As the Mississippi River flooding continues, New Orleans, directly on the river, is in the path of flooding. Water is water, regardless of its source. Whether it comes from a flood or a hurricane (Katrina comes to mind), it damages.

Do you remember how President George W. Bush was castigated by the MSM after Hurricane Katrina? He was hit hardest by (the late) Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann, Brian Williams, and Jack Cafferty.

You can follow this link to be reminded of how the MSM blamed Bush.

The operative question now is:

Will President Barack Obama get the same MSM treatment (that Bush got) when the flooding in New Orleans from the swollen Mississippi River finally reaches New Orleans? Will the MSM tell us what Obama’s plan of action is?

We see that Obama signed documents to make money available in Tennessee and Arkansas, but he remained in Washington D.C. to do so. Bush was excoriated by the MSM for not arriving on the disaster scene soon enough. Are we beginning to see a double-standard by the MSM?

On the morning of 10 May 11, I searched with Google and Bing for flood preparations in New Orleans. Some of the links I found are cited below.

• Christian Science Monitor
• Christian Science Monitor
• CBS News
• ABC News
• Discovery
• Bloomberg News

As you can see, there is no plan to be found – only pictures and words. Obama’s disaster plan for New Orleans in particular and Louisiana in general does not look too promising.

From this link on 10 May 11, I found this quote:

In Washington, D.C., the Obama administration has granted only a partial disaster declaration for Louisiana, rather than the full declaration Jindal initially sought. The partial declaration allows state and local governments to receive direct federal supplies, but a full declaration is necessary for state and local entities to get up to 75 percent reimbursement for its expenses related to flood control. The Federal Emergency Management Agency could later expand the declaration. Jindal said he is seeking an immediate appeal, nonetheless.(emphasis mine)

This link will take you to another article that states, among other things, the following fact that the MSM also conveniently forgot to mention:

Before Katrina hit, President Bush called Governor Blanco and offered to federalize the Louisiana Guard. In cases of local emergency, governors must request such action. Governor Blanco waited 24 hours before saying “no” to the president’s offer. She made that decision because federalized Guard units cannot be used for law enforcement and the governor wanted to preserve that option. But then she failed to use it.

Will Obama come up with a disaster relief plan? Will he visit (in a timely manner, whatever that is) the disaster sites? Will the MSM treat him the same way they treated Bush? Only time will tell.

On May 12th I searched again. Here is what I found:

• From New Zeland, no less: link
• From the New York Times: link
• From the AP: Obama in El Paso, still have not found link to what he plans to do in New Orleans
• From Newsmax.com: Obama on his way to El Paso

On May 14th:

• From FEMA I found a flood planning document. Lots of good questions and advice, but no specific answers.
• Here is another FEMA flood checklist, but again no specifics.
• Here is a link to the state of Louisiana‘s Disaster plan, but nothing (I can find) about flooding.
• I found Mayor Nagin’s (updated in 2006) hurricane evacuation plan, but nothing about a flood.
• Here is an article I found about Govenor Bobby Jindal andNew Orleans preparations, but not a word about what Obama is doing or about what the federal government is specifically planning.
• From WDSU in New Orleans, a flood check list, but again not a word about what Obama is doing or about what the federal government is specifically planning.
• Here is an article about Obama speaking to flood victims in Memphis, but that is NOT why he is going to Memphis. Does the MSM castigate him? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…

May 16th:

• This article shows Obama meeting with Memphis residents before speaking at a high school commencement address, the reason why he was in Memphis. Yet the “Huffington Post” titles the artcle: “Mississippi River Floods: Obama In Memphis To Meet With Victims”.
• This article tells what is happening to protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
• Here is an article about people ignoring evacuation orders from St. Landry Parish President Don Menard.
• Here is an article about people on the Atchafalaya River heeding evacuation warning.
• This article annnounces that President Obama has declared an emergency for Louisiana, but not one word about his plans (if he has any) to visit Louisiana.
• All I can find about Obama and his visit(s) to Mississippi River flood victims is this article from San Francisco, entitled: “Obama to view Tennessee flood damage”.
• Here is an article about snubbing Rhode Island flood victims in April, 2010. Did we hear about it in the MSM? Noooooooooooooooooooooo. I searched Obama’s visit to the Rhode Island flooding victims, but found nothing.
• Here is an article about Obama ignoring Tennessee flood in May, 2010, but did we hear about it in the MSM? Noooooooooooooooooooooo. Again, searches turned up nothing.
• Here is another article about Obama ignored Nashville and Tennessee.

May 17th

Here is an article, the first I’ve found, that says Bobby Jindal is “warmer” on Obama’s flood efforts. The article is entitled, “Bobby Jindal praises President Obama on flood response” but nowhere in the article does Jindal praise Obama.

May 20th

• This article talks about Vicksburg and Talulah on the Louisiana side of the river.
• Here are some incredible pictures of what people, who do not wait on the government (of any level), can do.

May 23rd

• This article talks about tornados in Missouri, flooding along the Mssissippi River, and Obama in Ireland (BTW, not a word from Obama about tornado victims).
• This article talks (only) about Obama’s concern for natural disasters.

Are we beginning to see a double standard here?

But that’s just my opinion.

Bill gates just filed a patent on a scheme to unplug hurricanes by surrounding them with fleets of pump-boats bringing cold water to the surface:

Having posted this idea four years ago myself, I have to admit it’s a bit wacky. On the other hand, Hurricane Katrina devastated a substantial chunk of my country, so anything that MIGHT be able to slow these monsters down ought to at least be talked about.

The Gates scheme is lumbering and passive. My Hurricane Stopper is agile and active, giving it a better chance of being practical. My idea was to have wind-turbine powered jet-boats suck their propellant water from the cold depths and spread it around in the hurricane’s path. Think of barge-like wind-farms, big enough to ride out hurricane seas.

Downsides: Might not be possible to build a wind-farm barge capable of riding out hurricane winds and seas; would kill a lot of birds and fish; possible ill effects from changing the temperature gradient in the Gulf, if used on massive scale.

Gate’s scheme is similar to mine in that it also uses the hurricane’s own energy, but it does so passively. He would dot the Gulf with giant tubs, ballast-regulated to ride so that hurricane seas would lap over the edges of the tubs, raising the water level in the tub above the surrounding sea level. Gravity would then drive the water in the tub down through a drain in the bottom that extends down to the cold depths:

At whatever rate the waves lap over the top, the same amount of water should flow out the bottom. But is it really possible to in this way get the warm top-water off of the cold water below?

The patent claim is that when the top-water gets pushed down to the cold depths, it pushes the cold water up, but will it? How can cold rise through warm? It seems more likely that the warm water exiting the drain will float back up, but not all the way because it has been cooled by its exposure to deep water, with the warm top-water continuing to sit as a lid on the cold water below.

The only way any cold water would make it to the surface is by roiling of the waters from below, but this roiling would be originating 155 feet down, and only by passive means. If it brings any cold water to the surface, it won’t be much.

Neither will these giant tubs be very mobile, meaning the Gulf would have to be pre-saturated with these lap-tubs. FAIL.

In sum, Gates claim to the general idea of stopping hurricanes by bringing cold water to the surface is pre-empted by my four year old scheme, and his “best embodiment” of this general idea is far inferior to my embodiment, leaving him with nothing. Sorry Bill. You should have been reading my blog. I’d have been glad to work with you on a patent claim before the one year post-publication deadline for filing.

Let that be a lesson to everyone. Read my blog!

Another freebie: mitigate global cooling with sooty coal

With the earth cooling rapidly (by historical standards) for 10 years now, and with our quiescent sun guaranteeing a significantly extended cooling phase going forward, we need to start figuring out how to mitigate the growing cold, because unlike global warming, global cooling is actually dangerous. Cold really does feed on itself in a way that can get away from us, and it directly constricts the space available for living things, both seasonally and absolutely. Nothing gobbles up the biosphere like glaciation.

It is the feedback mechanism that creates the danger. Spreading snow and ice increase the earth’s “albedo,” or reflectivity, bouncing sunlight away and cooling the earth, creating yet more snow and ice. Of course this feedback cycle also works in the warming direction, but with a big difference. In the warming direction, the albedo feedback effect gets smaller and smaller as warming progresses. Once snow and ice have shrunk back to arctic regions, they are that point only reflecting away a small amount of sunlight, so further melting cannot shrink the albedo much further.

In the cooling direction, the albedo feedback effect gets larger and larger as cooling progresses. When snow and ice come down to lower latitudes, they cover progressively larger swaths of land and they reflect away sunlight that is progressively more direct. This is why the earth regularly experiences runaway cooling, and spends most of its time in 100,000 year long glacial periods, but has never experienced run-away warming. Warming feedbacks diminish as they progress. Cooling feedbacks build.

The last two years are illustrative, as near record snow- cover in Asia and North America have spawned our present cool summer. We are seeing right now just how fast cooling feedbacks can ramp up, but there may be something we can do about it.

We just need to darken the snow. Where oh where can we get our hands on a massive steady supply of black sooty stuff that we can pump out onto the snow all winter long across the great white north?

Just build, build, build coal burning electric plants across North America, Scandinavia and Asia, and leave the scrubbers off the smokestacks. As a handy by-product, the resulting cheap energy will bring our “green”-around-the-gills economy rocketing back from its current death spiral.

