the scope of the tragedy. Some guy behind a desk 4 years ago may have said that this could happen, but nobody really imagined what it would actually be like. It's possibly beyond the scope of our imagination, despite the fact that these things have happened before and will happen again. If we lived consciously with the idea that these kinds of things were always around the corner, we wouldn't survive. We have to pretend.

That 'we', however, only refers to individuals, to regular people, living their lives. Government is not an individual, it's a collective; or it's supposed to be. Government should be able to hold these things in its mind, because we can't. It should be able to imagine and plan for the worst, because we can't by ourselves. It takes collective imagination to say, "this might never happen, but if it does and we're not prepared, the consequences are too horrible to consider" and to be prepared. It takes collective imagination to see a storm coming and set supplies and relief at the ready before they are needed. The collective imagination of the American public did this. We all sat staring at our TVs, wondering why nobody was doing anything, why nobody had done anything. But our government, our official collective, failed. It was too wrapped up in itself, and forgot that it represents not itself, but the rest of us.

The real relief from this storm has come from the people, not from the government. We have done more and given more than they ever could. We see ourselves in the victims, our leaders don't. Our leader, singular, specifically, does not. He has never struggled for anything nor been threatened in any real way. He doesn't watch the news, he doesn't see what his country is. He doesn't want to know, and then it's too late. Thousands die.

It's time to clean house. It's time to get back to the real thing. Government by the people, for the people, is really in danger of perishing from this earth, or at least from this country. Too dramatic? Maybe. They thought the reports of what would happen when the levees broke were too dramatic too.

Well there's something you don't see.... ever.

Remember the date! For possibly the first time in his life, George W. Bush has uttered the words, "I take responsibility," also simultaneously setting a personal precedent for even acknowledging that anything has gone wrong in the first place.

Our little president is growing up! Why, by the time he leaves office, he may have developed the moral compass of a teenager.

Is it just me, or is the mere existence of this story profoundly disturbing?

Weird, I don't remember the "unless it seems improper" clause in the first amendment.

Anyway, it's good that this didn't work, but scary that it was even considered.

Google, in their seemingly infinite slickness, has added recent satellite imagery of New Orleans to Google Maps and Google Earth.

If you live(d) in New Orleans, you could probably find your house and see how it faired.

And there you go..

The rest of the article is pretty interesting, detailing how bush received a report on Thursday of last week explaining the desperate situation at the New Orleans Convention Center, after having received no such news from his leaders on the ground.

See, now that seems weird. Because every time I turned on a TV, I saw direct evidence of what was happening in New Orleans. It might not have been an "official" source, but when a camera points at people dying in the streets, and reporters are increasingly frantic about the conditions they're seeing right in front of their faces, I'd say that should probably be "reliable" enough to get your ass moving.

Bush, of course, one day later, publicly commended Brown for doing a "heck of a job" and I think he should have to answer for that. The initial response was late, and then even when they found out that the situation was being hopelessly bungled, it still took A WEEK to discipline the person possibly most responsible. A week in which hundreds probably died. Why the delay? If Bush knew on Thursday, why did he praise Brown on Friday and leave him in position, not to mention have his people defend him, for another week?

In the end, they've done the absolute least that they should do. Brown has been called back to Washington, he hasn't been fired. They're still saying they need him in Washington for other potential disasters, as if this was just a routine shuffling, and had nothing to do with his performance in this crisis.

The management of the mismanagement is being mismanaged. Getting Brown out of the way so people who have a clue can help the victims is a start, but it's not enough. This does not begin and end with Brown.

This American Life has a special episode on Hurricane Katrina this weekend.

Where you can listen in your area.

In the first five minutes, Ira Glass quickly debunks the idea (peddled by the Secretary of Homeland Security, among many others) that the federal government had no authority to act and preposition assets until called to do so by state and local authorities. By declaring a state of emergency in Louisiana, president Bush had given the federal government all the authority it wanted. Moreover, there are new powers under something called the "National Response Plan" where the Secretary of Homeland Security can deploy federal assets even without ANY declaration of emergency by anyone, local, state, or federal.

The rest of the show is dedicated to giving voice to people who actually lived through this nightmare.

Absolutely required listening.

We all know that FEMA director Michael Brown's previous job, from which he was dismissed, was as an official on the association of arabian horse fucking, or something like that.

But we've been told that he had some emergency management experience. His biography on FEMA's website, for example, says, "His background in state and local government also includes serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight..."

Well, turns out that's a load of arabian horseshit.

So he was not an "assistant city manager," he was am "assistant to the city manager." It might seem like a subtle difference, and it is, but an important one. An assistant city manager is a manager. An assistant to the city manager is an assistant.

And he's not alone in being a completely unqualified douche..

Now we just sit back and wait for him to get the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Bush makes up for having to cut his vacation short..

Priceless.

Dick Cheney in Mississippi prattling on about something or other on live television, when a passerby yells a phrase the vice president is all too familiar with.

Click image to watch.

Keith Olbermann put together a nice clip reel of who said what when. A nice thing to refer to as they all now proceed to lie their fucking asses off about it.

Click the image to watch the video (6.5MB Quicktime).

Today's Progress Report from the Centers for American Progress is pretty stunning.

Since I know how people feel about clicking links and reading stuff, I'll excerpt a big chunk here. All you have to do is let your eyes continue downward...

There's also a good bit about the contrast between the Bush administration's response to the hurricanes that struck Florida last year (coincidentally, there was an presidential election going on at the time, and OH!, the governor is his brother) and their response to Katrina. Worth a read.

Once again, nobody really says it better than Jon Stewart. If you haven't been watching the Daily Show this week, do it.

Watch the Daily Show's first segment on the hurricane (they were on hiatus the week of the storm) here.

When you're done watching that, watch yesterday's opening segment, Meet the Fuckers.

Brilliant stuff. My favorite part is when they show clip after clip of Republicans saying this is not the time to think about who is to blame for the disaster, followed by clip after clip of the same people blaming the state and local governments.

If you're complaining that people should not be "playing the blame game," chances are, YOU'RE TO BLAME.

Often biting satire is the most effective means to highlight the awful truth.