The Weak In Rock

This was forwarded to a mailing list I subscribe too. Just read it.

Everyone,

I just returned from my first trip to Louisiana this
weekend since Katrina. I spent the entire trip back
trying to decide if I wanted to tell you all about
what is happening down there, because honestly if I
had the choice, I would choose not to know. But in
the end, I figured e-mail you all was better than
talking to each of you on the phone and over e-mail.

It is beyond what you can imagine… it’s hell on
earth. I flew into Baton Rouge, which sits about 80
miles northwest of New Orleans, and the city is
destroyed, but not by the storm. There are over
750,000 refuges from New Orleans in Baton Rouge.
People are camping on the side of the roads, in their
cars if they have them, and all over the LSU campus.
The first thing you notice is how outraged everyone
is. The people of Baton Rouge don’t want us here.
There seems to be no plan for the New Orleaneans once
they are dropped off in Baton Rouge, and everyone is
confused, horrified, or worse. They know this is
potentially a permanent situation, or at least the way
it will be for the next several months, and it is safe
to say they are as scared as the homeless and
exhausted refuges that litter their streets.

My sister and I rented four houses in Houma,
Louisiana, which is about 50 miles south of Baton
Rouge or about 30 miles west of New Orleans. We spent
the weekend moving our family there, then our friends,
and then in the end, people we met that had no other
options. When I left, we had perhaps forty people
with another twenty on the way. It is an amazing
thing to see: your best friends, your family, and
everyone in between huddled on floorboards, makeshift
beds, and sleeping bags. It is truly like a nuclear
bomb hit our city, and we are doing everything we can
just to keep everyone housed, fed, and with water.

Saturday morning, I decided to go into New Orleans.
There were far too many people from our home
unaccounted for, but beyond that, New Orleans is part
of everything that I am; it’s more than a city to
those of us who call it home. It’s part of your
family, and with the stories of looting, flooding, and
complete inability of the government to make the
matter better, it was as if a family member was being
slowly killed. I was told by everyone it was
impossible to get in and I would be arrested for
trying, but I’m sure you call imagine how little that
did to deter me.

There is no way to get into the city. The roads that
are open are being used to bring people out, and no
traffic is headed into the city. I had a rental car,
and I started to drive the 30 miles on backroads that
I guessed wouldn’t be flooded. I made it about half
way before there was no way to get into the city by
car. I loaded up a backpack with as much water as I
could carry, two packs of breakfast bars, three
canisters of bug spray, and an extra pair of shoes.
Then I started walking.

>From there, it was hell on earth.

First, there is the climate. It is almost 90 degrees,
and the humidity plus the still water everywhere has
made the swamp come alive with bugs. Trying to
describe the mosquitos is almost impossible. Do you
know the sound of the wind in the north when a
blizzard is happening? The “whirring” sound? That is
the sound this many bugs make. You have to wear long
sleeve shirts and pants, and you are drenched with
sweat because of the heat.

The first group of people I met were very friendly. I
traded my ipod for a kid’s dirt bike so I could make
better time, and they gave me some extra water. They
did their best to warn me it wasn’t safe to head into
the city, but they didn’t argue when I said there were
people we couldn’t find. They warned me about what
neighborhoods to avoid, and they said beyond
everything else, it was critical to stay away from the
police. They would force you to leave by putting you
on a bus destined for who knows where, and if you
resisted, they’d shoot you. It was the first I saw of
a constant epidemic: the police and the government are
considered absolute enemies by Katrina survivors. At
first, I tried not to judge and simply considered that
shortsighted, but over the next two days, I started to
understand where it came from.

I got into the outskirts of the city by about 2pm…
an upscale neighborhood called “Metaire,” where most
of the money of New Orleans lives. To even get that
far had already involved about half a mile of
swimming. There is no way I can get you to understand
just how destroyed everything is. It’s not just
underwater - it’s more that the swamps have risen over
New Orleans. There are snakes and alligators
everywhere, and the more you see, the more you realize
the city isn’t going to be livable for who knows how
long.

And then there are the bodies. I first started seeing
them as I crossed from Metaire into what is called
“mid city.” Have you ever been to Jazz Fest? The
neighborhood you drive through to get there and the
fairgrounds are called “mid city.” It was the first
place where I saw them. Before this weekend, I had
only seen a few dead bodies in my entire life: traffic
accidents, I once witnessed a shooting, and then
funerals. I don’t know how many dead people I saw
this weekend. Some have been pushed against dry spots
by what I am assuming are rescue workers. Others are
just floating in the water. Then there are all the
houses with red marks on them, meaning there is
someone dead inside. The most horrifying part of all
of it is what happens when a body is floating in the
water for two or three days. It’s barely recognizable
as a person. When you see one, it is riddled with
mosquitos and who knows what else.

The other thing you have to understand is people are
still everywhere. Any idea the media may have given
you about a city wide evacuation is insane. I found
hundreds if not thousands of people in all the
different neighborhoods, and they have no intention of
leaving. First and foremost, they have nowhere to go.
And having come from Baton Rouge, the people that did
get evacuated are simply unloaded from the busses,
told loose plans of food that is coming, and told to
hold tight and someone will come up with a plan. It’s
chaos. Second, they don’t want to leave. They don’t
trust they will ever be let back in, and they
certainly are not going to allow their homes to be
pillaged by the people crafty enough not to get kicked
out. Finally, they just don’t believe the argument
that the city will be unsafe and riddled with disease.
The people still in New Orleans are our uneducated
and angry masses. You know the people of the world
that “don’t beleive” in AIDS, who thinks the
government is out to get them, and don’t understand
why they should ever get jobs when unemployment pays
just fine? Try convincing them typhoid fever is real.
But beyond that, they are armed and angry, they have
already survived five straight days of no food and no
water, and they don’t believe those who haven’t gotten
them food or water are going to find a place for them
to live. I know it sounds ignorant on their part, but
can you imagine it? I was there on Saturday, five
days after the storm, and still no one had been told
where to go for food or water. People are surviving
by breaking into each other’s homes. It’s chaos, and
it’s dangerous, and there doesn’t seem to be a plan to
fix anything any time soon.

My main goal was to go to the homes of family and
friends and make sure everyone was safely out of the
city. I grew up in the 9th Ward - it’s one of the
lowest income areas in the city, and it is also the
sight of the first levi break. For me to get to my
childhood home, I would have needed to dive down
underwater just to get to the roof. I went to the
second house we lived in after that. It’s roof had
been torn off, and there was a body floating not fifty
feet away from the front porch. I wish I could say
the journey to friends’ houses fared better, but I
can’t. Most of the homes were either completely
submerged, sitting in ten to fifteen feet of water, or
just not standing anymore. I found three people I
knew in all, and they set off for Houma that
afternoon.

Then I started to explore the city. Like I said, it
is hell on earth. The people are furious. They feel
as if they have been abandoned. You have to
understand, there is no power anywhere. The rescue
crews are going through New Orleans proper, not all
the neighborhoods where people live. Most of the city
doesn’t even think there is a rescue effort underway
at all. It became clear to me the one thing people
need is communication, and in the absence of
communication, fear takes people over. I never
realized how powerful the raw ability of communicating
is. There is nothing more important to restoring
order than giving the leaders an ability to get
messages to everyone.

I know you have all heard about people firing on
helicopters. I’m certainly not saying it is right,
but after being there, I understand. For five days,
helicopters were flying overhead, but none of them are
even so much as dropping water or food down for
people. They fly by using load speakers saying that
anyone found looting or stealing will be arrested, and
those are the helicopters that are followed by
gunshots, from what I saw. I don’t know who is
controlling the message being given to everyone, but
they need to be replaced. The only government group
anyone has seen are the police with sawed off shotguns
threatening to arrest everyone who is walking around
on the streets. Everyone is scared about their
future, about their friends and family, and about
their city, and fear leads people to do amazing
things. Like I said, I’m not saying firing guns at
the helicopters is the right thing to do by any means,
but after being down there, I understand.

When I left, I thought I was going to see the 3rd
world, but it isn’t the third world. It’s a state of
war. People don’t even know who they are fighting,
but they know they are at war. Twice, I had to bike
at full speed away from gangs that came at me, and
before I left the city, I had my cash, my backpack
with my food and change of clothes, and my camera
stolen from me. It’s like a family member of mine has
been possessed by a confused, frightened, angry force
that can’t be stopped. Every interaction with someone
who is supposed to be helping, like the helicopters
flying overhead or the police barking threats only
makes it worse.

When I left for New Orleans, I thought I wanted to
help the people I couldn’t find. But once there, I
realized I was just trying to feed my selfish vanity
of wanting to see the city in turmoil. If it was
flooded and there was chaos, I wanted to see it and be
a part of it. It was as if I was one of those
idealistic kids who wanted to head off to war to seek
glory. I’ll never forget this weekend my entire life,
and I’ll spend years wishing I could. You just can’t
describe what it is like to see your hometown that you
love, that is a part of everything you are, with dead
bodies floating in the street and the people you
consider “your people” firing guns at strangers and
hating everyone and everything. It was one of the
worst things I have ever felt or seen. It’s a war
being fought against no one.

But not all is ruined. I was thrilled to see the
French Quarter, the Garden District, and the central
business district were all ok. The shipping yards
along Tchapitoulas were also undamaged. It is enough
to make you believe the city can be salvaged.

I got back to Houma Sunday morning, and that is where
the real work began. We’ve been trying to construct
mosquito nets around the houses. Jjust using screen
doors and screen windows isn’t enough, because of how
many people we have living there. Opening the door
for ten seconds every hour can make the house
unlivable. We managed to get a generator going, and
we are using it to boil water, keep food cold, and
charge up non-working cell phones (we can make calls
out of state, but we can’t receive any phone calls
with in-state phone numbers).

So many of you have asked what you can do, and I am
sorry to sound pessimistic, but I just don’t know. I
wish I could say “donate money to the Red Cross,” but
I didn’t see the Red Cross doing anything. The entire
time I was there, I only saw Jesse Jackson and his
buses, a huge congregation of busses from Baltimore
(for some reason) bringing food and water, and private
companies like Dysani, Evian, and K-Mart bringing
supplies. The more you look around, the more you
realize it is the private sector that is the only
group that is doing anything. I genuinely believe
private companies are going to do more for us than our
own government, but I’m ignorant to the entire
picture, I only know what I saw, so I don’t want to
judge anyone.

If you want to help, all I can say is there are
different levels of help. There are 1,000,000 people
that need homes and some semblance of a future. My
sister, mother, aunt, and I are going to do our best
to make a home for people in Houma. We don’t need
money, but we do need bodies. There is just too much
to do.

I’m going back on Thursday, and I hope to figure out
an address for people to ship things to us. Right
now, what we need more than anything else are:

- light sleeping bags (not designed for the cold)

- battery chargeable power tools

- mosquito netting by the square yard

- CELL PHONES with out of Louisiana phone numbers are
CRITICAL

We have enough breakfast bars and bottled water for
now, and there is no power for preparing food as it
is. There are stores to the north that can sell food
once we have the power to make it, so that isn’t
needed, even though you would think it is.

I know this sounds crazy, but if there could be anyway
to make an outdoor movie theatre powered off a
generator, it would do more good than you can imagine.
New Orleaneans are social, and one of the biggest
problems we have is not being able to be with each
other… share the stress and find a way to deal with
it together. It’s being isolated from each other that
is really destroying people’s will.

If you can, please consider opening up your home to
people that need one. But as these people are
strangers, I don’t pretend it is something everyone
will find comfortable. If you can, there is an
amazing site setup to help you register as a host
(http://www.shareyourhome.org/).

Thank you to you all for everything you will do in the
next coming months.

If we had a parlimentary government in this country we could expect a vote of no-confidence in this inept Administration. Instead, we’re stuck with ‘em.

Here’s some more details on what’s going on in NOLA from Boing Boing. Here’s my favorite quote:

This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Is it too early to see if we can find some Army generals to stage a coup?

Wired has a great article from Bruce Schneier today about the futility of trying to defend our nation from dangers borrowed from movie and TV plotlines.

Bruce gets to the heart of what has been wrong with America’s response to the 9/11/01 attacks since 9/12/01. This sums it up in a nutshell:

One problem is that our nation’s leaders are giving us what we want. Party affiliation notwithstanding, appearing tough on terrorism is important. Voting for missile defense makes for better campaigning than increasing intelligence funding. Elected officials want to do something visible, even if it turns out to be ineffective.

It’s like the famous sentiment from the early days of the US Space Program - it made no scientific sense and there was no necessity to send men into space in the 1960s. None. But in order to get funding for the program NASA had to send men into space. The people wanted Buck Rogers, so we wasted billions on stuff that gave the people Buck Rogers and taught us very little about outer space, other than that it is a very dangerous place to send people.

Terrorism is nothing more than organized crime. The way it should be fought was the way that the big organized crime rings of the 1920s and 1930s were fought, with police. Making people take off their shoes before they board planes thwarts one potential risk. But because the criminals who want to blow up our airplanes know that we’re checking shoes they’re not going to bother with that angle, so ultimately it’s a waste of energy.

Another good pull quote from Schneier’s article:

We need to defend against the broad threat of terrorism, not against specific movie plots. Security is most effective when it doesn’t make arbitrary assumptions about the next terrorist act. We need to spend more money on intelligence and investigation: identifying the terrorists themselves, cutting off their funding, and stopping them regardless of what their plans are. We need to spend more money on emergency response: lessening the impact of a terrorist attack, regardless of what it is. And we need to face the geopolitical consequences of our foreign policy and how it helps or hinders terrorism.

Translation: We need to do police work. We also need to take seriously the blowback implications of our foreign policy.

Ok, this made me laugh… and I needed it.

Government Relief Workers Mosey In To Help
Enlarge ImageKatrina

FEMA representatives call out to survivors, “Show us your tits for emergency rations!”

NEW ORLEANS—Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, leading a detachment of 7,500 relief workers, moseyed on down to New Orleans Monday afternoon. “Well, I do declare, it’s my job to see if any of these poor folks need any old thing,” Brown said from his command rocker on the command post porch, adding, “Mighty hot day, ain’t it?” Follow-up teams of emergency relief workers are expected to begin ambling into the Gulf Coast region as early as this weekend. “They should be getting the trucks good and warmed up anytime now, and they’ll be cruising into town just as soon as all the reservists stroll in,” said Brown, who is currently at his desk awaiting offers of food, water, and evacuation buses to roll in from “somewhere or other.”

I’ve always liked Keith Olbermann. Now I’m positive he’s my favorite talking head.

Watch the video of his “editorial smackdown” (thanks to Daily Kos for that phrase) that gets right to the heart of why everyone in this country, not just the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, should be really pissed right now.

Or if you prefer, read a transcript here on the Daily Kos.

Thanks a many to Boing Boing for bringing this to my attention.

Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, needs to go. His response to the Hurricane Katrina crisis has been pathetic. He has repeatedly tried to excuse his incompetence by claiming he simply did not know the severity of the hurricane and than no one knew that the type of devastation that has occured was even possible. These are easily refutable lies.

Beyond his ineptitude in the face of this crisis we have to consider that if he could not handle a disaster that we had plenty of warning about (hurricanes don’t just appear and squish a city - they take days to form and are tracked constantly) what the hell would this nitwit do with a disaster, natural or otherwise, that occured without warning. What if the levees in New Orleans hadn’t been breached by a giant storm that was on its way with four days’ warning? What if they had instead been breached on purpose by some kook with a political agenda?

If you want to know how to get ahold of the White House to register your displeasure with Michael Brown and join me in demanding his ouster you can find all the contact information you might want here.

Here’s a list of bungles in NOLA on the part of FEMA over the last week. Gotta love it.

My favorite is the USS Bataan just sitting off the coast filled with hospital beds, helicopters and sailors willing to help in any way they can - oh, and also the capacity to make 100,000 gallons of fresh clean water a day - and basically going unused because apparently no one at FEMA thinks any of these things are needed.

Pardon my language, but what a bunch of fucking morons.

I have to believe they’re morons. If I allow myself, for so much as one minute, to believe that they’re doing this on purpose then I’m going to have a cardiovascular incident. Incompetence is at least understandable. It’s bad, and someone needs to lose their job over it, at the very least, but if you’re a nincompoop and you fuck up then, well that’s really not a surprise. Is it? But if you’re fully capable of handling the task at hand and you botch it to this degree… well then you should be shot. And not somewhere nice. No quick clean shot to the head. Nope. One bullet in each kneecap, at close range. Yeah, that’ll do.

More from Andrew Sullivan’s blog - an emailer to Andrew completely nails the essence of what’s wrong in NOLA…

“I’ve considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn’t be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I’m probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.

But after watching what’s happening in New Orleans-an American city that I’ve loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can’t ever vote for these people again.

Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.

And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, “Right on,” because some of that money’s bound to fall on my head.

Well, something else would fall on my head first.

I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that’s the job. We have A and B teams and I’m a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I’ve drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.

Here’s what these people would do for me.

They would leave me there to die.

Look at the facts. There’s no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it’s flammable.

In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that’s no choice at all.

I’m not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I’m talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can’t tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they’re piling up bodies in the street median.

We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.

A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, “All the people who weren’t bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things.”

There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they’ve lost everything, have no guidance, and don’t want to be shot by a looter.

There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.

In the UNITED STATES.

Some people say that you can’t hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, “I want you to make sure this never happens again,” it was not meant to be specific to “no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss.” It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could.

And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we’re sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that’s all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it’s obvious that they can’t.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

No. It wouldn’t. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I’d be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.

But one thing sure would have been different.

They wouldn’t have had a whole week to sort it out and know what’s coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, “Hey, what if…”

And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.

I’ve had it. I’m done. And if the other bunch of assholes can’t figure out that what’s important is that babies don’t starve to death here (and I’m not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm’s way, we’ll get rid of them too. And so on.

Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one’s in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor’s performance, or bragging that we’ve sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that “we had no idea the levees would break.”

Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.

No more.”

It’s a given that Dubya can’t turn back the clock and undo the stupidity of his government with regard to Hurricane Katrina, so since he can do fuck-all to fix things he may as well get one thing right - Fire FEMA Director Michael Brown. Why? Just have a look at these quotes CNN has collected over the last few days that show exactly how out of touch and incompetent the man is.

Andrew Sullivan opines in the Time of London thusly:

Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning in nearby New Orleans, or the dying and dead in devastated Mississippi? The vice-president was nowhere to be seen. The secretary of state was observed shopping for shoes in New York City. The president had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans’ levees.

Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn’t help coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two.

And I’ll opine in my own way -

This is likely to be a pretty unpopular sentiment, both with so-called liberals and so-called conservatives (although I’m more likely to find support in their ranks for it):

Our government is too concerned with the world outside of our borders and too few resources are expended on people in need right in our own backyard. The Katrina disaster would have been far less tragic if a third of the population of New Orleans wasn’t living in abject poverty. Dare I say it? Third World-style poverty.

I remember keenly my first visit to New Orleans a little over ten years ago. I was smitten with the city and started to wonder what it would be like to live there. I bought a paper and took a look at the apartments for rent. I was stoked at the low rents (especially compared to San Francisco, where I lived at the time). I started to think, “I could do this.” Then I looked at the help wanted ads in the same paper. There was nary a job listed that paid more than minimum wage. Suddenly those rents didn’t look so reasonable.

New Orleans is viewed by most of America as a tourist destination. Most people are unaware that it’s one of the most crime-riddled cities in the US. They’re equally unaware that the entire gulf-coast region is economically impoverished in the extreme. The question begs - if the US government had focused its considerable resources and energies at alleviating such squalor and poverty would over 100,000 people have found themselves virtually trapped when Katrina hit town?

Here’s the really unpopular bit - One simply has to ask, if our government wasn’t utterly committed to deep involvement in the affairs of other nations would the 9/11/01 attacks have even happened? How about the Oklahoma City bombing?

I concede that we live in a world in which throwing up the barricades and shutting out the rest of the world is simply impractical. But why does the United States Government need to be as deeply involved in the affairs of other nations? I’m not being facetious. I’m serious and I’d really like to see if anyone has a valid answer.

Rapper Kanye West said what needed to be said on NBC’s Hurricane fundraiser on Friday night.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people!

Read all about it here and here.

I also like that the Washington Post says something that’s needed to be said for a long time too:

(Mike) Myers is apparently as dumb as his Alfalfa hair…

In all seriousness folks, while I understand people decrying anyone who tries to use a national tragedy for political capital, as they say in NOLA, facts is facts. The federal government’s and George W. Bush’s response to this situation was pathetic. Things that should have been happening on Monday only started happening on Thursday after every press outlet in the country was heaping criticism on Bush, the Federal Government and the Republican Party.

One has to wonder if Kayne West is right. I tend to think it has more to do with the fact that Bush and the GOP are financially beholden to the religious right wing who were ready and willing on Monday to say that Hurricane Katrina was some kind of God-driven vengeance upon the sinners of New Orleans. Since Bush readily identifies himself with evangelical Christians maybe he agreed with them that God smote New Orleans for being a bevy of sin.

If there is a God that even remotely resembles the Christian idea of one then these fundamentalist folks are in for a surprise when they’re judged insufficiently compassionate and overly judgemental by their God. They’ve apparently skipped the bit in the Bible where God says that he alone may judge and condemn.

Links courtesy of the Druge Report.