If we would de-regulate energy development (real energy development, not the phony “green” garbage), our economy would start booming tomorrow, and there is absolutely no reason to regulate CO2.

The facts are in: the CO2 theory of late 20th century warming has been debunked

There are two competing theories of 20th century warming. One, backed by the known history of correlation between solar activity and global temperature, says it was caused by the extraordinarily high levels of solar activity between 1930 to 2000. The other, formulated by anti-capitalist ideologues who claimed in the 1970′s that fossil fuels were causing global cooling, says that fossil fuels caused the warming from 1980-1998.

With both candidate causes galloping along at high levels until 2003, both theories claimed validation. Then the sun went quiet, as atmospheric CO2 continued to grow apace–the perfect experiment for finding which theory is correct–and the results are in. The planet is cooling, supporting the solar warming theory and debunking the CO2 warming theory.

The alarmist theory is not just wrong, but is actually an obvious case of omitted variable fraud. The only way the CO2 alarmists could pretend that the tiny CO2 greenhouse effect could cause runaway global warming was by completely omitting the known solar-magnetic warming influence from their models and misattributing this warming effect to CO2. As NASA climate-modeler Gavin Schmidt puts it:

[T]here is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics to explain what [is] going on.

Schmidt feels no “need” to account a known warming effect when he can make his model work just as well (even better, for his purposes) by misattributing this warming effect to CO2. Dirtbag.

Solar warmists never behave in this anti-scientific way. They never omit CO2 greenhouse effects from their calculations, but only do what scientists are supposed to do: use reason and evidence to gauge the magnitude of the different warming effects as best as they can. Their calculation that the dominant climate driver is solar activity has now been confirmed. That means CO2 cannot cause run-away warming, which means that whatever warming effect it has is all to the good. In general, warming is good for people and other living things, while cooling is bad. Mankind and the biosphere both thrived when Greenland was green.

Now that we are entering a cooling phase, people may start wishing that CO2 had a significant warming effect, but it doesn’t. The one place where CO2 can be of significant help is as a fertilizer for plant growth. With the shorter growing seasons that go with global cooling, we need as much of that effect as we can get. Thus there is a non-negligible grounds for subsidizing CO2, and no reason to suppress it, as our demented Democrats are doing.

Dirty coal might actually require subsidization

When the eco-religionists talk about “clean coal,” they are not talking about soot at all, but are talking about sequestering the colorless, odorless, harmless plant-food called CO2. What we need is not just “dirty coal” in the CO2 emitting sense, but real dirty coal, chock full of good old fashioned snow-darkening soot.

Getting genuinely dirty coal power probably will require subsidization, because old-time soot is the byproduct of an inefficient burning process. It will take some R & D to develop plants that can be switched back and forth between fully efficient summer-mode burning, sans soot and sulpher, and “inefficient” winter burning, with black soot intact (efficient once the external value of soot is counted as an output).

Massive expansion of dirty northern coal-fired electrical generation will kill several birds with one stone: it will rejuvenate the world economy; it will decrease wintertime albedo cooling feedbacks, significantly mitigating global cooling; the release of CO2 from coal-burning will give some relief from cold-driven crop shrinkage; and it will contribute very slightly to the earth’s blanket of greenhouse gases, mitigating global cooling itself by a very slight amount.

So that’s my freebie. Dig here. Back to the future. Return to dirty coal. Hard to patent the past, but I predict that at least a few hefty diamonds will be pulled from this ash heap.

The Democrat smear machine is still at full tilt with TPM saying “gotcha!” to a Bobby Jindal statement about Katrina. The Jindal statement: (h/t Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher and Hot Air)

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

What’s the gotcha from TPM? That the visit didn’t occur the day after Katrina but a few days after Katrina.

Yup, some gotcha.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

Pathetic.

Oh, here is the Sheriff in his own words describing the help Jindal gave to him:

I can tell you first hand that with Hurricane Katrina, the day after, Bobby was in my office and said “what do you need?” And it wasn’t phone calls, he was in my office.”

Pathetic libs….just pathetic.

UPDATE

Col. John Fortunato, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said Jindal appeared at the sheriff’s offices on the east and west banks several times in the days after the storm. The boat rescue holdup by federal response officials did occur initially as citizens brought their watercraft to a staging area in Jefferson Parish, he said. But the problem was resolved and the great majority of boats were deployed to the flooded areas of New Orleans later that day.

Teepell, who after the storm drove with Jindal to visit various sheriffs’ offices in his district, said he recalled being in Lee’s office in west Jefferson on several occasions in the days after the storm. Teepell said he remembers the phone conversation but did not know who was talking to Lee.

Lee was recounting the boat rescue story to the caller on the line, Teepell said. The phone call was not taking place while the boats were attempting the rescue operation, but some days afterward, Teepell said.

Dec. 8, 2008: President George W. Bush kisses one of the children attending the Children’s Holiday Reception and Performance with first lady Laura Bush in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. The reception is for children whose parents are serving in the military and cannot be with them for the Christmas holiday.
Chip Somodevilla-Getty Images

In wake of Hurricane Katrina (which “hated” white people more, or in Kanye’s language, “George Bush hates white people”), let’s revisit the ever-so-politically astute and eloquent Kanye West:

Given the opportunity to rethink that comment and do some research, did Kanye retract his on-air smear:

He could take some notes from Bob Geldof and Bono.

Investors Business Daily:

George W. Bush has been singled out as the American president who has done the most for Africa. So where’s the recognition, both in the media and the black community, of this worthy achievement?

Bill Clinton might have been America’s first black president, but it seems he didn’t do as much for Africa as Bush has. Bob Geldof, Irish rocker and Africa activist, says the Texas oilman, who is wrapping up his second trip to the continent, “has done more than any other president so far.”

That’s high praise from Geldof, a man who has spent much of the last 20 years fixated on Africa’s many problems. He sees Bush’s efforts to fight disease and poverty in Africa as “the triumph of American policy.” Though he says it was “unexpected of the man,” Geldof admits both the president and the nation “rose to the occasion.”

Geldof rightly chastises the American media for ignoring Bush’s contributions to Africa.

But it would be unrealistic to have expected otherwise. This is a national press corps that seems to notice homelessness and poverty only when a Republican is in the White House, and which itself votes heavily Democratic.

Meanwhile, African-Americans give little support to Bush — he got 11% of their vote in 2004 after taking 8% in 2000. Black leaders — such as NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who has called Bush a liar, compared his judicial nominees to the Taliban and equated the GOP to Nazis — continue their shrill verbal assaults on the man.

Yet under Bush, the U.S. has boosted development and humanitarian aid to Africa from $1.4 billion in his first year in office to $4 billion a year today. He’s also sought $30 billion to fight AIDS.

Trade — far more efficient than aid — between our country and Africa has more than doubled during his terms. This administration has also actively sought to stop the genocide in Darfur and has led in attempts to end wars in Sierra Leone, Sudan and Congo.

As the U.S. press swoons over Barack Obama and his bromidic promise of “change” to the exclusion of almost all else, the African media have noticed Bush’s work.

It wasn’t the New York Times or ABC, but AllAfrica.com that gratefully acknowledged that Bush’s policies “have saved millions of (African) lives and lifted many others from abject poverty.“

Jim Young / Reuters
Three-year-old Faith Mang’ehe, whose mother is HIV positive, attends a roundtable session with her mother on AIDS relief with U.S. President George W. Bush at Amana District Hospital in Dar es Salaam on Sunday.

James Munyaneza:

Tatu Msangi, a single Tanzanian mother, took the story of the success of PEPFAR to Congress during a State of the Union address last month.

She is a living testimony of just how, through PEPFAR, the Bush administration has saved a life deep in a remote African village.

Msangi testified how despite living with HIV, she received the necessary counseling and Nevirapine (medication) during her pregnancy, and subsequently delivered a bouncing HIV-free baby girl. Now, her daughter Faith Mang’ehe has a future, and Msangi hope, thanks to Bush’s Emergency Plan.

This is not the only success story of its kind. In Rwanda and in other benefiting countries, such achievements are there although many remain publicly unnoticed.

“Thank you so much for the initiative. It has done so much for our people. It has given us a future,” Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kiwete told Bush on Sunday at a Dar es Salaam hospital which was partly built by the American people.

Under Bush presidency, a number of African countries have continued to benefit from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) although not many Africans have benefited yet due to a number of factors.

Africans will remember that in 2004, President Bush signed into law the AGOA Acceleration Act, which extended the legislation to 2015. The initiative has helped triple African total exports to the US since 2001 – the year Bush came to power.

~~~

Bush’s speeches have also increasingly been characterized by a positive shift in policy towards Africa. In a statement he delivered in Washington D.C shortly before embarking on his second African tour last week, he underlined that it was significant for developed countries to treat African nations not as “charity cases” but as “equal partners”.

Such school of thought is what is on the mind of a new breed of revolutionary African leaders including our own President Paul Kagame, who on several occasions, has blamed some western powers for approaching African matters in a bullish manner.

Therefore such African leaders would not agree more with Bush when he says: “We (United States) have also revolutionized the way we approach development. Too many nations continue to follow either the paternalistic notion that treats African countries as charity cases, or a model of exploitation that seeks only to buy up their resources. America rejects both approaches.

Instead, we are treating African leaders as equal partners, asking them to set clear goals, and expecting them to produce measurable results.”

Observers have said such statements from US politicians are interlaced with their fear for competition from other emerging world economies especially China, but whatever the reason, at least Bush’s statement is right.

Secondly, many African leaders will agree with the US President that what Africans need today is not aid but investment.

“America is serving as an investor, not a donor,” Bush said. This remark was last week re-echoed by an Ethiopian government official during a Reuters interview when he said: “What many African government officials want to see is less aid from Western powers like the US and more investment. This is the way forward for the continent…”

And of course, President-Elect Obama will be a beneficiary of Bush’s legacy:

It is also worth noting that Bush is passionately pushing for several pro-Africa initiatives that will live longer than his presidency – in other words, which will extend the often talked-about American generosity towards the disadvantaged world inhabitants, to the next US administration.

President Bush dances during an entertainment ceremony to inaugurate the new U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, Feb. 19, 2008.
JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Brookings senior fellow Homi Kharas thinks the U.S. contribution under Bush’s leadership to improving Africa is inflated praise:

* U.S. economic aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased from $2.1 billion to $5.4 billion between 2000 and 2005. But EU countries gave $21.9 billion to Africa in 2006, and the United Kindgom alone gave $5.2 billion — with an economy one-sixth of the size of the U.S. economy.
* $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Africa was in the form of food aid, which Kharas describes as “a form of assistance which is so questionable in terms of its impact on development that several large U.S. charities, including CARE, have stopped dealing with it.”
* The United States’ economic assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006 (and this isn’t even touching upon the enormous military expenditures on this region) was more than $6 billion, which is more than what was given to all 45 sub-Saharan African countries combined.

~~~

So while we should celebrate the U.S. contributions to Africa, we should also keep in mind the fact that it is Europe, not the United States, that is leading the international fight against African poverty.”

But I think Kharas misses the overall contributions of President Bush, including initiatives designed to help African nations grow their economies, rather than merely flushing money down the “feel-good” charity-drain.

Last November, President Bush was distinguished with the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award:

“We are pleased this year to have the President of the United States, George W. Bush, as the recipient of the Bishop John T. Walker Service Award,” Julius E. Coles, President of Africare remarked. “I cannot think of a more deserving person for this award given the tremendous increase in development and humanitarian resources that President Bush has provided to the continent of Africa to improve the quality of life for the people of Africa.”

Since taking office in 2001, President Bush has transformed the way development assistance is carried out [emphasis, mine] on the African continent by creating partnerships with African governments, businesses and civil society organizations to promote economic growth. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has committed over 60 billion dollars to fight global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. In addition, his administration has facilitated $34 billion to diminish debt, over $14 billion to invest in economies, nearly $4.5 billion to fight poverty and $10 million for clean water on the African continent.

3-and-a-half years ago, I wrote:

Recently, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair met to draw up a policy (prayers out to the Londoners, this morning), forgiving African debt and pledging $674 million in emergency humanitarian aid. The US already donates a quarter of all foreign assistance to Africa. There have been several Marshall Plans over the past 40 years, amounting to what? The end to poverty? No. Just money squandered to corrupt regimes. And how can we forget all the private donations of charity over the years, and past events like “We are the World”? 1985 Live Aid raised close to $150 million for famine relief; yet the majority of that went to a corrupt Ethiopian government and the propping up of yet another brutal dictator, Mengistu. Good intentions with bad results. Do we ever learn?

I have mixed feelings about the amount of financial aid we give to other nations- especially when it seems to be money squandered rather than money invested toward securing our best interests. And I question the gravity of the AIDS epidemic when there are other ills worth tackling using American tax dollars.

Marshall Plan for reconstructing Europe worked 60 years ago. But today’s Africa is not 1947 Europe. Europe was about rebuilding; Africa is about building. A European-style Marshall Plan doesn’t apply to Africa. Waste and corruption abounds when it comes to the financial assistance squandered by the U.S. and other nations over the decades on failed African states and corrupt regimes. It’s a perfect model for how simply throwing more money at the problem is not an effective solution.

It is with this understanding, that President Bush sought a more innovative approach to bringing aid to the continent of Africa, at least in one respect:

The Food for Peace Program was started in 1954, and for over 50 years, America has helped to feed over 3 billion people in 150 countries. More than 60% of international emergency food aid comes from the United States. What President Bush has come to realize, is that simply "throwing free food" at the problem, doesn’t help to lessen the problem. Our requirement for the program has always been that if we are to send food abroad, it had to have been grown in the U.S. This ends up hurting local farmers in Africa, who are trying to get a start at growing food. So what President Bush has proposed, in an attempt to get to root causes of hunger, is that 1/4th of all the food aid given by the U.S. has to be bought by the U.S. from local farmers. From the NYTimes:

It was here in Kansas City, at the 2005 food aid conference, that the Bush administration pushed for a fundamental change in food aid that would have diminished profits to domestic agribusiness and shipping companies. It proposed allowing a quarter of the Food for Peace budget to be used to buy food in poor countries near hunger crises, rather than buying only American-grown food that had to be shipped across oceans.

And Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns spoke at the conference on Wednesday to again make the administration’s case for the same idea, contending that such a policy would speed delivery, improve efficiency and save many lives.

This is compassionate conservatism. Finding practical solutions that go beyond creating "feel-good" policies that achieve nothing, and sometimes only succeeds in making matters worse. I believe that both liberals and conservatives care about the environment, want to be charitable to those less fortunate, etc. We just have different ideas on how best to make the world a better place. It is worth noting, as Medved does, that

Former President Bill Clinton recently said at a fund-raiser for Bread for the World, a Christian group that lobbies on hunger issues, that it was to Mr. Bush’s "everlasting credit" that he had proposed buying food aid in poor countries. Such a policy had never crossed his mind when he was president, Mr. Clinton said, but he thought it was a great way to help farmers in Africa and buy food more efficiently.

Lawrence Jackson
U.S. President George W. Bush at an arrival ceremony at Spriggs Payne Airport with Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Monrovia Feb. 21.

In a speech last February at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art:

in one of the major priorities of my Presidency, the United States has fundamentally altered our policy toward Africa.

America’s approach to Africa stems from both our ideals and our interests. We believe that every human life is precious. We believe that our brothers and sisters in Africa have dignity and value, because they bear the mark of our Creator. We believe our spirit is renewed when we help African children and families live and thrive.

Africa is also increasingly vital to our strategic interests. We have seen that conditions on the other side of the world can have a direct impact on our own security. We know that if Africa were to continue on the old path of decline, it would be more likely to produce failed states, foster ideologies of radicalism, and spread violence across borders. We also know that if Africa grows in freedom, and prosperity, and justice, its people will choose a better course. People who live in societies based on freedom and justice are more likely to reject the false promise of the extremist ideology. Citizens who see a future of opportunity are more likely to build hopeful economies that benefit all the people. Nations that replace disease and despair with healing and hope will help Africa do more than just survive — it will help Africa succeed.

For all these reasons, America has dramatically increased our commitment to development in Africa. We have also revolutionized the way we approach development. Too many nations continue to follow either the paternalistic notion that treats African countries as charity cases, or a model of exploitation that seeks only to buy up their resources. America rejects both approaches. Instead, we are treating African leaders as equal partners, asking them to set clear goals, and expecting them to produce measurable results. For their part, more African leaders are willing to be held to high standards. And together, we’re pioneering a new era in development.

The new era is rooted in a powerful truth: Africa’s most valuable resource is not its oil, it’s not its diamonds, it is the talent and creativity of its people. So we are partnering with African leaders to empower their people to lift up their nations and write a new chapter in their history.

First, we are working to empower Africans to overcome poverty by helping them grow their economies. After a long period of stagnation, many of Africa’s economies are springing to life. As a whole, sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow nearly 7 percent this year. The economies of Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania are among the fastest-growing in the world. And across Africa, poverty is beginning to decline. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a poor place, but poverty is beginning to decline.

This resurgence shows the strength of the entrepreneurial spirit in Africa. America is working to help unleash that spirit across the continent. Along with our fellow G8 nations, we have relieved some $34 billion in debt from African nations in the past 18 months. (Applause.) That is roughly the same level of debt that was cancelled in the previous 11 years combined. We have also made historic increases in foreign aid. In my first term, we more than doubled development assistance to Africa — part of the largest expansion of American development assistance since the Marshall Plan. (Applause.) At the beginning of my second term, I promised to double our assistance again by 2010. And the budget I sent Congress last week will ensure that we meet this commitment.

And just as important, we’re changing the way we deliver assistance. We created what’s called the Millennium Challenge Account, which offers financial support to the world’s most promising developing nations — nations that fight corruption, nations that govern justly, nations that open up their economies, and nations that invest in the health and education of their people.

America is serving as an investor, not a donor. We believe that countries can adopt the habits necessary to provide help for their people. That’s what we believe. And we’re willing to invest in leaders that are doing just that. So far, more than two-thirds of the MCA’s $5.5 billion is being invested in Africa. And on my trip next week, I will sign the largest project in the program’s history — nearly $700 million compact with Tanzania. (Applause.)

