Jack's posts with tag: spit-take
Laura Bush urges families in Katrina areas: 'Try not to be sad'
By Stacey Plaisance / Associated Press
GULFPORT, Miss. - First lady Laura Bush on Monday urged parents here to
cling to normal holiday practices even as families face dual hardships
- recovering from Hurricane Katrina and coping while family members are
stationed overseas for military service.
"There are still a lot of people not spending Christmas in
their homes, but I encourage families to have all the same traditions,"
Bush said to children and parents at a Naval Construction Battalion
Center.
Bush, accompanied by Santa during stops in New Orleans and
Mississippi, said in Gulfport: "Try not to be sad. It's very important
for your children."
She recommended reaching out to family services groups and counseling services, if needed.
Still, it was hard to deny how difficult it will be for some
children to have a normal holiday season. In addition to having one or
more of their parents away in the military, many witnessed the
destruction of their homes and neighborhoods when Katrina blew ashore
Aug. 29.
Many left homeless by Katrina are still living in trailers or tents.
Monday's trip marked the seventh time the first lady has visited
communities affected by the massive hurricane. She spent nearly an hour
at the Seabee center in Gulfport, where children ranging from preschool
to preteen years made Christmas ornaments - snowmen out of paper and
beads and Santa faces out of paper and cotton balls.
Bush, a former school librarian, paused to read Christmas
letters the children wrote. She later said she was moved by one
youngster who wrote to a father in the military: "'All I want for
Christmas, Dad, is for you to be home with me.'"
About 50 children at the Seabee center ripped into brightly
wrapped packages under a Christmas tree, revealing a bounty of stuffed
toys and board games.
The first lady showed the children a short movie called "A Very
Beazley Christmas" about her family's two Scottish terriers - Barney
and Miss Beazley. The film, with cameos by President Bush and others,
shows off the White House holiday decor as it tells a tale of Barney
becoming jealous when his sister gets more attention than him.
When 11-year-old Brooke Chaffee and her 8-year-old brother
Heath were on the phone Sunday night to their father, who is stationed
in Fallujah, Iraq, all they could talk about was how they'd get to meet
the first lady.
"This is something they'll never forget," their mom, Jennifer Chaffee, said after the children saw Laura Bush.
The three Chaffees have been living with family in Gulfport
since the hurricane hit. Their Long Beach home is still standing, but
Katrina left it with severe structural damage. Jennifer Chaffee said
the family is on a waiting list for a trailer from the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
Tue Nov 08, 2005 at 01:30:25 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- kos)
Too funny! Hastert and Frist make a big show of calling for an
investigation into a leak allegedly affecting national security -- the
locations of secret "black site" torture prisons. And then -- BOOM!!!
Lott just said, Tuesday afternoon, that he thinks it was a GOP Senator
who leaked the info to the Washington Post last week. He says the
details had been discussed at a GOP Senators-only meeting last week,
and that many of those details made it into the WaPo story.
Money quote from Lott; "We can not remain silent. We have met the enemy, and it is us."
All just reported on CNN. We are, folks, witnessing the full-on
implosion of the national Republican Party. And not a second too soon.
By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press WriterFri Nov 4,10:12 AM ET
A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what
secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks
turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture,
made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end
the "mutual prejudice" between religion and science that has long
bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate
in the United States.
The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992
declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was
an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Galileo was
condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth
revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at
the center of the universe.
"The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to
keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in
particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to
prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future,"
Poupard said.
But he said science, too, should listen to religion.
"We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic
bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason
that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link," he
said.
"But we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism," he said.
"The faithful have the obligation to listen to that which secular
modern science has to offer, just as we ask that knowledge of the faith
be taken in consideration as an expert voice in humanity."
Poupard and others at the news conference were asked about the
religion-science debate raging in the United States over evolution and
"intelligent design."
Intelligent design's supporters argue that natural selection, an
element of evolutionary theory, cannot fully explain the origin of life
or the emergence of highly complex life forms.
Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or
Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul's 1996
statement that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis."
"A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false," he said. "(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof."
He was asked about comments made in July by Austrian Cardinal
Christoph Schoenborn, who dismissed in a New York Times article the
1996 statement by John Paul as "rather vague and unimportant" and
seemed to back intelligent design.
Basti concurred that John Paul's 1996 letter "is not a very clear
expression from a definition point of view," but he said evolution was
assuming ever more authority as scientific proof develops.
Poupard, for his part, stressed that what was important was that
"the universe wasn't made by itself, but has a creator." But he added,
"It's important for the faithful to know how science views things to
understand better."
The Vatican project STOQ has organized academic courses and
conferences on the relationship between science and religion and is
hosting its first international conference on "the infinity in science,
philosophy and theology," next week.
___
On the Net:
Vatican project STOQ: http://www.stoqnet.org
'Can I quit now?' FEMA chief wrote as Katrina ragedE-mails give insight into Brown's leadership, attitudeWASHINGTON
(CNN) -- A Louisiana congressman says e-mails written by the
government's emergency response chief as Hurricane Katrina raged show a
lack of concern for the unfolding tragedy and a failure in leadership. Rep.
