Quote of the day: To celebrate the Katrina anniversary, what do you say we line the entire Bush administration up in front of a firing squad?

"Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: No one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: No one can find it.

"That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: You have to have copies of it. Lots of copies--in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work."

--from Greg Palast's account of the TV report he's done for Democracy Now on the devastation in New Orleans--from Katrina and afterward (the show transcript is here)


I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty darned tired of constantly thinking the absolute worst it seems possible to think of the behavior and motivations of the mutant life forms who make up the Bush administration and then finding out that the reality is worse, much worse--viler, more inhuman, more savagely ignorant, more ruthlessly incompetent, more psychotic, without any possible question criminally culpable.

Greg Palast [right] has done an investigative report for Democracy Now on the destruction of New Orleans and the aftermath, and it turns out that almost the least of it is that the Bush administration paid half a million dollars for an evacuation plan that never existed, perhaps because the money was paid to a bunch of droolers with no credentials except their history of Republican campaign contributions.

You'll also meet the top hurricane expert whose explicit (and accurate) disaster warnings were expressly ignored, and whose job has been threated for talking about it. And you'll learn that the administration had early knowledge of the breach of the levees, with pictures, information that no one "in the know" could be bothered to share with the people on the ground who were actually trying to cope with the catastrophe that was unfolding while the president farted.

I think maybe it's time to just line the whole crowd up in front of a firing squad and celebrate the huckuva job they've done with, er, fireworks.

Meanwhile the mainstream media debate whether Chimpy the Prez can regain his former "image" as a "leader." This would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.