Republican Party Hijacked by Radical Religious Right
... the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America's great political parties - the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is - and they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What's also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance - their loathing of other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge - has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the "Christograph") on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east to west.
Let's take a brief detour to Ohio and I'll show you what I am talking about. In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify and train thousands of "Patriot Pastors" to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports, the leader of the movement - the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Columbus - casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash between "the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell." The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public schools that won't teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the "secular jihadists" who have "hijacked" America and prevent school kids from learning that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist." He links abortion to children who murder their parents. He blasts the "pagan left" for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that "homosexual rights" will bring "a flood of demonic oppression." On his church website you read that "Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America's youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into this nation."
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via 1,400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a "Christocrat" - a gladiator for God marching against "the very hordes of hell in our society" - he nonetheless has been spotted with so many Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been publicly described as a"spiritual advisor" to the party.
... The Ohio Restoration Project is spreading. In one month alone last year in the president's home state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added 2000 "Patriot Pastors" to the rolls. On his website he now encourages pastors to "speak out on the great moral issues of our day...to restore and reclaim America for Christ."

New Orleans Doctors: We Had to Kill our Patients
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.
Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

Be Angry, Be Very Angry
For three long, terrifying days, as August turned into September, government failed the residents of New Orleans; failed the tax-paying citizens of this nation who expect that the entities in charge, from the White House on down to City Hall, will carry out their constitutional duties to "insure domestic tranquillity" and "promote the general welfare" - requirements they failed utterly to meet in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
This fatal failure should be evidence that it is time for an attitude adjustment in Washington. If just a few heads roll, it won't be enough, because the problem is far more than incompetent, uncaring, slow-to-awaken, negligent appointees. It's the "starve the beast" philosophy that has hollowed out important government agencies. Hurricane Katrina should make the Republicans who control the White House and Congress ashamed of themselves.
From the top down
The failure was at all levels, but it was especially egregious at the top. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is supposed to ride to the rescue in catastrophes, especially if local governments mess up and founder in despair.
No doubt the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana were not up to the job of managing the worst U.S. natural disaster since the San Francisco earthquake. Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, ordered a mandatory evacuation just before the storm hit but didn't send buses for those without cars. Still, many would've stayed behind anyway.
But local officials were left absolutely in the lurch by FEMA. Gov. Kathleen Blanco asked the president to declare a federal state of emergency on Saturday, Aug. 27, when Katrina was still out at sea. The White House that day authorized FEMA to "mobilize and provide at its discretion ... resources necessary to alleviate the impacts." So far so good.
The hurricane hit land on Sunday and began its rampage though the Gulf Coast. But it wasn't until Monday that FEMA chief Michael Brown asked his superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to send 1,000 employees to the region - and gave them two days to arrive.
One could argue that there were six lost days, those between the Saturday declaration of a state of emergency and the following Friday, when the National Guard actually restored order in New Orleans. But to be fair, most Americans - and folks in New Orleans - thought the sultry city had dodged a bullet when the hurricane failed to make a direct hit. The realization that levees were giving way and the city was doomed didn't come until Tuesday. That's the day the Times-Picayune newspaper evacuated its downtown building, and it's the day that TV-watching Americans began to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe they saw unfolding.
If ordinary people could see what was happening, how could the emergency experts in Washington be so oblivious?
On Wednesday, the Superdome, home to tens of thousands of evacuees, became dangerous. No air conditioning, no working sanitary facilities, not enough food and water. The Convention Center was worse. There, where 10,000 more evacuees had been sent by police, there was no government-supplied food and water, nobody in charge, and anarchy reigned. By Thursday, looters were taking what they could from stores as corpses floated in the street.
Americans saw; FEMA didn't
And Americans could see on their televisions that their government was AWOL. Terry Ebbert, the director of homeland security for New Orleans, said Thursday, "This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims but we can't bail out the City of New Orleans."
At about the same time, Brown, the clueless FEMA head, told CNN that he had only just learned that there were evacuees in the Convention Center. This was Thursday afternoon, by which time every television watcher in America knew there were thousands of people at the Convention Center and that they had no food or water and that people were dying for lack of medical care.
It wasn't until Friday that the vaunted American can-do spirit put an end to three days of governmental failure. Enough troops were mobilized, enough food was delivered to end the anarchy. Since then, we've begun to see the kind of behavior we expect from government: rescuing survivors, reuniting families, supplying needs, giving desperate people reason to hope again.
But here are just two of the awful things that happened while government slumbered:
The Convention Center. This facility is on high ground and was dry after the flood. It's just off the Crescent City Connection, a bridge that also was dry. The road over the bridge, Route 90, was used by the press to get in and out of the flooded city. By a circuitous route, journalists were able to get to the airport and to sources of food and gasoline. Entertainer Harry Connick Jr., was able to drive into the city over the bridge. FEMA could have done that, too, a network correspondent who was on the scene told Newsday. But it didn't. Not until Friday did government food finally come.
What was it like inside? Well, here's what Dr. Greg Henderson told TIME magazine after he arrived at the Convention Center on Friday: "They're stacking the dead on the second floor. People are having seizures in the hallway. People with open running sores, every imaginable disease and disorder, all kinds of psychiatric problems... "
St. Rita's. This small nursing home in St. Bernard parish, just east of New Orleans, had about 60 residents when the hurricane approached. For some reason, administrators did not evacuate and a last-minute rescue effort removed only about half of the patients. The rest of them died.
Imagine the scene: 32 bedridden elderly folks, up on the top floor awaiting help, expecting help. Picture the water rushing in, splashing against the legs of the beds, soaking the mattresses, rising, rising. The patients must have realized they were not going to be rescued. They must have called out. Probably they prayed. Probably the sound of rosary beads was heard as the water rose. And then 32 helpless people drowned in their beds.
This is America? How can the people we trusted to handle emergencies let things like this happen? It mustn't, ever again. Some necessary steps:
Hearings. Power brokers in Washington are falling over each other calling for hearings to discover what went wrong. Hearings are needed; preferably by a bipartisan panel, on the model of the 9/11 commission, which has authority to probe what went wrong at all levels, government and civilian.
Accountability. People who failed should be fired; people who acted heroically should be honored.
Planning for tomorrow. All areas vulnerable to natural tragedy - earthquake, tornado, flood - need to update their emergency plans in light of Katrina. Concern about terrorist attacks appears to have back-burnered such efforts. Long Island's elected officials have already agreed to meet for a joint emergency planning session. Good.
Abandon the "starve the beast" approach to government in Washington. The agencies that are supposed to serve the public should be adequately funded- not shrunk to invite failure - and headed by people of experience and integrity. FEMA's chief had political connections, not expertise, and he was relieved of Gulf Coast duties on Friday.
... As America goes forward from this tragedy, let it learn the lesson that government is about more than taxes and defense. It's about providing for the general welfare. It's about competence. It's about compassion. © 2005 Newsday, Inc.