Charlie Melancon, whose district south of New Orleans was devastated by
the hurricane, posted a sampling of e-mails written by Federal
Emergency Management chief Michael Brown on his Web site on Wednesday. The
lawmaker cited several e-mails that he said show Brown's failures. In
one, as employees looked for direction and support on the ravaged Gulf
Coast, Brown offered to "tweak" the federal response. In another
long e-mail two days after Katrina hit, Marty Bahamonde, one of the
only FEMA employees in New Orleans, wrote to Brown that "the situation
is past critical" and listed problems including many people near death
and food and water running out at the Superdome. Brown's entire response was: "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" (Copies of e-mails -- PDF ) On September 12 Brown resigned, 10 days after President Bush told him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Brown
took over FEMA in 2003 with little experience in emergency management.
He joined the agency in 2001 as legal counsel to his college friend,
then-FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's 2000 campaign manager.
When Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003 Brown assumed the top job. Before
joining the Bush administration, Brown spent a decade as the stewards
and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. The
e-mails Melancon posted, a sampling of more than 1,000 provided to the
House committee now assessing responses to Katrina by all levels of
government, also show Brown making flippant remarks about his
responsibilities. "Can I quit now? Can I come home?" Brown wrote
to Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs, the morning
of the hurricane. A few days later, Brown wrote to an acquaintance, "I'm trapped now, please rescue me." "In
the midst of the overwhelming damage caused by the hurricane and
enormous problems faced by FEMA, Mr. Brown found time to exchange
e-mails about superfluous topics," including "problems finding a
dog-sitter," Melancon said. Melancon said that on August 26, just
days before Katrina made landfall, Brown e-mailed his press secretary,
Sharon Worthy, about his attire, asking: "Tie or not for tonight?
Button-down blue shirt?" A few days later, Worthy advised Brown:
"Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the
president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this [crisis]
and on TV you just need to look more hard-working." On August 29,
the day of the storm, Brown exchanged e-mails about his attire with
Taylor, Melancon said. She told him, "You look fabulous," and Brown
replied, "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?" An
hour later, Brown added: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire,
you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god," according to the congressman. The
e-mails came from Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, who
oversees FEMA, following a request by Melancon and Rep. Tom Davis,
R-Virginia, chairman of a House committee appointed to investigate what
went wrong during Katrina, Melancon said. Brown resigned amid
accusations that FEMA acted too slowly after Katrina hammered Louisiana
and Mississippi, killing more than 1,200 people. He defended the
government's response and blamed leaders in Louisiana for failing to
act quickly as the hurricane approached. He acknowledged he made
some mistakes as FEMA's director, but he stressed that the agency "is
not a first responder," insisting that role belonged to state and local
officials. Brown could not be reached for comment Wednesday night on the e-mails and Melancon's charges. Although
Chertoff has not turned over all the documents requested by the
committee, Melancon charged that the material received so far
contradicts testimony by Brown before the committee in which he
described himself as an effective leader. (Melancon's analysis of e-mails -- PDF) Melancon
used an e-mail sent September 2, four days after the hurricane hit, to
illustrate his point. On that day, Brown received a message with the
subject "medical help." At the time, thousands of patients were being
transported to the New Orleans airport, which had been converted to a
makeshift hospital. Because of a lack of ventilators, medical personnel
had to ventilate patients by hand for as long as 35 hours, according to
Melancon. The text of the e-mail reads: "Mike, Mickey and other
medical equipment people have a 42-foot trailer full of beds,
wheelchairs, oxygen concentrators, etc. They are wanting to take them
where they can be used but need direction. "Mickey specializes in
ventilator patients so can be very helpful with acute care patients. If
you could have someone contact him and let him know if he can be of
service, he would appreciate it. Know you are busy but they really want
to help." Melancon said Brown didn't respond for four days, when
he forwarded the original e-mail to FEMA Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks
Altshuler and Deputy Director of Response Michael Lowder. The text of Brown's e-mail to them read: "Can we use these people?" Melancon
also charged that few of the e-mails from Brown show him assigning
specific tasks to employees or responding to pressing problems. On
September 1, FEMA officials exchanged e-mails reporting severe
shortages of ice and water in Mississippi. They were to receive 60
trucks of ice and 26 trucks of water the next day, even though they
needed 450 trucks of each. Robert Fenton, a FEMA regional response official, predicted "serious riots" if insufficient supplies arrive. Brown
was forwarded the series of e-mails about the problem, but no response
from him is shown in the e-mails provided to the committee, Melancon
said. Katrina came ashore along the Louisiana-Mississippi state
line, after being downgraded from a Category 5 to a Category 4 storm.
