The nightmare that is Bush's America in September 2005

Short cuts:

Bob Brigham's blog from NO is back up, and worth checking out. Among the many horrors, scroll down to the entry about the National Guard recruiting for fresh meat to feed into the grinder in Iraq among the evacuees housed in the Astrodome.

MSNBC's headline is "25,000 Body Bags", which means that the estimates of 40,000 may not be far off. Horrifying.

Brian Williams reports that the police and the Guard are getting testy:

At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

[snip]

Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

And this is BRIAN WILLIAMS -- NBC News' Brian Williams -- the guy who has said it's his "duty to listen to Rush Limbaugh". (More on Williams' love for Limbaugh here.)

So one can hardly say that Williams is anti-Bush.

The news blackout in New Orleans is clearly designed to move attention away from the seriously deteriorating situation on ALL fronts there, before the political damage to Bush gets any worse.

Meanwhile, E&P reports on Scotty McClellan's "blame game" mantra at yesterday's press gaggle.

As Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show last night, "When people don't want to play the blame game, they're to blame."

Crooks and Liars is monitoring how many Republicans decry the $2000 cash cards being given to evacuees to help them put their lives back together. (They really have no clue what it's like to have nothing, do they?)

And Bob Harris notes that only the most INLAND parishes were included in Bush's declared state of emergency before the hurricane. I guess those are the parishes that voted for him. Either that or it demonstrates incompetence of an even more appalling degree than we've seen so far...and that's pretty damn scary.

Steve Gilliard reports on a FEMA "detainment camp" that's been set up in Oklahoma, where

The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

Pastor Niemoller was right.

First they've come for the black poor from New Orleans.

They've shut out the media.

Soon they'll come for us.

UPDATE on the concentration camp (let's call it what it is) in Oklahama: It's been shut down. Hmmmmm......