President's Popularity is Sinking Like a Stone
Texas congressman Tom DeLay, arguably the most powerful man in the House of Representatives, added his voice to a string of gaffes from the Bush family and others by telling a group of evacuees in a Houston shelter that their experiences were not all that different from attending summer camp.
"Now tell me the truth boys," Mr DeLay said, "is this kind of fun?"
In New Orleans itself, and along the ravaged coastline of Mississippi and Alabama, a greatly increased presence of police, National Guard and relief workers has stabilized what, for the first few days, had appeared to be a state of near-total anarchy. Rescue workers in New Orleans said the floodwaters were now receding at a pace of several inches a day - amounting to as much as two city blocks along some of the gentler inclines.
With most of the living now evacuated, officials are focusing on the gruesome task of recovering bodies - many of them bloated, decomposed, or gnawed at by animals. The media were excluded from accompanying official search parties, and a morgue set up in the small town of St Gabriel, on the way to Baton Rouge, did not issue updated figures on its body count.
... As the country struggles with the consequences of widespread devastation and death, new stories continue to emerge about the federal government's various failures - relief supplies sent to non-existent staging posts, resources pumped into Texas and the Carolinas but not into Louisiana or Mississippi, families split up and flown to different parts of the country, in some cases without any advance knowledge of where the evacuees were being taken, and on and on.
In the middle of last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency run by Mr Brown promised to distribute $2,000 debit cards to those left most destitute by the storm. The cards were distributed only in Texas, however, and by Friday the program had been abandoned altogether. Jane Bullock, who was the agency's chief of staff under President Clinton, told reporters she couldn't believe the agency was killing one of the few "great ideas" to have come out of the relief effort.