Other nations are seeing the benefits of these agreements. They are moving ahead with the tough economic, political, and social reforms necessary to compete for a compact of their own. In fact, there is now more competition for funds than there are funds available, which ought to say two things: One, that this is evidence that the American taxpayers are getting good value for their dollars. In other words, if nations are willing to fight corruption, work on rule of law, support their people and not theirselves, then it makes sense to invest with them. And secondly, it is evidence that Congress needs to fully fund this important initiative.

The best way to generate economic growth in Africa is to expand trade and investment. When businesses in Africa can sell their products and services around the globe, they create a culture of self-reliance and opportunity. One of the most powerful incentives for trade is the African Growth and Opportunity Act. And I appreciate the fact that Congress has extended this good law. Since 2001, exports from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States have tripled. It’s also important for our citizens to know that U.S. exports to sub-Saharan Africa have more than doubled.

~~~

Last year, we launched the Africa Financial Sector Initiative. As part of this effort, our Overseas Private Investment Corporation mobilized $750 million in investment capital for African businesses. Today, I’m announce that OPIC will support five new investment funds that will mobilize an additional $875 million, for a total of more than $1.6 billion in new capital.

And next week, I’m going to sign a bilateral investment treaty with Rwanda. This will be America’s first such treaty in sub-Saharan Africa in nearly a decade. It reflects our shared commitment to systems of fair and open investment. It will bring more capital to Rwanda’s dynamic and growing economy. Look, the idea of somehow being able to help people through just giving them money isn’t working. That’s why I appreciate the efforts of Rob Mosbacher and OPIC, recognizing that when you invest in capital — invest capital, you create jobs. Paternalism has got to be a thing of the past. Joint venturing with good, capable people is what the future is all about. (Applause.)

But in the long run, the best way to lift lives in Africa is to tear down barriers to investment and trade around the world. And we have an opportunity to do that through the Doha Round of trade talks. Look, Doha is important to enhance trade, but if you’re truly interested in eliminating poverty, we ought to be reducing tariffs and barriers all across the globe. The United States stands ready to cut farm subsidies, and agricultural tariffs, and other trade barriers that disadvantage developing countries. On the other hand, we expect the rest of the world — especially the most advanced developing countries –to do the same. And if we both make good-faith efforts, we can reach a successful Doha agreement this year.

Secondly, we’re working to empower Africans to alleviate hunger, expand education, and fight disease. America is proud to be the world’s largest provider of food assistance, including emergency food stocks that have saved lives in places like Ethiopia, or Sudan, and other African nations. It’s a noble effort on our people’s part. I don’t know if — most Americans don’t understand that we’re the world’s largest provider of food to feed the hungry, but we are. (Applause.)

Yet our ultimate objective is to do more than respond to the hungry — it is to help African countries feed their own people. So I have proposed that America purchase crops directly from farmers in Africa, instead of just shipping food assistance from the developed world. (Applause.) This initiative would build up local agriculture markets. It would help break the cycle of famine. And it deserves the full support of the United States Congress.

We’re also focusing on education. I’m looking forward to seeing the President of Tanzania, he’s a good guy. Here’s what he said; he said “It’s an indisputable fact that education is key to development.” Across Africa, students are eager to learn, and often they lack quality teachers and just basic supplies. Things we take for granted in America are just lacking in parts of Africa. So in 2002, I launched the Africa Education Initiative, the goal of which is to distribute more than 15 million textbooks, train nearly a million teachers, and provide scholarships for 550,000 girls by 2010. And we’re headed to achieving that goal. In other words, these just weren’t empty words, these were concrete, solid goals, being funded as a result of the generosity of the Congress and the American people.

Last year, I also announced a new International Education Initiative, which will help make basic education available to 4 million people in Ghana, Liberia, and other nations. Laura and I are looking forward to talking to the leaders of Ghana and Liberia about this important, transformative initiative. With both these steps, we are matching the enthusiasm of African educators with the generosity of our taxpayers — and we believe strongly that this will open up the door to opportunity for millions. The good news is, so do the leaders of the countries we’re going to visit.

The greatest threat to Africa is disease. The greatest threat for a successful Africa is the scourge of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Two out of every three people afflicted with HIV/AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is the leading cause of death in the region. Just a few years ago, there were fears that HIV/AIDS could wipe out much of the continent’s population, with death rates that would rival the Black Plague of the Middle Ages.

We responded. We responded with the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It’s the largest international health initiative in history to fight a single disease. (Applause.) In 2002, we pledged $15 billion over five years to support HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and care. We set some clear principles on how that money would be spent. We put local partners in the lead, because they know their people and their needs. We opened the funding to faith-based groups — healers willing to deliver medicine to remote villages by bicycle or on foot. We stressed the importance of changing behavior, so that fewer people are infected in the first place.

And the results are striking. When I visited sub-Saharan Africa five years ago, or when we visited five years ago, 50,000 people were receiving medicine to treat HIV/AIDS. And when we return this week, there will be more than 1.3 million. (Applause.) One person who knows the benefits of the Emergency Plan is Tatu Msangi. She’s a single mother from Tanzania. When she became pregnant, Tatu went to a clinic run by a Christian group. Souls showing up to love a neighbor just like they’d like to be loved themselves. You know, it didn’t take a federal law to say, go to Africa to provide love for Tatu, it took a higher calling. These goals responded.

She learned she was HIV-positive, and enrolled in a program designed to prevent mother-to-child transmission. She went on to deliver a healthy, HIV-free girl, named Faith. I will see Tatu next week in Tanzania, but it’s not going to be the first time I met her. See, a few weeks ago, she and Faith endured a rather windy State of the Union address. She sat with Laura in the box, here in the capital of the nation that helped save their lives.

In all, the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has benefited tens of millions in Africa. Some call this a remarkable success. I call it a good start. Last May, I proposed to double our nation’s initial pledge, to $30 billion over the next five years. (Applause.) The people on the continent of Africa have to know they’re not alone. The G8 has shown leadership by agreeing to match our $30 billion pledge. The private sector has made generous contributions as well. Think of what Warner Brothers has done, for example. And now the time has come for Congress to act. Members of both parties should reauthorize the Emergency Plan, maintain the principles that have made it a success, and double our commitment to this noble cause.

Malaria is another devastating killer. In some African countries, malaria takes as many lives as HIV/AIDS. And the vast majority of those taken by malaria are children under the age of five. Every one of these deaths is unnecessary, because the disease is entirely preventable and treatable. So in 2005, America launched a five-year, $1.2 billion initiative to provide the insecticide-treated beds, indoor spraying, cutting-edge drugs that are necessary to defeat this disease. It’s not a complicated strategy. It doesn’t take a lot of medical research. We know how to solve the problem. That’s why I put the Admiral there. He knows how to solve problems. He can get us from point A to point B in a straight line. Well, nearly straight line. (Laughter.) And so we set a historic goal — if you have a treatable problem on hand, then you’re able to set measurable goals. And the goal is to cut the number of malaria-related deaths in 15 African nations by half. That’s the goal.

Like the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the malaria initiative empowers leaders on the ground to design strategies that work best for their nations. For example, President Yayi of Benin has called the fight against malaria “a fight against misery.” With the help of the malaria initiative, he’s leading a campaign to deliver insecticide-treated bed nets to children under five in Benin. I’m looking forward to hearing how that’s going when we meet him on Benin on our first stop. I can’t wait to find out how well this initiative is doing.

Like the Emergency Plan, the malaria initiative has been matched by G8 nations, which have pledged to cut malaria deaths by half in an additional 15 countries. This initiative has also been greeted with generous support from the private sector, faith-based groups, and Americans who want to do something to save somebody’s life. You can buy a $10 bed net and ship it to Africa to save a life. It doesn’t take much money, but it takes a big heart. One of the interesting gifts Laura and I got a couple of years ago for Christmas was bed nets in our name. It made us feel great.

Like the Emergency Plan, the malaria initiative is producing undeniable results. In just over two years, the initiative has reached more than 25 million people. (Applause.) According to new data, malaria rates are dropping dramatically in many parts of Africa. If we stay on this path, an extraordinary achievement is within reach — Africa can turn a disease that has taken its children for centuries into a thing of the past. And wouldn’t that be fantastic? And so Laura and I are going to spend time with these leaders, saying, what a noble opportunity; what a great goal; what a great way to serve humankind.

Finally, we’re working to empower Africans to end conflicts, strengthen democracy, and promote peace. When I took office, Africa was home to six major conflicts — in Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and southern Sudan. We concluded that the best way to broker peace was to support the efforts of African leaders on the ground, instead of dictating solutions from Washington, D.C. And today, every one of them has made progress toward peace and stability.

For example, the United States worked closely with Nigeria to help end the Liberian civil war. When the international community called for Charles Taylor to step down in 2003, the President of Nigeria provided a plane to take him in exile. When U.S. Marines deployed to Liberia, Nigerian peacekeepers deployed at the same time. And today, Liberia’s long war is over. And next week in Monrovia, Laura and I will meet with Africa’s first democratically-elected woman President: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (Applause.)

Even without major conflict or civil war, security challenges remain in Africa, and we’re working closely with local partners to address them. The Department of Defense has established a new African Command, which will work closely with African governments to crack down on human trafficking, piracy, and terrorism across the continent. We are employing diplomatic tools as well. In Eastern Congo, we worked with leaders on the ground to broker the recent agreements to demobilize all remaining armed groups. And we stand ready to help all sides to implement them. In Kenya, we are backing the efforts of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to end the crisis.

And when we’re on the continent I’ve asked Condi Rice — that would be Secretary Rice — to travel to Kenya to support the work of the former Secretary General, and to deliver a message directly to Kenya’s leaders and people: There must be an immediate halt to violence, there must be justice for the victims of abuse, and there must be a full return to democracy. (Applause.)

