Looking at my posting over time, there’s a noticeable spike a year ago when Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans and the American psyche. A year later, the Gulf Coast is still in tatters, tens of thousands have still not returned home, and several American corporations are several billion dollars richer thanks to to no-bid contracts. But as always in the Crescent City, the music has continued.

Out this week was a new release by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, a group I had the pleasure of meeting and working with during my time at XPN. They’ve been making classic New Orleans R&B since 1975 with 2 drummers and a whole bunch of horns. And I’m a sucker for horns. Their new album is a cover of the Marvin Gaye classic 1971 record, What’s Goin’ On. With guests like Chuck D, Bettye LaVette, Ivan Neville, G. Love, and the sampled voice of NO Mayor Ray Nagin, the Dirty Dozen have created a mournful and fitting eligy to the people of their home town. Like Gaye did during another time of war and upheaval, it cries out against the insanity of our times. It’s a great album.

Give it a listen.

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The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was “trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,” Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer — along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling. Laura Bush, by contrast, delivered only three blinks and stood still through her entire answer about encouraging volunteerism..

It’s almost sad to watch as Bush fades into his role as a legitimately failed President.

UPDATE: C&L has the video and you’ve got to watch it. First of all, the people behind him aren’t doing anything!! Bush seems like a elementary school debater, deflecting criticism with weak attempts at humor and dancing around like he needs to ask teacher if he can use the bathroom. It’s a really bad sign when even Matt Lauer can make you look foolish.

For the true connoisseur of cynicism — and I’m talking about myself here — the past few days have been about as good as it gets: the political equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Mobil five star restaurant. Everywhere you look, you can see mounds of mouthwatering hypocrisy, steaming heaps of juicy lies, fat slices of self-serving spin, and, of course, a bottomless tureen of hot buttered bullshit, fresh from the White House lavatory.

I just watched a remarkable piece Cooper did with Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist, touring the now abandoned New Orleans Convention Center. Henderson arrived at the Convention Center two days after the storm, hoping to aid other doctors he expected to already be working. He arrived to find 15-20,000 people with no medicine, no help, and no law enforcement. He was the only doctor there.

“That’s where the real hell was. This is where hell opened its mouth….People were sleeping everywhere, packed everywhere in here, all the way out to the street. It was just a mass of humanity.”

He went on to describe the only other healthcare there: a man with a few IV bags and no tubing or needles, who had to resort to pouring the liquid directly into people’s mouth. His voice broke as he showed Anderson the area where he’d heard many stories of women being dragged to and raped. Henderson picked up the tiny red shoes of a little boy and told Cooper how there were children everywhere, some laughing and playing, glad that they weren’t at school, while others lay on the floor siezing and dying.

All that’s left now in the Convention Center is trash and two abandoned dogs. As Brian Williams echoed on last night’s Daily Show, “How could this happen in America?”

…sent three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of State, asking for records and communications regarding the federal government’s preparedness and response to hurricane Katrina.

“For government leaders who have claimed to be focused on planning for and responding to emergency situations, the stories coming out of the disaster zones are heart-wrenching and appalling,� Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW said today. “The American people should know what led our government to bungle both the preparation and the response to Katrina.�

You might think the leader of the free world would feel at least some responsibility to determine whose mistakes led to the possibly preventable deaths of tens of thousands of people. But this is the Bush administration that knows nothing but politics and lies. Listen to what Nancy Pelosi related today of her conversation with our dear leader about dangerously incompetent FEMA director Mike Brown:

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.

“We felt it important to offer students from the Philadelphia area as much continuity as we can until they can resume studies at their home institution. In addition, many of our faculty and staff have expressed interest in volunteering their services in New Orleans and other areas needing assistance. We will give Penn faculty and staff up to three weeks of paid time off to work as volunteers with the various organizations involved in hurricane recovery efforts.”

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

The criminal cronyism of the Bush administration put a GOP activist in charge of emergencies in our country. As Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans said on this morning’s Meet the Press, this is “one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever.” Video link.

Ok, I thought my anger had temporarily run its course, but the sheer disregard that this president shows for the hundreds of thousands of people currently in harm’s way is truly disgusting.

Check what the White House seems to find important today.