Anti-Terror Strategy in Doubt on 9/11 Anniversary
A growing number of policy experts are arguing that Bush's strategy for conducting the war on terrorism -- particularly his preferences for military action over "soft power" and for working with compliant "coalitions of the willing" over independent allies and multilateral mechanisms -- is in urgent need of redirection.
This was made abundantly clear by the appearance of a who's who of national security and foreign policy experts at a well-attended conference here this week that appeared designed chiefly to assert the existence of alternative frameworks for conducting the war on terrorism on the eve of its fourth anniversary.
"There is an emerging consensus that while a military response to 9/11 was necessary, it was certainly not sufficient for dealing with terrorism over the long term," said Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation (NAF) and the main convener of "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose: Towards a More Comprehensive Strategy.
"Enlightened diplomacy must be combined with a robust commitment to compete vigorously for 'hearts and minds'," he said.
Capping the conference, which was addressed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former NATO commander Wesley Clark, and Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, among others political heavyweights, was the publication of a statement by the new Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan group of former veteran lawmakers and top national-security officials, including half a dozen secretaries of state and national security advisers, that implicitly criticized Bush's conduct of the war.
Noting that "terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy", the statement stressed that success in the war will require "strong partnerships with allies based on mutual respect"; living up to traditional U.S. principles, such as the rule of law, in conducting the war, at home as well as overseas; and "breaking our over-dependence on oil".
In contrast to Bush's rhetoric about "evil" and "evil-doers" as the source of Islamist terrorism, the statement also stressed that "terrorism is a political act requiring a political response", which, in addition to promoting democratic institutions in the Muslim world, should also include "addressing legitimate grievances", the existence of which the administration has been loathe to concede over the past four years.
While the statement did not define what those "legitimate grievances" were, a number of speakers -- some of whom are rarely heard in Washington's more exalted and politically sensitive policy circles -- made clear that U.S. policies in the Greater Middle East should be included.
"They do not hate us for what we are, but for what we do," declared NAF fellow Nir Rosen, whose writings in The New Yorker about his experience in insurgent-controlled Falluja, Iraq last year won wide notice. "The American empire will cease to be a target when it ceases directly or indirectly to oppress weaker people or to support those who oppress them."

Katrina Underscores Bush's Isolated Style
Bush's isolated management style is one factor hurting him. While his decision-making is usually cloaked in secrecy, the hurricane crisis showed some characteristic traits.
Denial of unpleasant realities, for example. On Sept. 1 Bush contended that no one could have foreseen that New Orleans might be flooded: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
Actually, a lot of people saw it coming. Three years ago, The New Orleans Times-Picayune published a lengthy examination of how likely that scenario was, and it got wide attention. In fact, Bush's own administration participated in a disaster drill for almost exactly this kind of catastrophe.
Bush himself has admitted in the past that he does not reach far for information.
"I glance at the headlines," Bush told Fox News in September 2003, but "I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who ... probably read the news themselves ... And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
Inside his administration, dissenting views are often stifled, and dissidents punished.
In 2002, the administration fired the head of the Army Corps Engineers after he continued to advocate spending increases for flood control after he'd been overruled. Michael Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi, wanted a 40 percent spending increase, while Bush wanted a 10 percent cut.
When Bush convened an economic summit in 2002, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later told writer Ron Suskind, the White House wanted to hear only from people who already supported Bush policies.
"A carefully vetted group of more than 240 executives, economists, and even a few labor leaders was being assembled," Suskind wrote. "They'd seem diverse and independent to the untrained eye. In fact, nearly every one would be a Bush supporter and many were major fundraisers. Attendance was, in a way, a reward for support."
While Bush likes to be surrounded by friendly faces, he avoids frowning ones. Since Katrina hit, Bush visited the Gulf Coast twice, but both times avoided angry evacuees - ostensibly so he wouldn't interfere with relief operations.
Some veteran Bush-watchers are skeptical of that White House explanation.
"They didn't want anything to be on TV showing a bunch of angry people hollering at the president," said George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. "It would not have been a favorable scene unless he could handle it well, which he can't. Clinton could. He would be down there feeling their pain. But Bush can't."
The president also has refused to speak to two major groups that represent millions of Americans, but have criticized him.
After one brief phone conversation in 2001, Bush has never met with the president of the AFL-CIO. He is the only president in the last half century who has not.
And Bush has never addressed the NAACP as president. "You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me," he once explained.

Tight Constraints on Pentagon's Freedom Walk

Organizers of the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police and the event closed to anyone who does not register online by 4:30 p.m. today.

Hurricane Katrina - Our Experiences
Two paramedics frorm California who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans, write about their experiences.
... Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Bush's Weaknesses
The most pointed criticism of Bush's management I've read over the past week comes from the conservative columnist William Kristol. "Almost every Republican I have spoken with is disappointed" by the administration's response to Katrina, Kristol told The Post's Jim VandeHei. "He is a strong president . . . but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his presidency."...
As a key adviser once told me, this president isn't interested in hitting singles and doubles; he wants home runs. This approach almost guarantees that the administration won't do well at crisis prevention -- which succeeds best when nothing dramatic happens at all, thanks to good planning.
Even on the issues Bush has identified as his priorities, there has been a surprising reactive quality. Take the war on terrorism: The two bureaucracies that are crucial for protecting Americans -- the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community -- have been in obvious disarray over the past two years. Yet Bush has not seized the initiative in either case and has let others set the agenda for reorganization. The disorientation today at those two mission-critical bureaucracies is genuinely dangerous for the country.
... on the political side it must be said that Bush has been very skillful. His top political adviser, Karl Rove, is one of the most gifted, if also ruthless, people ever to play that role. And this White House is good at reaction and damage control -- at mobilizing the apparatus of government after initial mistakes, as we're finally seeing on the Gulf Coast.

Bush's Motivation: Dominance
... It's an index of the president's disconnect that last week he could utter the words "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" to FEMA Director Michael Brown. Or that he imagined he could actually suggest the administration should investigate the scandal itself. (And drag its feet on its conclusions until after the next election. We know the score now.)
In yesterday's New York Post, Dick Morris wrote that W's reputation will surely recover because rebuilding New Orleans can now become a rallying theme, a "new source of popularity. . . . A disaster like Katrina is just what a president needs to anchor his second term." The cynicism is breathtaking but also shrewd.
What's so troubling about Bush is not that he is incompetent, as many currently charge. It's that he is dismissive, unless programmed to be otherwise. His competence, as Justin Franks pointed out in "Bush on the Couch," extends only to personal self-preservation -- to winning. When the less fortunate are endangered, he reverts to the primal aphasia he learned at his mother's knee. "Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," Barbara Bush commented from Houston on NPR Monday evening, adding, with a chilling matriarchal chuckle, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them."
Wow. How's that for one family's values? New York's only consolation this 9/11 is that we no longer feel so marginal as we recoil.

Parts of America are as Poor as Third World

Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality...
Child mortality is on the rise
For half a century the US has seen a sustained decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. But since 2000 this trend has been reversed.
Although the US leads the world in healthcare spending - per head of population it spends twice what other rich OECD nations spend on average, 13 per cent of its national income - this high level goes disproportionately on the care of white Americans. It has not been targeted to eradicate large disparities in infant death rates based on race, wealth and state of residence.
The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia
High levels of spending on personal health care reflect America's cutting-edge medical technology and treatment. But the paradox at the heart of the US health system is that, because of inequalities in health financing, countries that spend substantially less than the US have, on average, a healthier population. A baby boy from one of the top 5 per cent richest families in America will live 25 per cent longer than a boy born in the bottom 5 per cent and the infant mortality rate in the US is the same as Malaysia, which has a quarter of America's income.
Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala
The health of US citizens is influenced by differences in insurance, income, language and education. Black mothers are twice as likely as white mothers to give birth to a low birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill. Throughout the US black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday.
Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover
The US is the only wealthy country with no universal health insurance system. Its mix of employer-based private insurance and public coverage does not reach all Americans. More than one in six people of working age lack insurance. One in three families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Just 13 per cent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 per cent of blacks and 34 per cent of Hispanic Americans. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before the age of one by about 50 per cent.
More than a third of the uninsured say that they went without medical care last year because of cost. Uninsured Americans are less likely to have regular outpatient care, so they are more likely to be admitted to hospital for avoidable health problems.
More than 40 per cent of the uninsured do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment. More than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including prescription drugs, in the past year because they lacked the money to pay.
If the gap in health care between black and white Americans was eliminated it would save nearly 85,000 lives a year. Technological improvements in medicine save about 20,000 lives a year.
Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent
Child poverty is a particularly sensitive indicator for income poverty in rich countries. It is defined as living in a family with an income below 50 per cent of the national average.
The US - with Mexico - has the dubious distinction of seeing its child poverty rates increase to more than 20 per cent. In the UK - which at the end of the 1990s had one of the highest child poverty rates in Europe - the rise in child poverty, by contrast, has been reversed through increases in tax credits and benefits.

Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash

... An 89-year-old woman, still in her hospital gown, still sitting in her wheelchair, but slumped over and barely conscious with a crowd around her pouring water on her head. She briefly opened her eyes, groaned and then stopped moving.
A military truck passed with a lone soldier in the back with an automatic rifle on his lap, hunkered down as if to hide from the crowd that was appealing to him to stop for the woman. The truck kept moving. I doubt whether the woman woke up.
I went back to my car to get another camera with a telephoto lens after deciding the crowd was more positive toward the press than negative, but when I got there I discovered my instincts were wrong.
The car's window had been smashed and my second camera and the laptop I used to transmit the pictures were gone.
I found colleague Jason Reed who had come in the day before, and used his laptop to send in my pictures. I now had just one camera and lens to work with, and Reuters determined that after a week covering the storm I had put in my time. I was sent home to rest and resupply.
When I left I took with me two local residents, one of them a 60-year-old veteran with Parkinson's who could barely walk. When I got him to a hotel in Houston five hours later, he said "I'm going to pray for you every night."

Bush's "Leader" Image Fails in Face of Reality
The administration on Tuesday struggled to deflect calls for an accounting of who was responsible for a hurricane response that even Bush acknowledged was inadequate. There were increasing calls for the resignation or firing of Michael Brown, director of FEMA.
"I think it's clear we're in damage control now," said Norman Ornstein, political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
It's a troubling position for Bush, already suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
The mistakes have come one upon the other.
Even as Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast that Sunday night and early Monday, Aug. 28-29, and the National Hurricane Center was warning of growing danger, the White House didn't alter the president's plans to fly from his Texas ranch to the West to promote a new Medicare prescription drug benefit.
By the time Bush landed in Arizona that Monday, the storm was unleashing its fury on Louisiana and Mississippi. The president inserted into his speech only a brief promise of prayers and federal help.
He continued his schedule in California, and he didn't decide until the next day that he should return to Washington. But it took him another day to get there, as he flew back to Texas to spend another night at his home before leaving for the White House.
Once the president was in Washington, the criticism only intensified.
While a drowned New Orleans descended into lawless misery, Bush delivered remarks from the Rose Garden that were seen as flat and corporate. It was a sharp contrast to the commanding, empathetic president the public rallied around in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In a television interview, Bush said — mistakenly — that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees in a serious storm.
Even Monday's trip to the region was a redo, hurriedly arranged by the White House over the weekend after lukewarm response to Bush's first in-person visit to the Gulf Coast last Friday.
Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. — instead of the thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims — as an example of loss. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house — he's lost his entire house — there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch," Bush said with a laugh from an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.
In the same remarks, Bush gave FEMA chief Brown — the face for many of the inadequate federal response — a hearty endorsement. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.
Later in Biloxi, Miss., Bush tried to comfort two stunned women wandering their neighborhood clutching Hefty bags, looking in vain for something to salvage from the rubble of their home. He kept insisting they could find help at a Salvation Army center down the street, even after another bystander had informed him it had been destroyed.
And at his last stop that day, at the airport outside of New Orleans, Bush lauded the increasingly desperate city as a great town because he used go there and "enjoy myself — occasionally too much."
Unlike his galvanizing appearance in the rubble of the World Trade Center just days after the 2001 attacks, Bush has stayed far from the epicenter of New Orleans' suffering. His only foray into the city was to its edges to watch crews plugging one of the breached levees on Friday.
On Monday, he skipped the hardest-hit coastal areas entirely, choosing instead to visit Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or two.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the president avoided New Orleans to stay out of the way of search-and-rescue operations.
"It's going to be almost impossible to overcome the perception about the president that he didn't show compassion and didn't get control of the policy failures," American University political scientist James Thurber said. "The vivid images that are coming across the television are really destroying his image as a leader."

See also The New Yorker's analysis: ..."Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them. The performance skills Bush eventually mustered after September 11th—in his bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, in his first speech to Congress—eluded him. The whole conceit of his Presidency, that he was an instinctive chief executive backed by “grownups” like Dick Cheney and tactical wizards like Karl Rove, now seemed as water-logged as Biloxi and New Orleans. The mismanagement of the Katrina floods echoed the White House mismanagement—the cavalier posture, the wretched decisions, the self-delusions—in postwar Iraq.
Just as serious, the President’s priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.
Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, “All of us said, ‘Look, build it or you’re going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.’ And they didn’t, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water.”
... Times-Picayune reporters concluded that a catastrophe was “a matter of when, not if.” The same paper said last year, “For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.”"

And, from The Guardian: "both Republicans and Democrats denounced the government's performance, which left tens of thousands of people stranded for four days or more in New Orleans with little or no food, water or medical assistance.
"Government at all levels failed," Susan Collins, a Republican on the Senate governmental affairs committee, said. "It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days."
The seriousness of the political storm Mr Bush is facing was vividly illustrated yesterday by an editorial in the staunchly conservative Wall Street Journal which warned "the aftermath of Katrina poses a threat to his entire second term".
The usually supportive editorial page concluded: "What's really at stake in the coming months is the Republican claim to be the governing party."

Bush's response? Send Cheney, criticise "the bureaucracy" and head up an investigation himself! " "What I intend to do is to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong," Mr Bush said."

Can't-Do Government
why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.