In Darfur, the United States will continue to call the killing what it is – genocide. We will continue to deliver humanitarian aid. We will continue to enforce sanctions, tough sanctions, against the Sudanese government officials, rebel leaders, and others responsible for violence. We expect other nations to join us in this effort to save lives from the genocide that is taking place. We will use all our diplomatic resources to urge full deployment of an effective United Nations force. The decision was made to count on the United Nations to provide the force necessary to protect people, and so we’re going to support their efforts. I must confess, I’m a little frustrated by how slow things are moving. And yet we will support their efforts to find forces necessary to make a robust contribution to save lives.

On this trip, I’m going to visit with brave peacekeepers from Rwanda, a nation that knows the pain of genocide and was the first country to send troops into Darfur. Other nations need to follow Rwanda’s example. Other nations need to take this issue seriously, just like the United States does, and provide more manpower for this urgent mission. And when they do, I pledge America will provide the training and equipment necessary to deploy the peacekeepers to Darfur. (Applause.)

America also stands with all in Africa who live in the quiet pain of tyranny. We will confront tyranny. In Zimbabwe, a discredited dictator presides over food shortages, staggering inflation, and harsh repression. The decent and talented people of that country deserve much better. America will continue to support freedom in Zimbabwe. And I urge neighbors in the region, including South Africa, to do the same. We look forward to the hour when this nightmare is over, and the people of Zimbabwe regain their freedom.

These are great challenges, but there is even greater cause for hope. In the past four years alone, there have been more than 50 democratic elections in Africa. Thriving free societies have emerged in nations with Islamic majorities, Christian majorities, majorities of other beliefs — which is a powerful rebuke to the ideology of the extremists. In many nations, women have exercised the right to vote and run for office. Rwanda now has the highest percentage of female legislators in the world. (Applause.) Overall, more than two-thirds of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa are free. And for the rest, the direction of history is clear, so long as the United States does not lose its nerve, and retreat into isolationism and protectionism. The day will come when a region once dismissed as the “dark continent” enjoys the light of liberty.

The United States must remain fully committed to the new era of development that we have begun with our partners in Africa. It’s in our national interest we do so. I’m going to work closely with the G8 nations to ensure they keep their promises as well. Congress must continue to show its commitment by fully funding the development programs I described today. You see, saving lives is a calling that crosses partisan lines. It remains equally worthy in both good economic times and times of economic uncertainty.

Across Africa, people have begun to speak of the “Lazarus effect,” where communities once given up for dead are coming back to life. This work of healing and redemption is both a matter of conscience and a wise exercise of American influence. The work is not done. In the face of the needs that remain, it’s important for the African people to believe the American people are not going to turn away. That’s part of the purpose of our trip. The changes taking place in Africa don’t always make the headlines. So don’t be frustrated, Mark. That means the work is quiet, but it is not thankless.

Last November, I met a woman from Zambia named Bridget Chisenga. Bridget’s husband died of AIDS, and she expected to meet the same fate. Then she went to a clinic operated by Catholic Relief Services, funded by the American people. Today, Bridget is healthy. She has a job at the clinic, where she helps provide AIDS medicine to others. I want our fellow citizens to hear what she said: “This face is alive and vibrant because of your initiative. I would like to thank you.”

Americans have heard similar words of gratitude and hope in the past. They were said about the people who liberated the concentration camps, and saved the blockaded city of Berlin, and stood firm until the prisoners in the gulags were set free. This spirit of purpose and compassion has always defined America. And that is why the people of Africa can be certain they will always have a friend and partner in the United States of America.

God bless. (Applause.)

Mr Bush’s talks in Benin included the fight against malaria and Aids. Washington has provided millions of dollars of aid to the west African country.

5 days later, while in Rwanda, WaPo reports:

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 20, 2008; A09

KIGALI, Rwanda, Feb. 19 — He looked shaken, as anyone would visiting a genocide memorial with a picture of a 12-year-old girl and a plaque with her vital information.

Favourite sport: Swimming.

Favourite food: Eggs and chips.

Cause of death: Hacked by machete.

For President Bush, a visit to the Kigali Memorial Center evokes not just stomach-churning visions of what happened here 14 years ago but haunting questions about what is happening even now on another part of the African continent. A president who once scribbled “not on my watch” in the margins of a report on Rwanda finds himself still unable to stop what he has termed genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

“This is a moving place that can’t help but shake your emotions to your very foundation,” Bush said after touring the museum to the 1994 genocide, built on grounds that include mass graves with more than 250,000 bodies. “It reminds me that we must not let these kind of actions take place.”

But unlike Bill Clinton, who came here in 1998 to admit he should have done more to stop the Rwanda genocide, Bush said he feels no guilt and harbors no regret over Darfur — except regret that others have not done what he has pressed them to do. He opted not to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Sudan and instead has tried to help assemble an international peacekeeping force that has yet to fully deploy.

“I still believe it was the right decision,” he said, “but having done that, if you’re a problem-solver, you put yourself at the mercy of decisions of others — in this case, the United Nations. And I’m well known to have spoken out [about] the slowness of the United Nations. It seems very bureaucratic to me, particularly with people suffering.”

He came back to the question of personal regret. “I’m comfortable with the decision I made,” he said. “I’m not comfortable with how quickly the response has been.”

Darfur has always been a crucible of American power under Bush, testing the obligations and limitations of the world’s last superpower striving to dictate events in faraway lands. For Bush, it has been a singular frustration, one he rails about in private with aides even as he has settled for a multilateral effort that sputters inconclusively.

Bush was quick to call the killing in Darfur genocide, a term others still resist, and he organized a massive humanitarian response, imposed sanctions against Sudanese officials and promoted a plan for a 26,000-strong U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force. He announced Tuesday that the United States would spend another $100 million to train African peacekeepers for Darfur, including $12 million for 2,400 more Rwandan troops.

“President Bush did more than any other world leader to try to stop the deaths in Darfur,” said Andrew S. Natsios, who was the president’s envoy to Sudan until December. “He called it what it was when it was happening and then with other countries organized the African Union force.” The humanitarian aid effort, he added, “saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Yet activists say it has not been enough. “There is a lot about Darfur that all of us, the president included, should regret now,” said Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition. “Hopefully, the president shares our regret that there isn’t a lasting peace and security in Darfur and that the Darfuri people continue to face violence and suffering.”

So far, just 9,000 peacekeepers are on the ground and major military powers have yet to come up with needed helicopters. China has blocked sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. And Sudan continues to defy the international community as militias renew violence and burn down villages. “How can anyone have a clear conscience about what’s happening in Darfur?” Fowler asked.

Many asked similar questions in April 1994 when this lush, green country known as the land of a thousand hills descended into a frenzy of death. The assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, touched off a wave of violence against minority Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus. An estimated 800,000 people were killed over 100 days. With bodies still being found today, some put the toll as high as 1 million.

The president and first lady remained grimly silent as they made their way through the museum Tuesday, guided by its manager, Freddy Mutanguha, whose parents and four sisters were killed.

“The U.N. knew about what was going on in our country,” he told the president.

The White House press corps headquartered for the day at the Hotel Des Mille Collines, made famous by the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” which depicted a hotel manager who sheltered 1,200 from the violence. But the former manager, Paul Rusesabagina, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush in 2005, was disappointed by the president’s visit. In a letter to Bush, Rusesabagina complained that the current government in Rwanda, led by President Paul Kagame, a general in the Tutsi rebel force that toppled the Hutu government in 1994, has its own ties to mass killings.

A Spanish judge this month issued arrest warrants for 40 current or former members of the Rwandan military on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, although he did not indict Kagame because he has immunity as a head of state. “Mr. President,” Rusesabagina wrote, “the whole world will be watching and wondering in disbelief why you have decided to go and shake the hands of suspected terrorists when fighting terrorism was one of the cornerstones of your outstanding presidency.”

Rwanda’s government has dismissed the judge’s actions as unwarranted. Bush had nothing but praise for Kagame, calling him a “personal friend” as they signed an investment treaty.

He hailed Kagame for contributing the largest share of peacekeepers now in Darfur, where as many as 450,000 people have died, mostly from disease, starvation and dehydration caused or exacerbated by the attacks of Arab militias tied to Sudan’s government.

Like everything else, it’s complicated. Certainly, if America is not directly threatened, we should not follow the Clinton model (Bosnia-Kosovo); we simply don’t have the resources and probably lack the American public will and trust in endangering American soldiers’ lives.

But clearly the President has done more than any other world leader.

Sure I wish President Bush spoke out about Darfur more often. Slide it in there, in every interview, press conference and in more speeches. In some cases, he does, yet those moments get very little airplay. If the MSM is so concerned, they could do more themselves by broadcasting in bold headlines, PRESIDENT SPEAKS OUT ON DARFUR:

Speaking on soil once stained with the blood of Rwanda’s genocide, U.S. President George W. Bush called Tuesday on all nations to step up efforts to end “once and for all” the ethnic slaughter still continuing in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

The president said the U.S. is using sanctions, pressure and money to help resolve the Darfur crisis. But Bush, frustrated at the lack of willingness of some other countries to do the same, sought to give his campaign for their increased involvement added weight by making pointed remarks on it from the Rwandan capital.

“The Rwanda people know the horrors of genocide,” Bush said. “My message to other nations is: ‘Join with the president and help us get this problem solved once and for all.’ And we will help.”

Rwanda was the first to deploy peacekeepers to the violent Darfur region in a joint African Union-UN mission. The United States has trained nearly 7,000 Rwandan troops and spent more than $17 million to equip and airlift them into the region. The U.S. has committed $100 million to train and provide equipment for peacekeepers from several African nations deploying to Darfur.

