Thousands of furious evacuees sweltering for hours on traffic-choked freeways Thursday put a stain on what had been a generally successful response by state and local governments faced with back-to-back weather emergencies in Texas.


"This was not in the plan," County Judge Robert Eckels said, turning away from the lectern after a news briefing dominated by questions about the gridlock that resulted from the evacuation ahead of Hurricane Rita.

For the most part, the officials didn't offer much analysis of what might have gone wrong. They focused instead on the scramble to keep thousands of motorists from what Mayor Bill White called a potential "death trap" should the storm strike while they were stranded on the road.

But Brazoria County Judge John Willy criticized other local officials for calling for voluntary evacuation when Brazoria was under a mandatory evacuation order. That, he said, put a lot of cars on the dedicated evacuation routes and prevented people from the south from getting out.

Gov. Rick Perry said state and local officials are trying to move more than 1.5 million people out of the storm's path, and said that despite the traffic snags, he was certain that anyone who wants to evacuate will be out of the Gulf Coast area before tropical storm winds begin to kick up at midmorning today.

"If you're in the storm's path, you need to git gone. You need to be on the road, moving out of the storm's path," he said. "Those few hardheaded ones out there who are going to ride this thing out, don't expect there to be a lot of support in those areas."

"This evacuation is historic in its proportion," Perry said.

The observation by Perry and others — that problems were inevitable in any endeavor to move more than a million people over a few routes under an emergency time frame — didn't stop criticism about how officials planned for, and implemented, the exodus.

Chief among the complaints is that officials at all levels didn't appreciate — or at least articulate — just how crowded roads would get.

Add to that the fact that the Texas Department of Transportation seemed flat-footed in effecting a contraflow plan to ease congestion by moving some outbound traffic into inbound lanes.

Why, some asked, didn't the agency time the lane reversals to coincide with the mandatory evacuations of low-lying neighborhoods and areas threatened by storm surge?

"Why wasn't TxDOT on the same page?" asked Houston City Councilman M.J. Khan, stuck for hours trying to get his elderly mother-in-law to the airport. "Yesterday morning, that should have been part of the plan."

TxDOT said its effort was hampered by the complicated nature of the task and a lack of personnel.

Officials also faced criticism because they didn't plan, or didn't plan adequately, for making sure enough gasoline was available for tens of thousands of vehicles crawling through summer heat.

"It has been completely predictable. You try to shove all that traffic onto a freeway system, and it ain't going to work. There's only so much roadway," said Bill King, a lawyer and former Kemah mayor who's long said the region wasn't adequately prepared for a large-scale evacuation.

"All this about the running out of gas? Well, duh," King said.

I picked up the phone tonight and the man on the other end said his name was Congressman Scott Garrett. I almost didn't believe it. I asked him twice if he was kidding. He confirmed it with some agitation, and then it dawned on me that he didn't like the letter I wrote in today's Express-Times blasting him for voting against Katrina hurricane relief. He was pissed. He started explaining to me that the reason he voted that way was because there was no oversight of the relief agencies, and if I had heard his remarks on the floor of the House I would have known that. Like I said. Pissed.

He asked me to write another letter saying that I now understand why he voted the way he did. He said he doesn't want his family going around thinking he's a "heartless son of a gun." But the tone of his phone call (pissed), and the fact that he called me at my home, doesn't lead me altogether away from that conclusion. Here's why:

All I really said was that he voted against the Katrina relief bill, and I expressed my opinion about it. That it sounded like a bad idea. I didn't lie about anything, and the cold-heartedness I deduced from the vote is consistent with past behaviors.

I know. I know. This is an upsetting time for everyone. You could tell that in the tone of my letter. And, to his credit, I could feel it in his voice that Mr. Garrett truly cares about the victims who are suffering on the Gulf Coast right now. But, it's not a time to be less rigorous in the scrutiny of our politicians. There is never such a time. He's a professional, responsible public figure. He made a decision. He says he understands oversight. Let's oversee him. Let him be accountable to the media. Let him explain it to the public.Oh yeah, I forgot. He's the guy that hides from debates.

The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president's hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because "studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free"; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides "free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill" to poor teenagers.

Along the way, they'd find a way to punish -- or simply eliminate -- some of their enemies, real and imagined. They'd cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Of course, you can't balance the budget on the backs of PBS viewers, grad students and other outside-the-mainstream liberals alone. So the Republican plan also calls for "rational reforms to Defense and Homeland Security." Does this mean cutting weapons systems at the expense of big defense corporations? Well, no. But it does mean closing schools for the children of soldiers, cutting grants for local responders and offering National Guard members the "option" to purchase a less comprehensive healthcare plan.

The unprecedented flight from the flood-prone Houston area left clogged highways at a near standstill, frustrating hundreds of thousands of people whose cars and tempers were overheating.

"It can't get much worse, 100 yards an hour," steamed Willie Bayer, 70, who was heading out of Houston and trying to get to Sulphur Springs in far northeast Texas. "It's frustrating bumper-to-bumper."

The first rain bands were expected before nightfall Friday with the full fury of Rita expected into Saturday. Forecasters warned of the possibility of a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet, battering waves and rain of up to 15 inches along the Texas and western Louisiana coast.

Two communities that may bear the brunt of the storm are Beaumont, which is a petrochemical, shipbuilding and port city of about 114,000; and Port Arthur, a city of about 58,000 that's home to industries including oil, shrimping and crawfishing.

Texas officials scrambled to reroute several inbound highways to accommodate outbound traffic, but many people were waiting so long they ran out of gas and were forced to park.

"We know you're out there," Houston Mayor Bill White said of the congestion that extended well into Louisiana. "We understand there's been fuel shortages."

Texas Army National Guard trucks were escorted by police to directly provide motorists with gasoline. The state was also working to get more than 200,000 gallons of gas to fuel-starved stations in the Houston area.

By late Thursday night, the traffic was at least moving slowly, but was still backed up for about 100 miles in what White called "one of the largest mass evacuations in American history."

A bus filled with 45 elderly Hurricane Rita evacuees from the Houston area caught fire early Friday on gridlocked Interstate 45, leaving at least 24 dead, according to local officials.

"There were 45 souls on the bus ... at this point we believe we have about half accounted for," Dallas County Sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Don Peritz. He said early indications were that a mechanical problem caused the blaze and that passengers' oxygen tanks caught fire.

Separately, the Dallas County Fire Marshal's office told NBC News that 24 were killed in the tragedy.

Engulfed
The bus was engulfed with flames, causing a 17-mile backup on a freeway that was already heavily congested with evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

“It burst into flames with black smoke coming from the bus, and then we saw the fire,” witness Ashley Donald told Houston television station KTRK.

The Dallas television station, citing the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, said the bus was carrying senior citizens from Bellaire, a southwest Houston enclave.

By early Friday morning, the bus was reduced to a blackened, burned-out shell, surrounded by numerous police cars and ambulances.

After more than an hour of solemn ceremony naming Rep. Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, as the 2007-08 House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium in the House chamber last week and told a short story about "unleashing Chang," his "mystical warrior" friend.

Here are Bush's words, spoken before hundreds of lawmakers and politicians:
''Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.

''I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.''

Bush then unsheathed a golden sword and gave it to Rubio as a gift.

''I'm going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior,'' he said, as the crowd roared.

The crowd, however, could be excused for not understanding Bush's enigmatic foray into the realm of Eastern mysticism.

We're here to help.

In a 1989 Washington Post article on the politics of tennis, former President George Bush was quoted as threatening to ''unleash Chang'' as a means of intimidating other players.

The saying was apparently quite popular with Gov. Bush's father, and referred to a legendary warrior named Chang who was called upon to settle political disputes in Chinese dynasties of yore.

The phrase has evolved, under Gov. Jeb Bush's use, to mean the need to fix conflicts or disagreements over an issue. Faced with a stalemate, the governor apparently "unleashes Chang" as a rhetorical device, signaling it's time to stop arguing and start agreeing.

No word on if Rubio will unleash Chang, or the sword, as he faces squabbles in the future.

Even the words are the same. On Iraq, President Bush declared on Feb. 4, 2004, "We will do what it takes. We will not leave until the job is done." On post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, on Sept. 15, he eerily echoed, "We will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes." It was reassuring for the nation to be told by the president in his televised address that he intends to "stay" in the United States and not cut and run. Perhaps a White House speechwriter hit the copy-and-paste function on his computer or the word "stay" simply popped into the president's mind as he contemplated the crisis, straying into improvisation.

The jarring reverberation of repetitive rhetoric suggested a presidency on a feedback loop. Analogies, of course, are imperfect. Bush's speech, which junked the whole of conservative ideology and channeled the spirit of Lyndon Johnson, might be taken as evidence that his frequent trips to New Orleans have worked some voodoo on him. But there are enough elements in common between the catastrophes in Iraq and New Orleans to be able to grasp the underlying similarities in the Bush approach from Gulf to shining Gulf.

Just as the Iraq war was predicated on the distortion, falsification and suppression of intelligence, so was the administration's preparation for Katrina marked by the refusal to register information contrary to its prefabricated beliefs. Bush's censoring and dismissal of science on global warming helped lull him about the growing severity of hurricanes as a consequence. It was a possibility he did not want to know because it ran contrary to his dogmas. But his passivity extended to the eve of Katrina's landfall, when Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, briefed him by teleconference video about the likelihood that the raging storm would breach the levees of New Orleans. Under Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been reorganized from a professionally proficient operation into a political dumping ground, and since 2001 FEMA had been studiously ignoring precise warnings of a potentially disastrous hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Before the invasion of Iraq, Bush refused to listen to senior military commanders that the light force poised for attack would be insufficient to secure the country under occupation. Then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's Senate testimony on the dangers of the Bush planning earned him a publicly humiliating rebuke from then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (since rewarded by elevation to the presidency of the World Bank).

The latest runs of two key computer models, the GFS and GFDL, now indicate that the trough of low pressure that was expected to pick up Rita and pull her rapidly northward through Texas will not be strong enough to do so. Instead, these models forecast that Rita will make landfall near Galveston, penetrate inland between 50 and 200 miles, then slowly drift southwestward for nearly two days, as a high pressure ridge will build in to her north. Finally, a second trough is forecast to lift Rita out of Texas on Tuesday. If this scenario develops, not only will the coast receive catastrophic damage from the storm surge, but interior Texas, including the Dallas/Fort Worth area, might see a deluge of 15 - 30 inches of rain. A huge portion of Texas would be a disaster area. We'll have to wait for the next set of model runs due out by tomorrow morning to know better.

The 7:09 pm eye report from the hurricane hunters found a 897 mb pressure and flight level winds of 161 knots (186 mph). This pressure makes Rita the 3rd strongest Atlantic hurricane of all time. Tonight, Rita will be passing over the Loop Current, a warm eddy of water in the Gulf that aided Katrina's growth to a Category 5 hurricane. Fueled by this pool of deep warm water and an almost ideal upper level wind environment, Rita should continue to intensify until Thursday morning, when she will pass beyond the Loop Current. The eye has shrunk to 20 nm diameter from 25 nm earlier this afternoon. By the time the eye shrinks down to 10 nm, the eyewall will collapse and an eyewall replacement cycle begin, putting an end to this intensification cycle. With potentially another 12 hours to go before this happens, Rita could challenge Gilbert's 888 mb pressure record.

"America is committed to the defense of South Vietnam until an honorable peace can be negotiated," Johnson told the Tennessee Legislature on March 15, 1967. Despite the obstacles to victory, the president said, "We shall stay the course."

After 14 Marines died in a roadside bombing on Aug. 3, Bush declared: "We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. And the job is this: We'll help the Iraqis develop a democracy."

The two wars were waged quite differently even though they shared similar aims.

About 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1967 after a three-year buildup, compared with about 140,000 in Iraq today. Heavy aerial bombing was a primary U.S. strategy in Vietnam while Iraq, after the initial campaign of "shock and awe," has been mainly a ground war. The U.S. negotiated for peace in Vietnam, but there is no single entity with which to negotiate in Iraq.

"The differences are so notable that it would take too long to list them," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld remarked recently.

Knowing the long, painful and divisive Vietnam War ended with an unceremonious U.S. withdrawal and the fall of South Vietnam, administration officials have blanched at comparisons with Iraq. The administration declined to comment on comparisons between the rhetoric of Johnson and Bush.

Johnson's main arguments were much like those Bush has employed: War was justified to protect the U.S. and to encourage freedom everywhere. When faced with mounting losses on the battlefield, both presidents offered the dead as a reason to keep fighting.

"When a war is long-lived and the outcome is not demonstrably positive, the lines of argument available to a president are seriously constrained," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Democrat or Republican, 1960s or early part of the 21st century, you're going to hear a common rhetoric."

South Vietnam, politically unstable because of internal violence and corruption, stumbled toward elections to adopt a constitution and to select officials — not unlike the process Iraq is undergoing.

"Our nation was not born easily. There were times in those years of the 18th century when it seemed as if we might not be born at all," Johnson said in a speech on Aug. 16, 1967.

"Given that background, we ought not to be astonished that this struggle in Vietnam continues," Johnson said. "We ought not to be astonished that that nation, wracked by a war of insurgency and beset by its neighbors to the north, has not already emerged, full-blown, as a perfect model of two-party democracy."

Bush, too, has compared Iraq's difficulties in determining its political future to postcolonial America's.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

[snip]

Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.

"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper."

Is it possible that the President and the Vice President have fallen out? I mean, I’m just asking. But if you remember September 11, 2001 -- and I’m sure you do -- the President had no idea what to do, but the Vice President did. The Vice President took over. He didn’t even consult with the President. He put the President on Air Force One and the President spent the day flying from one airport to another, which was something that even the President eventually understood made him look as if he wasn’t in charge.

Authorities in Texas and Louisiana today are working to get thousands of residents out of the path of Hurricane Rita as the powerful, Category 4 storm picks up strength in the Gulf of Mexico. The military also is redeploying troops and ships in the area -- including many that were helping with Hurricane Katrina recovery -- out of Rita's path and into position to respond quickly.

The 1:53 eye report from the hurricane hunters found a 920 mb pressure and flight level winds of 153 knots (176 mph). These numbers plus the satellite intensity estimates would ordinarily support upgrading Rita to a Category 5 hurricane, but NHC is being conservative, and calling Rita a strong Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph surface winds.

There are two hurricane hunter aircraft in Rita this afternoon. The NOAA hurricane hunters found a central pressure of 934 mb at 11:17 am, and the Air Force hurricane hunters found a central pressure of 923 mb at 1:02pm. This incredible drop of 11 mb in 105 minutes is the fastest pressure fall I can ever recall seeing in a hurricane, and exceeds the 10 mb drop in 100 minutes we saw in Hurricane Charley last year. With an eye diameter of 25 miles, an eyewall replacement cycle is not likely today, and Rita may intensify to a level close to Katrina's strongest point--902 mb.

Ed Schultz, a radio talk show host from Fargo, N.D., and self-proclaimed "America's No. 1 progressive talker" who is carried on radio stations from Los Angeles to Boston, watched from his comfortable lakefront home as thousands struggled to survive in New Orleans.

"We're out water-skiing and enjoying the world…. I said, 'We've got to find some of these families and bring them to Fargo,' " he recalled.

Schultz decided to charter the jet he uses about once a month for his radio show on KFGO-AM (790). It costs about $10,000 a pop, but it's worth it when he and the crew don't feel like driving to appearances in Ann Arbor, Mich., or Sioux Falls, S.D., or don't want to hassle with the delays of commercial flying.

Schultz isn't a high roller — "he's not Oprah," his producer points out — but he does have loyal listeners, and he knows how to get things done. So when it appeared to him that the federal government had dropped the ball, Schultz launched the Adopt a Family of Hurricane Katrina Trust Fund. Then he and his wife, Wendy, hooked up with the Air National Guard 119th Fighter Wing out of Fargo and went down to the Gulf Coast.

Hours later, he called his pilot, Toby McPherson, and said: "Toby, get that jet fired up and come on over and pick me up. We've got to bring home some families."

The NOAA Fisheries Service and the Marine Life Aquarium of Gulfport, Miss., working with a number of other partners, rescued the last four of the eight trained bottlenose dolphins that were swept out of an aquarium tank torn apart by the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. Normally held in captivity, the dolphins don't have the necessary skills to survive on their own. They have survived various injuries and predators and have stayed together since the storm.

On September 10, the team of NOAA marine mammal biologists and aquarium trainers first located the eight dolphins and began providing food and medicine to the animals. Over the course of a week, the team was able to capture four of the weakest dolphins, and has been feeding the others several times a day as they planned and performed the multi-stage rescue. The remaining four dolphins vanished over the weekend. Through reports from the Coast Guard, NOAA Fisheries Service scientists found the dolphins Tuesday morning while doing surveys in a NOAA boat near Biloxi, Miss.

Due to the unclean condition of the water and the difficulty of the rescue, biologists captured the dolphins in stages. The animals were transported to nearby salt-water pools, provided by the U.S. Navy, where they will receive medical care and be evaluated for diseases, including contagious diseases. NOAA Fisheries Service lead veterinarian Dr. Teri Rowles said the dolphins will be kept in quarantine while scientists access their overall health.

"We're pleased we were able to rescue all eight dolphins," said Rowles. "They are now in a situation where full diagnostics can be done and medical care can be provided. The rescue team remains cautiously optimistic that they will recover from this ordeal."

The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas.

Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day.

There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."

[snip]

Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.

The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill.

Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post.

Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses.

Outrage overflowed on Capitol Hill this summer when members of Congress learned that Halliburton's dining halls in Iraq had repeatedly served spoiled food to unsuspecting troops. "This happened quite a bit," testified Rory Mayberry, a former food manager with Halliburton's KBR subsidiary.

But the outrage apparently doesn't end with spoiled food. Former KBR employees and water quality specialists, Ben Carter and Ken May, told HalliburtonWatch that KBR knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq's Euphrates River. One internal KBR email provided to HalliburtonWatch says that, for "possibly a year," the level of contamination at one camp was two times the normal level for untreated water.

"I discovered the water being delivered from the Euphrates for the military was not being treated properly and thousands were being exposed daily to numerous pathogenic organisms," Carter informed HalliburtonWatch.

Carter worked at Camp Ar Ramadi, located 70 miles west of Baghdad in the notoriously violent Sunni Triangle, but he says water contamination problems exist throughout Iraq's military camps. He helped manage KBR's Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit (ROWPU), which is a water treatment system designed to produce potable (drinkable) water from a variety of raw water sources such as lakes, lagoons and rivers. ROWPU is supposed to provide the troops with clean water from Iraq's Euphrates River.

William Granger of KBR Water Quality for Iraq reached this conclusion in an email after investigating Carter's complaint: "Fact: We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated. The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River." Granger admitted that the contamination was "most likely … ongoing through the entire life" of the camp, but that he was "not sure if any attempt to notify the exposed population was ever made."

In a company email last March to his superior, Harold "Mo" Orr, coordinator for Halliburton's health and safety department said, "We have determined that the military (Command Surgeon) has not given any kind of signoff on the military ROWPU (As required by the military SOP) nor has KBR ever inquired about this before. This was only discovered thru the investigation of possible contamination by Ben Carter who is right now in charge of the ROWPU."

Orr's request for further investigation into the matter was overruled by KBR's health, safety and environmental manager, Jay Delahoussaye, who said in an email that the initial health hazard turned out to be "erroneous" and that "corrective measures" were taken and "No KBR personnel were exposed to contaminated water."

But Granger responded with another email, saying it was unclear whether corrective action had been taken. He said it was "highly likely" that someone from KBR finally started chlorinating the water this year, but that "there is no documentation" to confirm it. Nor is there documentation to show KBR is testing the water three times per day as required by the military, Granger said.

Nonetheless, Carter said chlorination is not enough to remedy the problem since raw sewage is routinely dumped less than two miles from the water intake location, in violation of military policy and procedure. "Chlorination of water tanks, while certainly beneficial, is not sufficient protection from parasitic exposure," Carter said in an email to Granger, who is still employed with KBR.

According to Carter, Granger had written a scathing, 21-page report to KBR management about water quality at Ar Ramadi. Carter says the report proves the company's "incompetence and willful negligence" in protecting the water supply.

Kellogg Brown & Root Services Inc. in Arlington, VA received $15 million for Task Order 0020 under its $500 million maximum "emergency response" contract with the US government. DID covered the particulars of that contract on Monday; they set out a number of specifications that leave just a handful of global firms able to meet them.

Task Order 0020 is a cost reimbursement, indefinite-delivery/ indefinite-quantity construction capabilities contract for post-Katrina recovery efforts in support of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for "unwatering activities" in Plaquemines, East and West basins, New Orleans, LA.

The work to be performed provides for immediate disaster recovery response to repair pumps (many of which were poorly designed for the conditions they faced) and restore utilities to efficiently and rapidly remove water from these areas. Work will be performed in New Orleans, LA, and is expected to be complete by November 2005.

The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal reached into the White House yesterday, picking off President Bush's top procurement official -- who just barely had time to resign before being arrested.

The federal charges against David Safavian stem from his tenure as chief of staff of the General Services Administration, predating his arrival at the White House a year ago. But his arrest nonetheless draws renewed attention to the ongoing corruption and influence-peddling inquiry swirling around Abramoff, a lobbyist well known for his connections to conservative Republicans in the White House and Congress.

And for a White House so desperate to build public confidence in its ability to respond to the Gulf Coast disaster, it doesn't exactly help that the man who up until Friday was overseeing contracting policy for the multi-billion dollar relief effort has now been charged with lying and obstructing a criminal investigation.

R. Jeffrey Smith and Susan Schmidt write in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration's top federal procurement official resigned Friday and was arrested yesterday, accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the federal government. It was the first criminal complaint filed against a government official in the ongoing corruption probe related to Abramoff's activities in Washington.

"The complaint, filed by the FBI, alleges that David H. Safavian, 38, a White House procurement official involved until last week in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002."

Philip Shenon and Anne E. Kornblut write in the New York Times: "The White House said in a statement that Mr. Safavian had resigned on Friday and that 'we, of course, will cooperate fully with the Justice Department in this investigation.' A spokesman said the White House would have no further comment on the arrest. . . .

"His wife, Jennifer Safavian, is chief counsel for oversight and investigations on the House Government Reform Committee, which is responsible for overseeing government procurement and is, among other things, expected to conduct the Congressional investigation into missteps after Hurricane Katrina."

Shenon and Kornblut note: "The Justice Department did not reveal details of Mr. Safavian's arrest, including where it occurred. The department also did not say why the criminal charges were brought directly by prosecutors, rather than by the Washington grand jury investigating Mr. Abramoff. The Justice Department often bypasses a grand jury when a criminal case is brought together hurriedly or when there is fear that a defendant may try to flee."

Just recently, Safavian was the administration's point man when it came to one of the controversial measures in the White House's recent $51.8 billion supplemental aid request: The boosting from $15,000 to $250,000 of the upper limit for purchases made with government-issued credit cards. Critics said the change will allow card holders to circumvent important measures to curb fraud and cronyism.

[snip]

In addition to Safavian, Abramoff is known to have close ties to at least one other key White House official: Susan B. Ralston, Karl Rove's omnipresent assistant and gatekeeper.

Here's Peter H. Stone writing in the National Journal last year: "As presidential adviser Karl Rove set up shop in the West Wing in 2001, he was looking for an assistant to serve as the trusted gatekeeper of his new fiefdom. Superlobbyist and Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff was happy to lend a hand. Abramoff knew just the right person for the job: his own assistant, Susan Ralston. She interviewed with Rove and got the position."

Ralston told Filipinas magazine last year: "Working for Karl Rove is like being at the center of the Bush universe -- I am fortunate to be where I am, and be involved in much of what goes on at the White House."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family's hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent.

Frist held an undisclosed amount of stock in Hospital Corporation of America, based in Nashville, Tenn., the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain. On June 13, he instructed the trustee managing the assets to sell his HCA shares and those of his wife and children, said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Frist.

Frist's shares were sold by July 1 and those of his wife and children by July 8, Call said. The trustee decided when to sell the shares, and the Tennessee Republican had no control over the exact time they were sold, she said.

HCA shares peaked at midyear, climbing to $58.22 a share on June 22. After slipping slightly for two weeks, the price fell to $49.90 on July 13 after the company announced its quarterly earnings would not meet analysts' expectations. On Tuesday, the shares closed at $48.76.

The value of Frist's stock at the time of the sale was not disclosed. Earlier this year, he reported holding blind trusts valued at $7 million to $35 million.

Blind trusts are used to avoid conflicts of interest. Assets are turned over to a trustee who manages them without divulging any purchases or sales and reports only the total value and income earned to the owner.

To keep the trust blind, Frist was not allowed to know how much HCA stock he owned, Call said, but he was allowed to ask for all of it to be sold.

Frist, a surgeon first elected to the Senate in 1994, had been criticized for maintaining the holdings while dealing with legislation affecting the medical industry and managed care. Call said the Senate Ethics Committee has found nothing wrong with Frist's holdings in the company in a blind trust.

"To avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest Senator Frist went beyond what ethics requires and sold the stock," Call said. Asked why he had never done so before, she said, "I don't know that he's been worried about it in the past."

An HCA spokesman said the company had no part in Frist's decision.

The federal searches of Columbia facilities began in March. Agents were looking for evidence of suspected fraud against Medicare, Medicaid, and the military healthcare system. Three mid-level Columbia managers were indicted in Fort Meyers, Fla., this summer for conspiring to inflate the amount of reimbursement Columbia’s Fawcett Memorial Hospital in Port Charlotte, Florida, was to receive from Medicare and the military healthcare program.

Federal investigators continue to examine several other Columbia billing practices. Both the Department of Justice and Columbia refused to talk about the on-going investigations. But the Wall Street Journal has reported some of the things Columbia is being investigated for are ordering costly blood tests, receiving reimbursement from the federal government for advertising and marketing expenses, and billing separately for costs that are usually consolidated.

Other concerns have been raised as well. During a hearing in Fort Meyers, assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Haley said company officials may have tried to destroy evidence relevant to the government’s investigation. "According to Ms. Haley, law-enforcement officials first became aware of a possible attempt to destroy evidence when, soon after Columbia businesses in El Paso were searched in March, a local citizen alerted law-enforcement officials to a ‘cache of Columbia documents in a garbage dumpster at a gas station several miles’ from the nearest Columbia facility," the Journal reported Aug. 14. Columbia spokesperson Jeff Prescott refused to comment on the report.

Thomas Frist Jr., MD, the vice chair of Columbia’s board, and other board members rallied for Scott’s resignation after 35 warrants were obtained to search facilities in seven states in July. On July 25 he received the resignation. Frist, who co-founded Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) with his physician father in 1968, stepped in as chairperson and CEO.

Since then, Columbia has reportedly developed an "action plan" to sell its $1.2 billion Dallas-based home healthcare unit and to restructure its relationships with physicians. Columbia’s ties with physicians—such as the practice of offering to sell them financial stakes in hospitals—has been a hallmark of its business since the early days in El Paso. But now Columbia has reportedly decided to discontinue those sales and will establish tighter guidelines on physician transactions. Columbia executives stress that the creation of the action plan does not imply they found any wrongdoing or errors in their policies and procedures.

Newsweek magazine reported last week that when Katrina struck, no one wanted to tell the president the truth about what happened. None of his advisers wanted to bring him the bad news. What kind of staff is that? Nobody wanted to tell the president of the US that the nation's 35th largest city had been destroyed. Who are these people? And what kind of government do we have when everyone is afraid to tell the president anything he doesn't want to hear?

[snip]

The public's not going to buy any of this stuff that comes out of Washington. They're not going to believe anything that comes out of these partisan reports, or stuff that was done from within the White House. It just isn't going to wash. The game is up with John Q. Public. They're not buying this stuff anymore.

In the past couple of days I have been to Slidel, which was the worse thing I've seen in my life. You cannot tell that houses were ever in areas...there is nothing, absolutely NOTHING. The storm surge off of the lake went to 40 feet apparently and seeing the piles of debris, I would say that was about right.

The stench is really something all around here, at least to me. It is over 100 degrees with the same humidity, these towns smell horrific...fear, death, dying, mold, and very much like chemicals.

I've noticed my skin is looking bad and there are some 'bites/sores' I can't quite figure out.

The suffering is relentless, the aid from the government agencies and the 'help' agencies are all lacking hugely. FEMA claims their hands are tied by Washington....who knows.

I'm on the ground, seeing human suffering and squallor conditions in AMERICA and I keep reminding myself I am NOT supposed to be living in a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY...when I see this for miles and miles and listen to the stories, I believe that this part of AMERICA is THIRD WORLD.

Imagine having 20 feet of water go through your home and returning to have it still with 3-9 feet of water, then having to RIP EVERYTHING out and stack in in the streets for FEMA/insurance to look at...then having to rip out the carpets and the drywall because MOLD is growing everywhere at an alarming rate...then think about HAVING TO LIVE IN THAT HOME because unless you leave the state, there is NO place to go. Then look for bleach, or ANY FUCKING cleaning supplies to try and make your 'home' 'safe'...and there is NOTHING being handed out and the mold grows back as quickly as you clean it off.

Did I tell you this is in AMERICA? Slidel to be exact.

Think of those riding out the storm in a church and going higher and higher and finally the water begins to receed...when it drains out, you still have no place else to go, because your housing is gone, so you stay in the molding and dank church...you've been forgotten, no food, water...STILL.

Did I tell you this is in AMERICA? Slidel to be exact.

These are stories I will tell later when I get back to California and prepare them. Today (Tuesday) I head back to Slidel to take a load of supplies to 'my' new friends and check on the church and will go buy things if necessary.

Today I hope to continue to take video, pictures and record stories from the survivors and the refugees.

Oh, yes, they are refugees, the ones with no place to go and nothing but the clothes on their back...in fact they say they are the 'forgotten refugees of America'....

AMERICA .... The failing to help our CITIZENS.

I do believe that if it weren't for the individuals and grassroots that are all over this hurricane ravaged area, there would be worse death tolls, as I believe we have saved many.

Our close ally President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan visited the U.S. last week and fretted aloud about a surprising problem: The "easiest way" for Pakistani women to make money is to get raped, he said, so they're lining up to be raped and thus making him look bad.

That's right. He's nuts.

"You must understand the environment in Pakistan," The Washington Post quoted him as saying. "This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."

That comment got Mr. Musharraf in hot water. So over the weekend, Mr. Musharraf denied that he had ever said any such thing - noting that if he had, he would have been "stupid."

True.

The Washington Post reviewed its tapes and reported that it had quoted him correctly. It also added an additional quote from the same interview, in which Mr. Musharraf spoke of rape as an avenue to riches: "It is the easiest way of doing it. Every second person now wants to."

Sexual violence has become a sensitive issue for Mr. Musharraf because of the pioneering work of women like Mukhtaran Bibi, whom a tribal council sentenced to be gang-raped as a way to punish her brother - and who then used her compensation money to start schools and launch a nationwide anti-rape campaign. After I wrote about her last year, Times readers sent her a total of $160,000, which she is using to start an ambulance service, operate schools and campaign for women's rights.

Fearing that Ms. Mukhtaran's anti-rape campaign would make his country look bad, General Musharraf barred her from traveling to the U.S. to attend a conference. When she protested to me and others, the government kidnapped her to keep her from complaining, releasing her only after Condi Rice raised the issue with the Pakistani government.

Then in July and August, I wrote about Dr. Shazia Khalid, a Pakistani physician whom the authorities drugged, put in a mental hospital, threatened to kill and finally exiled to keep her from recounting her rape.

The latest victim to come forward is Sonia Naz, a 23-year-old woman whose husband disappeared. Desperate, she went to the National Assembly building in Islamabad to see if she could get help. Then, she says, the police arrested her and repeatedly stripped her, raped her and beat her.

Embarrassed by these revelations, Mr. Musharraf held a conference in Pakistan this month on women's issues. He wore a necktie with blue and pink, which he said could reflect cooperation between men and women - and then he denounced Dr. Shazia.

Here in New York on Saturday, General Musharraf held a meeting with an invited audience to show himself off as a sensitive man. The meeting started awkwardly when he tried to demonstrate his feminist credentials by saying he opposed violence against women because it's unchivalrous toward the weaker sex. Then, in response to skeptical questions, Mr. Musharraf lost his temper, shouting at audience members and threatening to "get" anyone who exposed Pakistan's problems to the world.

Folks find Mr. Burgin's accessible personality easy to trust, his counsel easy to revere, his authenticity easy to believe. For 20 years, churchgoers first in Birmingham, Ala., and then Cincinnati, Ohio, trusted, revered, and believed the impeccable reputation Mr. Burgin built from his pulpit. But beneath the thick varnish of smooth oration and doctrinally sound sermons, this conservative pastor secretly harbored a monster. "I was a master of duplicity," he said.

Six years ago, the shadow-dwelling beast got out; Mr. Burgin was addicted to internet pornography. For the entirety of his ministry and even before, Mr. Burgin tumbled silently through a cycle of shame, repentance, and broken vows. Seasons of apparent victory collapsed in times of stress, when the comfort of habit proved too difficult to resist. Despite a guilt-ridden conscience, Mr. Burgin often preached on sexual purity, slogging through such sermons undetected. "I compartmentalized it in my mind," he said. "I rationalized. I minimized. I would stop while preaching and teaching on it."

Mr. Burgin's exposure came during a spell of particularly high internet activity. A series of stress-filled events—his father died, his eldest son left for college, and he relocated to a new church—drove him to new levels of daring. He left undone the practiced ritual of covering his tracks, failing to delete his computer's history and temporary internet files. "I got sloppy, and I got caught," he said.

Mr. Burgin's wife of 25 years did the catching and unlocked the cage of her husband's secret monster by releasing printouts of his activity to various church leaders. She then chose divorce, taking the couple's young daughter with her. His ministry and family lost, his reputation soiled, Mr. Burgin turned to the church for help and found little. "Churches didn't know how to handle me," he said.

A Barna Research Group study released in November 2003 found four out of five born-again Christians believe pornography to be morally unacceptable. The Bible likens lust to adultery and fornication, both expressly forbidden. Nevertheless, Mr. Burgin's disaster is far from unique:


• A 2003 survey from Internet Filter Review reported that 47 percent of Christians admit pornography is a major problem in their homes.

• An internet survey conducted by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in 2002 found 30 percent of 6,000 pastors had viewed internet porn in the last 30 days.

• A Christianity Today Leadership Survey in 2001 reported 37 percent of pastors have viewed internet porn.

• Family Safe Media reports 53 percent of men belonging to the Christian organization Promise Keepers visit porn sites every week.

• One in seven calls to Focus on the Family's Pastoral Care Hotline is related to internet pornography.

• Today's Christian Woman in 2003 found that one in six women, including Christians, struggles with pornography addiction.

The Pentagon said on Monday there was reason for optimism in Iraq despite what it called the "tough reality" of a war in which insurgent violence rages unabated and the U.S. military death toll approaches 2,000.

Two-and-a-half years after American-led forces invaded Iraq to oust President Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials tout political progress -- saying every important milestone has been achieved including a draft constitution -- and the steady building of Iraqi security forces.

But some defense experts, saying insurgencies like this one can take years to unfold, argued the conflict had become a military stalemate and expressed concern about civil war. They also said an erosion in U.S. public support for the war should be a worrisome development for President George W. Bush.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita urged people not to gauge the war based on the volume of rebel bombings. "That's not a good way to determine how good or bad things are going -- by (counting) how many things are exploding," Di Rita said.

"Nobody's trying to hide from that reality. It's a tough reality," he said. "But it's a tough reality in which, I think, generally the people that are closest to it, the Iraqi political leaders and our commanders, feel (there is) reason for some optimism despite all the violence."

Publicly, the White House will tell you that it intends to push ahead with two of its big legislative issues throughout the fall: making permanent the first term tax cuts and Social Security reform.

Even privately, with the political and policy debacle that the White House created with its Clintonian response to Hurricane Katrina, policy and political types at 1600 Pennsylvania insist what's left of an agenda is still viable.

But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level departments say this Administration is done for.

"You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."

Too pessimistic? Maybe not. Rumors are flying through various departments of longtime senior Bush loyalists looking to jump, but with few opportunities in the private sector to make the jump look like anything more than desperation. Almost daily, complaints from Cabinet level Departments come in to the White House about lack of communication coordination on even basic policy matters.

"What happened was that some of the best people who were working in the Administration during the first term, but who weren't necessarily Bush campaign members or weren't particularly close to the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by under-qualified but more politically connected people," says a current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. "In this department we lost three quarters of the people who should have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because they had received no indication they would be considered for better or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have stayed."

Cindy Sheehan may be the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement. But that didn't stop members of the New York Police Department from marching into the crowd of about 150 people gathered in Union Square Monday to hear her speak and yanking away the microphone.
The NYPD pulled the plug just as Sheehan was calling on the audience not to lose heart in the fight to end the war in Iraq.

"We get up every morning, and every morning we see this enormous mountain in front of us," said Sheehan, speaking on behalf of the other parents and family members of fallen soldiers who have taken up the crusade to bring the troops home.

"We can't go through it, we can't go under it, so we have to go over it," she continued, just as the cops rushed the makeshift podium.

Police dragged away Paul Zulkowitz, a.k.a. Zool, an organizer with “Camp Casey NYC,” the small encampment that he and other activists set up a month ago in Union Square in solidarity with Sheehan’s vigil outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The New York branch existed much to the ire of the city’s Parks Department. Today, Zulkowitz was arrested for failing to obtain a sound permit—a charge that normally warrants no more than a summons.

Moments earlier, Zulkowitz had been chastising Parks officials for refusing to grant a permit to the encampment, and accusing the police of trying to harass the antiwar protest away. Contrasting the liberal Big Apple with the hostile environs Sheehan faced in Crawford, Zulkowitz told the crowd: "You would think that here in New York City, at Union Square—our Hyde Park—you would think that we would little difficulty having a 24-hour vigil to oppose the war. In fact, we've had two arrests and eight summonses and endless harassment from the police for doing what we do."

As the activists hustled away Sheehan and the other family members on the Bring Them Home Now tour, an enraged crowd of about 50 people stormed after the police, chanting, "Shame! Shame!" Meanwhile Iraq war veteran and now peace activist Jeff Key played "God Bless America" on his trumpet.

"Since when can't you talk out here in Union Square?" demanded an Upper West Side social worker who identified herself as Quha, who said she'd taken her lunch break to hear Sheehan because she has a 20-year-old son who is considering enlisting. "I've seen everyone and their mother come out and speak nonsense out here in this park, and for them to shut down Cindy Sheehan is just not right."

"They came in like gangbusters. It was really ridiculous," said Margaret Rapp, a retired teacher from Inwood who added that she planned to file a complaint after an officer forcibly shoved her in the chest. A mother of a 19-year-old, she said she'd come to hear Sheehan because she lost her fiancee during the Vietnam War. "This is very close to home. There is a chord that Cindy hits among people that have lost people in this war and other wars, or who have draft age children like me. We're scared to death.”

Inspector Michael McEnroy, commander of the 13th Precinct, insisted the shutdown order had nothing to do with the content of Sheehan’s speech, but was instead about the "provocation" caused by Zulkowitz. “This has been going on for much longer than today,” McEnroy said, adding of Sheehan, “I don’t even know the woman.” That last part prompted one pissed-off onlooker to shoot back: “Haven’t you watched the news or read a paper in the last three months? ”

Susan Wood, former director of the office, quit in protest last month over the FDA's delay in approving -- or even making a decision on -- the so-called morning-after pill. Sometime last week, it appears, the FDA posted a news release on its Web site that said Norris Alderson had been appointed the acting director of the office. As we noted Friday, Alderson's appointment immediately drew fire from Planned Parenthood, which complained that he was (a) a man and (b) someone who had appeared to have decades of experience in ... veterinary science.

But sometime Friday, the FDA put up a new press release that said that Theresa Toigo -- who is (a) a woman and (b) not an expert in veterinary science -- is the new acting director. Alderson wasn't mentioned in the release, and the release that did mention him disappeared almost immediately from the Google cache, replaced somehow by an old post about insulin. It's as if the Alderson appointment never happened, but only sort of: Alderson is still listed as the acting director of the Office of Women's Health on a Department of Health and Human Services Web page. And the news release on Toigo says, rather cryptically, "This is a revision of this statement posted earlier on Sept. 16."

So what happened? Did someone in the press office at the FDA simply screw up? Or did the FDA name Alderson to the position and then change course once the agency realized that appointing an expert in veterinary science to the Office of Women's Health might send the wrong message or invite unwanted comparisons to another Bush administration appointee who had animals on his résumé? We'd like to know, and we've asked the FDA and Alderson to explain. We'll let you know as soon as they do.

3 polling days after George W. Bush's prime-time speech to the nation from Jackson Square in New Orleans, a "can't win" dynamic is unfolding for the President, according to exclusive SurveyUSA data gathered Friday 9/16, Saturday 9/17 and Sunday 9/18. The number of Americans who now approve of the President's response to Hurricane Katrina is down: 40% today compared to 42% before he announced the Gulf Opportunity Zone. The number of Americans who disapprove of the President's response to Katrina is up: 56% today compared to 52% before the speech. Bush went from "Minus 10" on his Response to Katrina before the speech to "Minus 16" today.

Although not official, Tropical Storm Rita is absolutely of Hurricane intensity at this time. Satellite imagery indicates that strong convection has wrapped completely around the center -- and an inner eye wall has already formed. The next RECON will reach the storm this afternoon, but imagery over the past 2 hours indicates it is a VERY solid CAT 1 hurricane. The storm is located near 23N/76W and is moving WNW at 10Kts.

The models continue to show Rita passing through the Florida Straits, and the Florida Keys will likely take the brunt of the storm -- probably as a CAT 2 hurricane.

The GFS and indeed all the global models continue to show Rita reaching the north Texas coast Saturday -- and while over the Gulf of Mexico, should develop a strong upper level anticyclone that will only increase the probability that RITA
will reach Major Hurricane intensity by Wednesday as it moves into the central Gulf of Mexico.

[snip]

All the models are showing what the GFS has been indicating for 6 model runs in a row -- the ridge over the southern U.S. will have it's western edge erode sooner than originally thought, and this will allow the storm to turn NW Thursday.
At this time - the far upper coast coast - near Galveston - appears to have the highest landfall probability on Saturday. HOWEVER -- with recent model trends -- a turn sooner rather than later could lead to a landfall along the coast of Louisiana.

The situation has deteriorated in Baghdad dramatically today. Five neighborhoods (hay) in Baghdad are controlled by insurgents, and they are Amiraya, Ghazilya, Shurta, Yarmouk and Doura. It is very bad. My guys there report that cars have come into these neighborhoods and blocked off the streets. Masked gunmen with AKs and other weapons are roaming these areas, announcing that people should stay home. One of my drivers in Amiraya reports that his neighborhood is shut down totally, and even those who need food or provisions are warned not to go out.

The government will respond feebly. It will go into a contested neighborhood, and then just like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, the insurgents will flee to take over another area on another day. Bit by bit they are taking over the main parts of Baghdad. The only place we are sure they cannot control is Sadr City, unless of course they want to take on Jaish Mahdy [Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army], and that would be bloody.

A few minutes ago Jaafari came on television to tell everyone in Baghdad to stay home. Can't wait for his next bold move.

There are flyers in public areas of Baghdad warning people not to gather in large numbers because they will thereby become targets. I am trying to get a copy of the flyer.

Notwithstanding Al-Hayat's claim that Zarqawi and the Sunni resistance are not together, my street listeners claim otherwise. My folks are convinced that the two groups, broadly defined, are together, "100 percent" is the claim of certainty. It is hard to get a handle on this because people in Baghdad tend to lump all resistance groups, except for Zarqawi, into one large category.

More and more of even the most patriotic intelligentsia are departing. The situation is dire, and those with escape valves are using them. [Some organizations are]sending more of [their] staff to Arbil and Sulamaniyah and out of Baghdad. Until about March this year, [some] thought that there was a chance of returning to Baghdad. It is remarkable how incapable this government is. Its only success is that it exists at all.

In the meantime, the embassy people act as if nothing in Baghdad is wrong (except that they cannot walk in the Green Zone without body armor and they have to take precautions against kidnapping). Recently, a group from State and the military parachuted in from Washington [with fatuous advice] . . . It is a fantasy world."

How Bush "performs" on television is the criteria by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths -- and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush's dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes -- or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to put together a pattern of Bush being unable to cope with disaster and protect Americans. There is a straight line going from Bush's paralysis after 9/11 -- sitting in a classroom for nearly 10 minutes reading "My Pet Goat" before his speechwriters could give him something to say, while Dick Cheney oversaw the response, followed by Bush's bizarre odyssey of flying away from Washington, D.C. -- to his failure to respond to the Tsunami disaster for days, to his failure to respond to the disaster in New Orleans for days. We won't even get into the bloody, bankrupting quagmire he got us into in Iraq by lying us into war.

Any corporate board would know that they have a total incompetent on their hands and send him packing. We didn't just have Michael Brown as head of FEMA. Michael Brown is our President!

[snip]

That the media seems to bring no historical context to Bush's continued history of blunders and betrayals of America's national security is testament to the decline of a nation that used to value responsibilty, honesty, hard work and integrity. Now, all that counts is "the performance."

And Bush is the actor set out to read the scripts and appear "manly" in photo ops, so that Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld can go about doing their business of pursuing their megalomaniac, psychotic visions and rewarding corporate campaign givers with taxpayer-funded contracts worth billions of dollars.

In the meantime, America's security and economic situation (forever intertwined) grow perilously more dangerous. You have to remember one thing: the guys behind the front man (Bush) have no idea how badly they are doing. People forget this. The Bush "Masters of the Universe" think that they are doing a marvelous job and at some point reality will catch up with them. Only the reality that is catching up with them is the weakening of America to the point that all our lives are threatened by a government so incompetently run, it makes Enron look like a "best practice" model for how to operate a transparent, honest corporation.

Two of the first companies that got emergency no-bid federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina recovery work have faced questions over past business practices, court and government records show.
A division of Fluor, a California firm awarded a housing contract worth up to $100 million, has paid millions of dollars to settle federal government lawsuits — including one that accused it of overbilling for 1989 hurricane cleanup work.

The Shaw Group, a Louisiana firm that won housing and engineering contracts worth up to $200 million, has disclosed that it is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm is also a defendant in federal securities class-action cases.

[snip]

Federal court records show Fluor agreed to pay $3.2 million in 1997 to settle allegations that its FD Services division padded repair bills for cleaning up U.S. Navy bases in South Carolina after the 1989 strike of Hurricane Hugo. Fluor also agreed to pay $8.5 million in 2001 to settle allegations that it billed the government for work done for other clients, court records show.

[snip]

In its annual report filed in July, the Shaw Group disclosed that it was the subject of what the company termed an "informal inquiry" by the SEC. The firm said it was cooperating with investigators, who had not told the firm the reason for the inquiry or its scope. The SEC declined to comment.

Separately, federal securities class-action cases accuse the Shaw Group and its executives of defrauding investors with misleading statements about the company's finances and management.