It flooded 80 percent of New Orleans. It was followed about a month
later by Hurricane Rita, which caused more damage and flooding. Melancon
and several other Democrats from districts directly affected by Katrina
were invited to participate as a ex-officio members of the Katrina
investigative committee, though they have no formal role. House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi refused to appoint any Democrats to the
panel after GOP leaders rebuffed Democratic demands for an independent
probe. This is the second time a congressional committee had
dealt with e-mails relating to FEMA's Katrina response. A complete
transcript of Brown's e-mail traffic during the Katrina crisis has not
been released by the Department of Homeland Security.
| |
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03/brown.fema.emails/index.html |
The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has
been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding
God—and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek
Oct. 31, 2005 issue -
Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither
would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the
red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in
staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved
wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She
exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough
books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's
often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The
New York Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches
news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a
half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.
They've been worried about
her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book
since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling
vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year,
when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998,
when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned
to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew
that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002.
And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more
than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and
the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting
for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her?
"For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails
saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not
want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice,
the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N.
Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the
Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by
Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write
only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob
Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
Meeting the still
youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that
on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing.
And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in
her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to
where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New
Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three,
she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the
afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a
continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken
evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in
despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural
hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
To render such a hero and
his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but
in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which
she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually
allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched
every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of
the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from
"Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim
LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was
intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly
authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making
James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But
she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with
Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the
historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus'
family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy
Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds
to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
Rice's most daring move,
though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's
intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times
when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say
she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus
"fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be
convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to
me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to
render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text
crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer
we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different
to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a
dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then
weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue
Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.
Rice already has much of
the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk
about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero
ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I
want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of
fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes
redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785289/site/newsweek/
"But
I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could
-- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in
this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an
impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your
crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching,
extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky." -Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, 9.28.05 From HEREOMFG. Fucker.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) --
President Bush on Tuesday said he takes responsibility for the federal
government's failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina.
"Katrina
exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of
government and to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its
job right, I take responsibility," Bush said during a joint news
conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. [SNIP]
By JENNIFER LOVEN and DAVID ESPO
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON
Congress'
top two Democrats furiously criticized the administration's response to
Hurricane Katrina on Wednesday, with Sen. Harry Reid demanding to know
whether President Bush's Texas vacation impeded relief efforts and Rep.
Nancy Pelosi assailing the chief executive as "oblivious, in denial"
about the difficulties.
With much
of New Orleans still under water _ and likely to stay that way for
weeks _ Bush readied a request for about $52 billion for relief and
recovery along the Gulf Coast, and the White House indicated millions
more would be needed later. Congressional officials said they expected
to approve the next installment as early as Thursday, to keep the money
flowing without interruption.
There
was no formal announcement of the details contained in the request,
although the Associated Press learned that the government plans to
distribute debit cards worth $2,000 each to adult victims of the
hurricane.
"They are going to start
issuing debit cards, $2,000 per adult, today at the Astrodome," said
Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The cards could be used to buy food, transportation, gas and other
essentials that displaced people need, according to a state official
who was on the call and requested anonymity because the program has not
been publicly announced.
GOP
congressional leaders met privately to plan their next step, possibly
including an unusual joint House-Senate committee to investigate what
went wrong in the government's response and what can be fixed.
Establishment of a joint panel would presumably eliminate overlapping
investigations that might otherwise spring up as individual committees
looked into the natural disaster and its aftermath.
In a letter to the Senate's Homeland Security Committee chairwoman,
Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, pressed for a wide-ranging
investigation and answers to several questions, including: "How much
time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he
was on vacation? Did the fact that he was outside of Washington, D.C.,
have any effect on the federal government's response?"
At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of
the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no
credentials."
She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.
"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.
"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"
"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.
The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version
NEW
ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans
emerged Thursday. The sanitized view came from federal officials at
news conferences and television appearances. But the official line was
contradicted by grittier, more desperate views from the shelters and
the streets.
These conflicting views came within hours,
sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's
transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael
Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin,evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
| |
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.response/index.html |
So Long, AT&T? Not So Fast
Once SBC completes
its acquisition, Ma Bell's familiar moniker will replace its new
parent's. And a renewed consumer push will commence
As telecom giant SBC (SBC
) prepares to close its acquisition of AT&T (T
), it might seem that the 120-year-old telecom brand is about to fade into history.
Don't bet on it. SBC, which was spun off from AT&T amid the breakup
of the Bell telephone system in 1984, will assume its former parent's
name, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The plan, which is consistent
with speculation that followed SBC's bid for AT&T earlier this
year, reflects SBC's new national identity and its desire to market
AT&T's Internet phone service to consumers around the country. And
it gives SBC a marketing weapon to use against its rivals. [SNIP]
Governor Ernie Fletcher has called a news conference for a major
announcement regarding the merit hiring investigation. The conference
is scheduled for 6 p.m. (EDT) tonight.
Reports from the media are inconsistent, but there is a consensus
emerging that Fletcher is issuing pardons -- some say nine of them.
Mark Hebert (WHAS-11 Louisville) and Bill Bryant (WKYT-27 Lexington)
are both reporting online. Sources inside the investigation have told
BluegrassReport.org that they expect Fletcher will pardon himself as well. {snip}
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