~~~

“There is evil in the world and evil must be confronted.”

How was President Bush received in February during his trip to Africa?

Jon Ward, Washington Times:

Eric Draper, Mr. Bush’s chief photographer, rode with the president in his limousine as he made his way into Monrovia, Liberia, on the last leg of a five-country African trip last February.

“That was just an amazing experience, to watch this reaction, the emotion on the streets, people crying and on their knees … screaming thank you,” Mr. Draper said in a recent interview with The Washington Times. “It was just incredible.”

I know his African trip was mentioned about by the press; but not the details. The coverage seemed more like pg A18 news, mentioned in passing. An incurious media makes for an ill-informed public. Many people only vaguely know that there is great suffering in Darfur and other parts of Africa. The MSM press could drum up more support for direct action; more political pressure by the public on the White House, giving President Bush the political capital and green light for perhaps even sending troops. But, no. Public opinion has all but muzzled the liberator of 60 million people. Bush critics say it’s not the job of the U.S. to be the world’s policeman and we have no legal right to invade sovereign nations (*cough*UNSCR 687*cough*); and then they demand President Bush “do something”. He’s been going to the UN like they want; and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Not part of the solution: Example via Michael Totten:

There is no love for the United Nations in Kosovo.

Kosovo is the fourth country I’ve visited where the UN has or has had a key role, and in only one of them – Lebanon – is the UN not despised by just about everyone. In Lebanon the UN has so little power to make a difference one way or the other that any anger at the institution would largely be pointless. In Bosnia, though, UN “peacekeepers” stood by impotently while genocide and ethnic-cleansing campaigns were carried out right in front of them. The UN’s Oil for Food program was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq at the expense of just about everybody who lives there. Kosovo, meanwhile, declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, but the elected government is still subordinate to the almost universally despised UN bureaucrats who are the real power. Many Kosovars insist the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is actually a dictatorship.

Minor Thoughts (the link I provided for the above Totten excerpt) includes this gem:

“The government of Iraq has more sovereignty than you do,” I said.

That shocked them. Iraq is in vastly worse shape overall than Kosovo. And yet Iraq regained much more of its sovereignty in a shorter amount of time, even while fending off a ferocious insurgency and civil war.

Right now, the Kosovars would love to have been occupied by the United States. If they had, they’d have more control over their own country, they’d have a functioning economy, and the Americans would have sent trained and competent administrators. Not only that, the American administrators would have been eager to pass their expertise and knowledge along to the Kosovars.

Why does the American left hate American interventions but love United Nations interventions?

Just this past Monday, President Bush signed a waiver to airlift equipment and supplies to Darfur:

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who made the airlift announcement shortly before the Oval Office meeting, said that Bush waived congressional notification requirements because “failing to do so would pose a substantial risk to human health and welfare.” Hadley cited the immediate need to improve the security situation in west Darfur to allow for aid deliveries.

Hadley also lashed out at critics, singling out New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who have argued that President Bush did not do enough under his watch to end the violence in Darfur. “President Bush has been committed to resolving the crisis there since the United States first labeled it genocide in 2004,” Hadley said.

Kristof wrote in a blog entry following the announcement that the airlift “sure smells of a desperate effort to burnish the administration’s legacy on Darfur, but better late than never.”

The United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was established in July 2007, but the peacekeeping force has struggled to secure the region due to a lack of troops and equipment. Bush has reportedly grown impatient with the lack of progress UNAMID has made since being deployed.

Bush said “it’s going to be very important for the United States to pay attention to the implementation” of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which he called ‘vital’. The White House meeting was arranged to mark the fourth anniversary on January of the signing, which some observers consider one of the Bush administration’s major foreign policy accomplishments.

It is deplorable that there are probably a significant number of Americans- especially black Americans- who feel as Kanye does regarding President Bush’s attitudes toward blacks; and who have fallen for the propagandistic myth that the Republican Party itself is inherently racist.

For whatever polls are worth, an NBC/WSJ poll in 2005 (as blockquoted earlier, Bush received 11% of the black vote in 2004 after taking 8% in 2000) measured a 2% approval rating for President Bush amongst African-Americans (I hate that hyphenation, as how many black Americans actually come directly from the continent of Africa?):

The poll also revealed overwhelming opposition to Bush among African-Americans. Only two percent said they approved of his performance as president, the lowest level ever recorded in that category, NBC television reported.

This is interesting, since some polls measure Bush’s approval rating is in the 80 percentiles:

I mentioned some of Bush’s liberal accomplishments in Africa, before. Danny Huddleston at American Thinker says President Bush’s approval rating in Africa is 80%:

Also, few people are aware of the help Bush has provided to Africa. He has an astonishing approval rating of 80% on that continent. The NY Sun reported on this back in February:

President Bush’s sense of mission to improve the lives of the people of the Middle East has attracted so much attention that the Wall Street Journal called him “Bush of Arabia” the other day over an article by Fouad Ajami. Less widely appreciated are Mr. Bush’s achievements in Africa, which are worth marking as the president embarks today on a visit that is scheduled to include trips to Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia. Mr. Bush has committed $15 billion to fight AIDS and HIV in Africa, and the result is that the number of Africans benefiting from anti-retroviral drugs has soared to 1.3 million today from 50,000 a few years ago. A similar effort is under way to fight malaria, with similarly promising results.

Mr. Bush hasn’t gotten much credit for this among the American public, but, as a BBC interviewer noted yesterday, his approval rating in Africa is in the 80% range, which is astonishingly high. [....]

Asked about all this yesterday, Mr. Bush characteristically looked beyond the poll numbers to the broader principles. “I believe to whom much is given, much is required. It happens to be a religious notion. But, it should be a universal notion as well,” the president said. “I believe America’s soul is enriched, our spirit is enhanced when we help people who suffer.”

Also read: Countries that will miss George Bush

Dancers wear traditional tops bearing the image of President Bush Sunday as they perform for the president during a dinner held at the State House in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Photo by Charles Dharapak

Images of President Bush make up the fabric of dresses for Tanzanian women as they await Bush’s arrival at Julius Nyerere Airport in Dar Es Salaam February 16, 2008.
REUTERS/Jason Reed

Women dressed in clothing picturing President Bush await his arrival at the state house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Feb. 17, 2008.Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

President Bush greets entertainers during a ceremony at the executive mansion in Monrovia, Liberia, Feb. 21, 2008. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

President Bush treated like a rock star:

In the week his approval ratings slumped to the lowest level in history for a serving US president – with just 19 per cent of the electorate approving of his actions – George Bush has found an entire continent willing to laud his achievements.

His six-day tour of Africa has seen George W Bush Day proclaimed in Benin, brought tens of thousands of jubilant Tanzanians onto the streets of Dar-es-Salaam and led to a road in Ghana being rechristened the George Bush Motorway.

Bush ended the trip in Liberia, where he met Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the country’s president and the first woman to lead an African nation. The US has invested more than $1bn in aid in the country so Bush was greeted like a pop star – perhaps to the chagrin of ex-rocker Bob Geldof who accompanied the president on his African tour – and presented with a ceremonial robe by a Liberian woman (above).

So, the President who has surrounded himself with the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history (soon to be succeeded by an Obama Administration), which includes the appointment of the first black Secretary of State and first black (female) National Security Advisor (and subsequently, the next Secretary of State), apparently “hates black people”? Well, he sure has a funny way of expressing it.

Maybe Kanye West could take the time to visit war-torn Darfur and tell the parents there who named their children after Bush, our 43rd president hates them:

And so, as his administration comes to an end, how’s this for a great irony: In Africa, newborn sons are named after George W. Bush. Yet his legacy to this country is the election of a black man — whose father was a true son of Africa.

White House photo by Eric Draper
President George W. Bush embraces members of the African Children’s Choir at the White House in July.

So after running this bogus Katrina story for a week the AP decides to retract it on Friday night?

In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn’t until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.

Notice how they are still playing word games? Overrun is not the same as overtop, as a reader of Ed Morrissey’s points out:

They are replacing the verb “breach” with the verb “overrun” which means: 1 a (1) : to defeat utterly and occupy the positions of : OVERWHELM, OVERPOWER, CRUSH (2) : to invade and occupy or ravage b obsolete : to run over destructively or harmfully : run down c : to spread or swarm over The word used in all of the briefings was “overtop” or “top” as a diminutive form thereof. Overtop means. 1 : to rise above the top of : exceed in height : tower aboveDefinitions are Merriam Webster Unabridged. They are still using misleading language and really should be renamed, Agitprop Pravda.

Either way you look at this thing any half competent editor would have realized after watching the tape that this story was a hit piece. But they still decided to run with it. I sure don’t smell coincidence here anymore, this was obviously done at the behest of the Democratic party. How could the AP have gone so far into the depths of depravity that they are now a shill for the left?

Mark Noonan at Blogs For Bush brings up the same point:

What we have here is a very strange confluence of events: this story started just as Mardis Gras brought New Orleans back into the public eye. Normally, the story would be about how New Orleans is recovering – but the story instead was a bogus re-write of videos that the Administration had long ago provided to the MSM. I smell a rat here – a DemocRAT, if you ask me. This is simply too beneficial for the Democrats for it to be coincidence – there could very well be collusion, and that would make what the AP did a de-facto campaign contribution to the Democratic Party. I believe that such a donation – which would have to be figured as a value of tens of millions of dollars – would be illegal under our campaign finance laws.

We should have a full hearing in Congress, with the AP and the DNC forced to turn over all documents which may in any way be related to Katrina from the day it went ashore to the day this AP story ran last week. We need to get to the bottom of this, lest the MSM – by getting away with this – merely become an adjunct of the DNC dressed up as an independent media.

You think Keith Olbermann will issue a retraction?

On the Wednesday March 1 Countdown, Olbermann teased the show: “Video of the government-wide Katrina briefing, the one from August 28th, the day before the hurricane hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the one in which the President is warned that the levees could be breached four days before he told the American public no one could have anticipated that the levees could be breached.”

Olbermann opened the show trumpeting the fresh evidence the Countdown host believed contradicted Bush’s public statements: “Good evening. Six months to the day after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, half a year in which the White House has claimed repeatedly that no one could have anticipated how bad it would be, a wealth of evidence, much of it caught on tape, now revealing that President Bush was indeed fully briefed about the storm’s potential and all of the damage it might do.”

After hearkening back to the “Nixon tapes,” dubbing these the “Bush tapes,” Olbermann continued: “The tapes revealing that Mr. Bush and his Homeland Security secretary were warned in no uncertain terms before Katrina hit shore that the storm could breach levees, could risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome, could overwhelm rescuers.”

Olbermann then brought aboard Richard Wolffe of Newsweek to further discuss the tapes. The Countdown host couldn’t resist another Nixon reference as he concluded the interview wondering if Bush’s dishonesty was as bad as the “actual malfeasance or misfeasance”: “And again, as we said, as Richard Nixon always said, you can be excused for almost any crime, if you will, or failure or error of omission or commission, but if there is tape of you not doing the job and then afterwards boasting that you have done everything that you could do, that’s almost as bad as the actual malfeasance or misfeasance, is it not?”

First there was Rathergate by 60 Minutes II, now there is Katrinagate by a producer of 60 Minutes II.

Other’s Blogging:

• Big Lizards
• Sister Toldjah
• Captain’s Quarters
• Rightwinged
• Narcissistic Views

Either way you look at this thing any half competent editor would have realized after watching the tape that this story was a hit piece. But they still decided to run with it. I sure don’t smell coincidence here anymore, this was obviously done at the behest of the Democratic party. How could the AP have gone so far into the depths of depravity that they are now a shill for the left?

So first the reports were “Bush was told that levee might be breached”, but when the transcripts were released everyone saw he was told they might be “topped”. Of course the left in its infinite wisdom decided to argue that it meaned the same thing.

but now the person who briefed Bush has told the MSM that NOONE anticipated the levee’s being breached:

News sources have reported that President Bush lied when he said he wasn?t warned that the levees in New Orleans could be breached during Hurricane Katrina.

But a videotape of a key meeting between Bush and hurricane officials supports the president?s contention that the breaching of the levees was unanticipated.

On September 1, four days after Katrina struck, Bush said: “I don?t think anybody anticipated a breach of the levees.?

The Associated Press on Wednesday claimed that “federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees.?

The Democratic National Committee attempted to make political hay out of the AP report, stating that “during the briefing, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told the president that the integrity of the levees was ?a very, very grave concern? that the president appears to have ignored.?

However, the tape shows that what Mayfield actually told Bush was: “I don?t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that?s obviously a very, very grave concern.?

Mayfield told NBC News on Thursday that he warned only that the levees might be topped ? that is, the storm surge could push water over the top of the levees ? not breached, and that on the many conference calls he monitored, “Nobody talked about the possibility of a levee breach or failure until after it happened.?

Mayfield even told Bush: “The forecast now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the City of New Orleans itself.?

The Washington Times, commenting on what it called a “hit job? on the president, opined: “If it were true that Mr. Bush heard predictions of levee breaches before the storm hit, then that makes a despicable and costly lie of his statement four days after the hurricane.

“The truth, instead, is that no adviser warned the president of the possibility that the levees could fail. Of course, it makes a juicier story to suggest that the president was warned.?

When will the left learn? Every week they think they have the smoking gun and run with it before checking it out, citing it as gospel. But taken with the recent release of Blanco telling Bush the levee’s were fine, this report demolishes the left once again.

The fact is that the MSM is so disconnected from reality they have lost their ability to retain any credibility with those with any common sense. Their obvious leftist agenda shines through in EVERY piece of reporting released.

When will the left learn? Every week they think they have the smoking gun and run with it before checking it out, citing it as gospel. But taken with the recent release of Blanco telling Bush the levee’s were fine, this report demolishes the left once again.

Will the left go ape over this video that shows Blanco reassuring the Bush administration that the levee’s had not been breached?

In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana’s governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans’ protective levees were intact, according to new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials.

“We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees,” Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. “We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time.”

In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House’s formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck.

Critics have maintained the Homeland Security Department responded too slowly to the breaches, delaying repair efforts and allowing flooding to worsen. Formal reports of New Orleans’ levee breaches reached the White House by 6 p.m., and the administration confirmed the damage by the next morning, according to the White House’s recount.

In the video of the conference call, Blanco appears uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation “could change.”

Blanco said floodwaters were rising in parts of the city “where we have waters that are 8 to 10 feet deep, and we have people swimming in there.”

“That’s got a considerable amount of water itself,” the governor said. “That’s about all I know right now on the specifics that you haven’t heard.”

Of course this piece is written by the same 60 Minutes producer discussed here, so she HAS to throw in the “Blanco appeared uncertain” bit.

UPDATE

Wizband has uncovered the fact that the writer of this hitpiece was a 60 Minutes II producer around the time of Rathergate…..who would of thunk it?

Have a look at the byline to the AP story:

By MARGARET EBRAHIM and JOHN SOLOMON

WASHINGTON (AP) – In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Here’s an interesting detail on someone who certainly looks like one of the story authors from the French-American Foundation’s membership roles:

Margaret Ebrahim (2003)
Producer
CBS News, 60 Minutes II

This CBS News page confirms that a Margaret Ebrahim was a 60 Minutes II producer in 2005. Ironically it was Mary Mapes who gave her away…

Not surprising that someone related to 60 minutes is involved in this shoddy piece of journalism

END UPDATE
Everyday there is a new story that the left hopes with all their might will take down Bush, and everyday they go away with their tail between their legs. This Katrina story is no different. Lets take a look at the article:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Get outta here, he knew the levee’s would be breeched and did nothing about it? Once again the MSM bias rears it’s ugly head. What was he REALLY told?

…”I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

Ohhhh, so now the levee overfilling is equivalent to breached? Kinda like my bathtub overfilling or the whole tub collapsing….same thing huh? Wholly Christ is this just too easy or what?

The article attempts to portray Bush as uninterested and uncaring but then tells us he was worried:

Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility ? and Bush was worried too.

Um, huh? So either he didn’t care and didn’t send what needed to be sent or he was worried about the possibility of disaster. Which is it AP?

Another point, who in the hell WASNT warned prior to landfall? Hell, it was non-stop 24/7 updates.

New Orleans braced for a catastrophic blow from Hurricane Katrina overnight, as forecasters predicted the Category 5 storm could drive a wall of water over the city’s levees.

The huge storm, packing 160 mph winds, is expected to hit the northern Gulf Coast in the next nine hours and make landfall as a Category 4 or 5 hurricane Monday morning.

About 70 percent of New Orleans is below sea level, and is protected from the Mississippi River by a series of levees. Forecasters predicted the storm surge could reach 28 feet; the highest levees around New Orleans are 18 feet high.

Of course the article attempts to lay the blame at the federal level, when the response by the fed’s was actually steller:

In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest–and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm’s landfall.Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day–some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, “guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways,” says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.

These units had help from local, state and national responders, including five helicopters from the Navy ship Bataan and choppers from the Air Force and police. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries dispatched 250 agents in boats. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state police and sheriffs’ departments launched rescue flotillas. By Wednesday morning, volunteers and national teams joined the effort, including eight units from California’s Swift Water Rescue. By Sept. 8, the waterborne operation had rescued 20,000.

While the press focused on FEMA’s shortcomings, this broad array of local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary success–especially given the huge area devastated by the storm. Computer simulations of a Katrina-strength hurricane had estimated a worst-case-scenario death toll of more than 60,000 people in Louisiana. The actual number was 1077 in that state.

The problem was the local and state response was a disaster, and they are the first responders. The feds showed up within 3 days, which is to be expected. The local officials should have showed up within hours but thanks to Nagin and Blanco, that was a huge failure.

MR. RUSSERT: Many people point, Mr. Mayor, that on Friday before the hurricane, President Bush declared an impending disaster. And The Houston Chronicle wrote it this way. “[Mayor Nagin's] mandatory evacuation order was issued 20 hours before the storm struck the Louisiana coast, less than half the time researchers determined would be needed to get everyone out. City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan.” And we’ve all see this photograph of these submerged school buses. Why did you not declare, order, a mandatory evacuation on Friday, when the president declared an emergency, and have utilized those buses to get people out?

MAYOR NAGIN: You know, Tim, that’s one of the things that will be debated. There has never been a catastrophe in the history of New Orleans like this. There has never been any Category 5 storm of this magnitude that has hit New Orleans directly. We did the things that we thought were best based upon the information that we had. Sure, here was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren’t available.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Mayor, if you read the city of New Orleans’ comprehensive emergency plan– and I’ve read it and I’ll show it to you and our viewers–it says very clearly, “Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.”

It was your responsibility. Where was the planning? Where was the preparation? Where was the execution?

MAYOR NAGIN: The planning was always in getting people to higher ground, getting them to safety. That’s what we meant by evacuation. Get them out of their homes, which–most people are under sea level. Get them to a higher ground and then depending upon our state and federal officials to move them out of harm’s way after the storm has hit.

MR. RUSSERT: But in July of this year, one month before the hurricane, you cut a public service announcement which said, in effect, “You are on your own.” And you have said repeatedly that you never thought an evacuation plan would work. Which is true: whether you would exercise your obligation and duty as mayor or that–and evacuate people, or you believe people were on their own?

[...]MR. RUSSERT: Since 2002, the federal government has given New Orleans $18 million to plan and prepare for events like this. How was that money spent?

MAYOR NAGIN: It’s my understanding that most of the money–I’ve only been in office about three years. So we’ve mainly used most of the money that we get from the federal government to try and deal with levee protection and the coordination of getting people to safety. That’s primarily what we use the money for.

Either way it’s obvious the concern was that the water could flow over the levee due to the winds and amount of water. EVERYONE sighed with relief that first day because everyone thought they had dodged a bullet, but then the actual BREACH occurred.

The best post I have seen yet comes from Wizbang who had a local engineer at the scene the day of the disaster:

I invite you to look through our Katrina archives from the beginning – you can learn a lot about what actually happened and when. Wizbang was in the unique position to have one of our bloggers, Paul – an engineer by trade, who just so happened to live in New Orleans. That provided us with a unique local angle on the story.

On August 27, 2005 Paul noted everything discussed in the briefings seen on the AP video and more. How did he know this? Well for starters the entire New Orleans area had avoided a similar fate in 2004 when it looked like they were headed for a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane (Andrew). The Katrina being discussed in the AP video is the monster Category 5 version of Katrina that was bearing down directly on New Orleans.

And that’s where the dishonesty in the AP story really lies. Contrary to popular belief New Orleans DID NOT take the brunt of Katrina. The Gulf Coast in Mississippi had that honor. As it veered east of New Orleans the force that Katrina hit the New Orleans area with was the equivalent of a Category 1 (or possibly Category 2) hurricane. On the video those officials are discussing a direct hit of a Category 5 storm, just as Paul was. A Category 5 storm didn’t hit New Orleans…

When the President said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” he probably should have been more specific for the casual arm-chair quarterbacking of the left. What he should have said was, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees in New Orleans from a Category 1 hurricane, since the levees were built to withstand the storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane.”

On August 29, 2005 I noted from U.S. Army Corp of Engineers data that the levees did not top. Less than 24 hours later Paul noted that New Orleans was 80% underwater and was for all intents and purposes destroyed.

What changed in the interim? We all know now that the levees were not topped, they crumbled in many spots (most of which were less than a decade old) were they could not withstand the surge they were designed to contain. As Paul noted November 11, 2005, Katrina did not flood New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did.

Absolutely no one in the AP story mentions the possibility that monumental incompetence, generations of corruptions, and shoddy engineering would doom New Orleans even if it did manage to avoid a direct hit…

Puts a little more context into a obvious hit piece by the AP doesn’t it?

One other thing. Who leaked this stuff? Heeere Brownie Brownie Heeere.

Other’s Blogging:

• Newsbusters
• Macsmind
• Say Anything
• Expose The Left
• The Kellino Zone
• RightWinged

Either way it’s obvious the concern was that the water could flow over the levee due to the winds and amount of water. EVERYONE sighed with relief that first day because everyone thought they had dodged a bullet, but then the actual BREACH occurred.

Mayor Nagin really needs bite the big one. Now he is whining about the Hotels in his city:

In a brewing dispute over next year’s Mardi Gras, the hotel and tourism industry on Wednesday spoke out against Mayor Ray Nagin’s suggestion that hotels donate a portion of their profits from Mardi Gras to help refugees return to the city.

Darrius Gray, the head of the Greater New Orleans & Lodging Association, belittled Nagin’s suggestion, saying hotels have been losing money since Hurricane Katrina and are in no position to hand out money.

“Profits are hard to come by these days to tell you the truth,” Gray said.

[...]The mayor also said the city’s hotels could do more for the refugees scattered throughout the country by putting aside a quarter of their rooms for refugees.

Gray said hotels are doing their part already and that between 25 percent and 30 percent of hotel rooms are occupied by people with Federal Emergency Management Agency housing vouchers.

J. Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, lashed out at the mayor for suggesting that the tourism and hospitality industry has not done enough to help the city recover.

Perry said hotels played a key role in the early days after Katrina hit when they were able to provide housing to recovery workers by bringing in potable water and generators.

“Many of the hoteliers were on the ground when water was lapping down Canal Street and parts of Poydras (Street), and I’ll tell you, they’ll be here forever,” Perry said.

Perry attacked Nagin for what he called his “fractured message.” He challenged Nagin to send a more positive message to the country about the viability of holding Mardi Gras and enjoying the city for its touristic value.

“There’s frankly no more patriotic message in America than to come and enjoy the most unusual, authentic, historic, walkable city on this planet — New Orleans,” Perry said.

Nagin is definately stuck on stupid. All they care about is getting those New Orleans residents back so they can win the election they put off. Day in and day out that is all these two, Nagin & Blanco, talk about.

I guess this kind of stuff is inbred into the liberals. Freely spend other peoples money.

These people have got to be some of the most ignorant people on the planet:

WASHINGTON – Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust.

Holy bejesus are they stupid. As Iawhawk points out, this is a concentration camp:

If you don’t know what the above picture is, it’s bales of human hair found in Auschwitz

The children of Auschwitz

The comparison is inappropriate, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla. ?Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed,? Miller told the survivors.

?They died from abject neglect,? retorted community activist Leah Hodges. ?We left body bags behind… The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die.?

It appears all the intelligent human beings were able to evacuate the city because if you watched any of these proceedings yesterday you get the feeling that those left behind were grade school dropouts.

This kind of thing makes me so freakin angry, as you can tell. The gall of these people to compare themselves to those in concentration camps. I’m sorry, my wallet is closed for these people now. They deserve NOTHING. All the proceedings did was prove to the world the result of decades of liberal entitlement. NOTHING is owed to these idiots.

Is it a coincidence we are not hearing this kind of crap from those in Mississippi, Alabama, & Florida? Nope. You only hear this coming from this corrupt state who has made entitlement an artform.

?No one is going to tell me it wasn?t a race issue,? said New Orleans evacuee Patricia Thompson, 53, who is now living in College Station, Texas. ?Yes, it was an issue of race. Because of one thing: when the city had pretty much been evacuated, the people that were left there mostly was black.?

Hmm, why let some facts get in the way, facts such as:

(St. Gabriel, LA) — Analysis of the people killed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita shows a nearly even split along race lines and gender. Medical examiners say of the more then one thousand victims, about half are white and half are black. About half of the people killed were men, about half were women. In all, the morgue set up to process bodies after the hurricane has recorded one-thousand-90-deaths. Of those, less than five-hundred have been returned to next of kin. Officials are still finding bodies.

Want another great quote from these idiots?

The military took them to an evacuation point on a highway where they spent the night, awakening to a “bunch of hard red necks scowling and growling at us in military uniforms … pointing guns at us and treating us worse than prisoners of war,” she said.

Sigh.

Finally I will leave you with this simple fact, it appears we, the taxpayer, are still footing the bill for these whiners:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying an estimated $3 million a day for nearly 50,000 hotel rooms for hurricane victims. The agency had set a Dec. 1 deadline for moving families out of hotels and into more permanent housing, but later extended the deadline to Jan. 7.

The hotel program has cost the agency at least $300 million since Katrina hit on Aug. 29, followed by Hurricane Rita on Sept. 24.