The RNC, not to be upstaged in callousness by the White House, sent out an email today encouraging its constituents to fight against the “death” tax. Because right now, we should definitely be concerned about the estate tax and how it hurts multi-multi-millionaires.

Atrios is doing a great job covering Katrina. Some of the more upsetting statements he’s heard on CNN today:

More from convention center from CNN. Woman with baby:

We gotta get some help. We really need some help. WE got babies – I got three kids. They need water, milk, bottles. They don’t have nothing. Newborn babies. Premature babies. Everything.

That official told me they were able to take a couple of people out. One woman so desperate that she actually handed up her 2 month old baby and said take my child. I can’t get on this bus, but you’ve got to try to save this child. She didn’t even know the woman’s name.

Chris Lawrence: They say that there have been National Guard units that have come by. Tossed some MREs out. Very little. Here and there. People have been eating potato chips that they can scrounge up, looting some of the stores that are nearby for food and water, for juice, for drinks. Not the kind of food that you need to feed these thousands of people. What these people are saying basically is give us some water, give us some food, don’t leave us here to die or get us out of here. They’re saying we’re stuck here. We cant leave. They don’t send the buses. They won’t take us out of here and yet they won’t come in with truckloads of water and food to feed us. You’ve got sick people there, sick You’ve got old people there, these young babies there. What are they going to do? Are they going to leave us here to die?

At least Scott McClelland seems to understand the situation, saying about the looters:

There are ways for them to get that help. Looting is not the way for them to do it.

Jack Cafferty, on CNN’s Situation Room this afternoon:

I’m 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can’t sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome. What is going on? This is Thursday! This storm happened 5 days ago. This is a disgrace. And don’t think the world isn’t watching. This is the government that the taxpayers are paying for, and it’s fallen right flat on its face as far as I can see, in the way it’s handled this thing.

The mayor of New Orleans has issued a “desparate SOS:”

Fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. “This is a desperate SOS,” the mayor said.

Anger mounted across the ruined city, with thousands of storm victims increasingly hungry, desperate and tired of waiting for buses to take them out.

“We are out here like pure animals. We don’t have help,” the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and he and other evacuees complained that they were dropped off and given nothing _ no food, no water, no medicine.

I don’t really know what to say about Hurricane Katrina and it’s devastating aftermath throughout the Gulf Region. It seems like every day things just get continuously worst. For an informational update I’ll point you towards a long post that Matt is continously updating. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already watched Bush’s “speech” from yesterday, head over to C&L and see how our commander-in-chief is handling this crisis. Very good Georgie, 13.4 million liters of water is a lot. The New York Times editorializes that we are waiting for a leader:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end

You would think that even the ideologues in the Bush administration could put aside their distaste for anyone who isn’t an American to help the tens of thousands who are in need, but sadly this is not the case. Kos reports that the US won’t allow Canada to help the victims:

On tonight’s news, CTV (Canadian TV) said that support was offered from Canada. Planes are ready to load with food and medical supplies and a system called “DART” which can provide fresh water and medical supplies is standing by. Department of Homeland Security as well as other U.S. agencies were contacted by the Canadian government requesting permission to provide help. Despite this contact, Canada has not been allowed to fly supplies and personnel to the areas hit by Katrina. So, everything here is grounded. Prime Minister Paul Martin is reportedly trying to speak to President Bush tonight or tomorrow to ask him why the U.S. federal government will not allow aid from Canada into Louisiana and Mississippi.

Compounding the near-criminal delays that the White House has allowed to occur, Bush is even blatantly lying to cover his own ass, telling reports today that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Of course this is a complete fallacy since in 2001 FEMA ranked a hurricane hitting New Orleans as the third most likely catastrophic event in the US after a massive earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in NY. And as the New Orleans Times Picayune reported on June 8, 2004, the Bush administration’s budget cut funding for hurricane preparedness for the first time in 37 years. Is he trying to hit trifecta? Does he even want to be president?

At least the hurricane isn’t disrupting Condi’s good time as she shops for shoes, sees a show in New York City, and has someone who disagrees with her physically removed from the store.

On at least one positive note, I’m glad to hear my friend Jon’s family is okay.

That’s all the anger I can summon for right now. I go in for sinus surgery tomorrow, laying me up for most of the weekend, so hopefully there will be plenty of posting over the next few days.

The Red Cross needs your help: