Free Republic

Yes, the rumor’s true. Greg Palast is facing a criminal complaint from the Department of Homeland Security stemming from his filming the Hurricane Katrina investigation for Link TV and Democracy Now. The film’s producer, Matt Pascarella, is also facing the legal wrath of Big Brother. It appears the complaint is about filming a sensitive national security site owned by Exxon petroleum. It seems that photographing major Bush donors is now a federal offense. Reached at an undisclosed location, Palast says, “Let’s not get over-excited. They haven’t measured us for our orange suits yet.” During questioning by Homeland Security, Palast asked,...

According to some political operatives and willing members of the dominant media, the nation has a President who is extraordinarily inept. Yet other critics say George W. Bush is evil beyond description. But conventional wisdom among the President's detractors implies Bush is both of these things, inept and evil, to a point never before seen in world history. According to the far left, Bush, a bumbling fool, is one of the great evil masterminds of our times. However, no one has ever accused liberals of basing their views on logic or truth. If this sounds extreme, it is. To those...

Americans still remember vividly the scenes from a year ago when Hurricane Katrina swept away entire communities, sent thousands of families for shelter in the Super Dome, and left hundreds of thousands more homeless and jobless. Americans throughout the land were moved to help in any way they could - sending donations and aid and volunteering to meet the needs of our fellow citizens. We responded because that's what Americans do. We care for our country, help our neighbors, and lend a hand to those in need. However, as we all painfully know, the Administration did not live up to...

With a tropical storm threatening Florida and the one-year anniversary of Katrina approaching, CNN’s August 28 “American Morning” kicked off a weeklong look at “Red Tape and Rubble” in the Gulf Coast. But Ali Velshi’s first report in the series was unbalanced, treating insurance companies as guilty until proven innocent of greed or fraud. “We’re going to be there when you need us,” anchor Soledad O’Brien said is the promise insurance companies extend out to policy holders, “But many Katrina victims think uh, uh, that’s not true,” she complained. O’Brien set the stage for Velshi’s unbalanced report by painting insurance...

I am not writing the following to minimize or downplay the destruction that occurred a year ago from Hurricane Katrina. Let's face it, Katrina was one of the most devastating storms to hit the United States. It was very reminiscent of Hurricane Camille in 1969 in terms of destruction. As with 9/11 and the Christmas 2004 Tsunami, we saw the best in the American people once again. Without being prompted, Americans united to send food, clothes, money, supplies and volunteers to New Orleans and the Mississippi/Alabama coast. There is no denying the generosity and compassion of Americans seen time and...

DO you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopter landings at the Superdome, as soon as Katrina passed, to drop off tens of thousands saved from certain death? Of the corpsmen running with stretchers to carry the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? Or the reports on how the operation - with Coast Guard helicopters, regular military units and local first responders, too - went on for more than a week, saving more than 50,000 lives? No? That's because the national media imposed a near-total blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the largest,...

Matthews Has Cheney Heckler on Hardball08/25 06:54 PM - The Markup, Videos The heckler, in a scenario that no one could have foreseen, proceeded to heckle both Matthews and the other guest on the program: The heckler is Dr. Ben Marble, who famously approached Dick Cheney as he was speaking to a group of reporters in a Katrina-ravaged Mississippi neighborhood and told him to engage in an act of congress with himself. Tonight on Hardball, Marble interrupted host Chris Matthews and his other guest, Katrina survivor Rockey Vaccarella, several times. Most egregiously, he shouted down Vacarella, who recently met with President Bush, by interjecting, "You...

The president spoke with UN SG Kofi Annan about the international force being assembled for Lebanon; the Iranian regime's statement on its nuclear program; and the need to improve the situation in Darfur. He attended a fundraiser for Senator George Allen, R-VA. President Bush met with Rockey Vaccarella, Louisiana victim of Hurricane Katrina, to discuss rebuilding efforts there.

What a difference one year makes. With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall (August 29, 2005) rapidly approaching, who would have predicted that we would now be in the middle of a near-normal Atlantic hurricane season? Weren't the global warming pundits' predictions for this hurricane season that it would be just as bad -- maybe even worse! -- than last year? Yet, now at mid-August, we have had only three named tropical storms, compared to nine by this date last year. Normally, we would have had one hurricane by now, and we have not had any so far, so by...

NEW YORK — Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, HBO documentary executives were stumped. How to respond on film to something so monumental? "We were in a meeting one day and I said, `I guess we'll have to let Katrina go,'" said Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary and Family. "Then, literally within the hour, Spike called. It was like, `Eureka!'" Spike Lee was quickly signed to chronicle the storm and its aftermath in New Orleans. The first half of Lee's heartbreaking film, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," debuts Monday. The four-hour documentary marks...

Today: August 17, 2006 at 8:45:37 PDT Son Sues Over Katrina Wheelchair Death By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The son of a 91-year-old woman who died in her wheelchair while waiting to be rescued from the city's Convention Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina sued the city and state Thursday. Herbert Humphrey Jr.'s lawsuit accuses numerous state agencies and the city of New Orleans of willful misconduct in the death of his mother, Ethel Freeman. It was filed in state Civil District Court in New Orleans. The Convention Center had been overwhelmed with desperate evacuees,...

"Greed is not the product of one particular economic system, but something that all economic, political and social systems have to cope with one way or the other." So asserts economist Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. According to Marxist ideology, "greed" in a capitalist system would inescapably deliver a lower level of overall well-being -- economically, morally, and politically -- than a collectivized "people's" system with more elevated and nobler goals than crass acquisitiveness, unbridled individualism and gross profit-making. Instead, as was demonstrated in the Soviet...

The CBS “Evening News” may want to change its theme music to R.E.M.’s “End of the World As We Know It.” Nearly two months into a quiet hurricane season, CBS’s Michelle Miller alarmed viewers of the July 30 broadcast with ominous warnings of a “long overdue Northeast hurricane” that “could devastate the region and cripple the U.S. economy.” Invoking the “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938, Miller warned that as devastating at that storm was in lives lost and property damage, the economic hit today would be much worse, as “real estate values from Maryland to Maine are among the...

PASADENA, Calif. - Mr. T has given himself a makeover. The former television action star shed the piles of gold chains that were his signature look after witnessing the destruction from Hurricane Katrina. "As a spiritual man, I felt it would be a sin against my God for me to wear all that gold again because I spent a lot of time with the less fortunate," the actor said Thursday at the Television Critics Association's summer meeting. "I saw some, I call it `sorry celebrities.' They'll go down there and hook up with the people to take a photo-op. I...

KENNER, Louisiana — Three people convicted of hauling away liquor, wine and beer from a grocery store after Hurricane Katrina were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The judge said Wednesday he wanted to send a message that looting would not be tolerated when he gave the maximum sentence to Coralnelle Little, 36, Rhonda McGowen, 42, and Paul C. Pearson, 36. A jury convicted the trio May 2 on a portion of the state's looting law that took effect two weeks before the Aug. 29 storm. The amended law set a three-year minimum sentence, and a maximum of 15 years...

June 15, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - A Houston hairdresser with a long rap sheet conned the feds into paying for his sex-change operation with Hurricane Katrina aid, it was revealed yesterday. In a shocking example of mismanagement and fraud in the widening FEMA fiasco, Michael James Green, 25, was charged with bilking the feds out of $36,000 meant for destitute hurricane victims. He claimed to have lived in 18 damaged addresses and used 18 different Social Security numbers, federal prosecutors said. But Green wasn't using the money for food and shelter: He used it to pay for a sex-change operation,...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

NEW ORLEANS -- Mayor Ray Nagin unveiled a new evacuation strategy for New Orleans on Tuesday that relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters. "There will be no shelter of last resort in the event of a major hurricane coming our way," Nagin declared. The mayor, facing a runoff election May 20, has been widely criticized for failing to get the city's most vulnerable residents out of town as Hurricane Katrina approached. The Superdome and Morial Convention Center became a scene of misery for days after the Aug. 29 hurricane as thousands...

Despite the wall-to-wall coverage of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, nearly one-third of young Americans recently polled couldn't locate Louisiana on a map and nearly half were unable to identify Mississippi. Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 fared even worse with foreign locations: six in 10 couldn't find Iraq... _ Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language. _ Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world. Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and...

Link only since Gannett newspapers are not allowed on Freep. http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060425/NEWS0110/604250371/1001/news

The most intriguing news out of this city's mayoral primary election is the story of what didn't happen: White voters failed to dominate at the polls Saturday as thousands of black voters returned home. Nearly eight months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the majority of New Orleans' black neighborhoods, black voters kept incumbent Mayor C. Ray Nagin's candidacy alive, casting an estimated 90 percent of votes in his favor. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu drew the second-highest percentage of black voters, with more than 20 percent of his total support coming from displaced black residents. "So the African-Americans' candidates are progressing...

ORLANDO, Fla. - If government can't do it, business will. Once the domain of government and charitable relief groups, hurricane response and preparedness are a booming billion-dollar business — from the self-heating food packets to the souped-up cell phone towers on wheels. Call it Hurricanes Inc. "Private industry is the only way to go," said Joe Spraggins, emergency management chief for a Mississippi county hit hard by Katrina. The trend has been growing for a few years. But with 2004 when multiple storms struck Florida, and last year with Katrina, then Rita, it has only accelerated. Spraggins, of Harrison County,...

Continuing the media assault on profitable businesses, CBS News attacked the insurance industry for “record profits” in 2005, a year also beset by heavy hurricane damage claims. “Even while insurance companies paid out a record amount in claims after Hurricane Katrina and other storms, the industry still made more than $44 billion in profit, an almost 19-percent increase from the year before,” said CBS’s Sandra Hughes on the April 5 “Evening News,” introducing a critic of the insurance industry. “They’ve used a national disasters like 9/11, natural disasters like Katrina and phony excuses like too many lawsuits to jack up...

US Newspaper Distorts Farrakhan Visit to Cuba Havana, Mar 30 (Prensa Latina) When the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper reported on the recently concluded trip of Louis Farrakhan to Cuba it deliberately tried to mislead its readers by allowing US government officials to discredit the Nation of Islam minister. On the next to last day of his week long visit to Havana, Farrakhan and his delegation participated on the hour-and-a-half prime time Round Table, broadcast nationwide on Cuban TV and radio, something Black progressives could never have in the United States, even if they paid millions to try and buy the airtime....

A substantial majority of New Orleans' registered voters still reside within the city or its suburbs, and their racial makeup closely mirrors that of all registered voters before the storm, according to new data commissioned by the secretary of state. The new data challenges the popular notion that the out-of-state votes of displaced New Orleans residents loom large over the April 22 election, as well as the perception that in-town voters are overwhelmingly white and those out of town are overwhelmingly black, said Greg Rigamer of GCR and Associates, who produced the data[....] Further, the data shows the proportion of...

JACKSON, Miss. (March 24) - Randy Walker swears he would have died from his diabetes after Hurricane Katrina had a sheriff not seized two FEMA trucks filled with ice and distributed it to residents, many of whom had to keep their insulin cold. Now, that sheriff could be prosecuted on charges of interfering with a federal operation. Forrest County Sheriff Billy McGee commandeered two 18-wheelers full of ice from Camp Shelby, a Federal Emergency Management Agency staging area, after five days passed with little relief for residents living without electricity in the wake of the deadly storm. "Man, I was...

They're kidding, right? VH1 Classic will present a full hour of the English and German music videos for the 1984 hit "99 Luftballons," aka "99 Red Balloons," by German rock group Nena. The music video presentation, to air Sunday (2 p.m. EST), caps off the cable channel's "Pay to Play for Hurricane Katrina Relief," which raised over $200,000 for Mercy Corps, a humanitarian relief organization.

NEW YORK For the second time in less than a week, The New York Times today admitted to a serious error in a story. On Saturday it said it had misidentified a man featured in the iconic "hooded inmate" photograph from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Today it discloses that a woman it profiled on March 8 is not, in fact, a victim of Hurricane Katrina--and was arrested for fraud and grand larceny yesterday. As it did in the Abu Ghraib mistake, the Times ran an editors' note on page 2 of its front section, along with a lengthy news...

Four New Orleans police officers have been cleared of allegations that they looted a Wal-Mart store after Hurricane Katrina, but each was suspended 10 days for not stopping civilians from ransacking the store, the Police Department said. The probe stemmed from an MSNBC report that showed the officers filling a shopping cart with shoes, clothes and other items. When a reporter asked the officers what they were doing, one responded, "Looking for looters" and turned her back. Assistant Police Chief Marlon Defillo, commander of the Public Integrity Bureau, said the officers seen on the video were recently cleared of looting...

“Where do I go to get my reputation back?” Ray Donovan, President Reagan’s Labor secretary, poignantly asked that question when, after the media had adjudged him guilty, he was acquitted in court of corruption charges. Former FEMA Director Michael Brown might ask the same question. While Brown was doing everything humanly possible to help the victims of the largest natural disaster in American history, America’s media, aided and abetted by numerous politicians, served as accuser, prosecutor, judge and jury to convict him as the poster boy of incompetence. The only problem? It wasn’t so. The story is an old one....

President Bush, visiting a still-suffering Gulf Coast, said Wednesday that Congress must help this ravaged city recover from Hurricane Katrina by approving billions he has requested to repair levees and compensate Louisianans who lost homes. "I'm getting a view of the progress that is being made," Bush said after a tour by air and on the ground offered a chilling portrait of the pain that lingers six months after Katrina struck. "There's still a lot of work to be done, no question about it." "You've got a pile of stuff here," the president remarked at one point, watching from a...

Former FEMA chief Michael Brown told HUMAN EVENTS that the newly released video warning of major devastation from Hurricane Katrina is fresh evidence that Bush Administration officials used him as a scapegoat in a time of crisis. In some of his toughest criticism of the administration to date, Brown and his lawyer, Andy Lester, spoke to HUMAN EVENTS about Brown’s handling of the Katrina disaster and how two high-profile administration officials—Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend—deliberately portrayed Brown as incompetent. “They’ve got to keep me out there as a scapegoat,� Brown told HUMAN EVENTS. “If...

MSNBC versus NBC News. MSNBC's David Shuster, at the top of Thursday's Hardball, and NBC's Lisa Myers at the start of the NBC Nightly News, played the identical soundbites from Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warning, on Sunday August 28, about his “grave concern” the levees in New Orleans could be “topped,” and a clip of President Bush four days later maintaining that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." But they used the soundbites to prove opposite assessments. Shuster contended that Mayfield's video “seems to contradict what President Bush said about Katrina” since Mayfield's...

The President of the United States of America has announced in a theatrically heroic manner that New Orleans will be rebuilt. At first blush, what he has proposed seems like a nice idea. That is the best that can be said of it. A wise evaluation of the facts tells us that the horrendously expensive project he has proposed is a fool’s errand. The city is doomed. There is absolutely no hope for it in the long term. Emotionally pleasing as it may be, rebuilding New Orleans prophesies an even worse disaster than what we have just seen. Hurricanes are...

I'm so happy to see the extensive coverage of Mardi Gras in New Orleans on FOX, MSNBC and CNN. I hope some will now realize that there is more to this celebration than Bourbon Street, boobs and beads.

by Mark Finkelstein February 28, 2006 Didn't someone get the word to Ray Nagin? Didn't His Honor know he was supposed to use his Mardi Gras appearance on the Today show to bemoan slow progress in the rebuilding of New Orleans and take some helpful shots at the Bush administration for its stinginess in allocating only $91 billion? If Nagin wasn't playing by the Bush-bashing script, Katie Couric was there to fill the gaps and use the opportunity to plump for more government programs and an expansion of perhaps the worst idea ever in welfare - 'public housing.' Katie opened...

by Mark Finkelstein February 27, 2006 If you look in the dictionary next to 'disgruntled', expect to find a photo of former FEMA Director Michael Brown. As the Today show graphic read, "Michael Brown Blames White House," and NBC Evening News host Brian Williams was there to record every embittered word, with nary a nuanced question that might have probed Brown's account of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. In the interview excerpt shown on this morning's Today, Brown sought to exculpate himself by describing a conference call he had held with the President and top White House advisors in...

WORK! Stop the presses!Someone finally said what needed to be said…publicly. During some government meeting in Houston, three New Orleans council members (guests?) said to “evacuees� what was on so many people’s minds: Get off your duffs and work. New Orleans doesn’t want its poorest residents back — unless they agree to work.That was the message from three New Orleans City Council members who said government programs have “pampered� the city’s residents for too long. (Source) Houston transplants who want to return to New Orleans got a dose of tough love. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now,� said...

Baton Rouge -- Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Wednesday abandoned for now her push to shrink New Orleans' government after the proposal ran into strong opposition during a special legislative session on hurricane relief. "I know there's a resistance to change. It's very hard to get a focus on reform," Blanco said, acknowledging she has given up on the legislation this session. The measure by House Speaker Joe Salter would have consolidated the city's century-old network of two elected sheriffs, two elected clerks of court and two court systems. It passed the House overwhelmingly and was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday...

WASHINGTON -- In the frenetic search to find emergency housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, the government last October turned to Chicago and found space at a Gold Coast hotel -- for $399 a night. Richard Skinner, inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, told a Senate committee Monday that hotel bills in Chicago and other cities were "excessive compared to [the] contract's estimated cost." One New York hotel charged $438 a night, he said.

SARASOTA, FL. - Having been one of the Companies participating the the Relief and Recovery of Hurricane Katrina victims, I can tell you mistakes were made at ALL levels of Government, starting at the LOCAL level...

Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses, suggesting that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud, a Congressional auditor will report Monday. The examination of the so-called Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the "significant fraud and abuse," the Government Accountability Office intends to report. The auditors did not try...

A difference in soil boring data transferred from one chart to another may have played a key role in engineering decisions that led to the breach on the 17th Street Canal floodwall that flooded much of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, National Science Foundation investigators say. A cross-section drawing in the project design documents shows a weak layer of peaty soils running between 11 feet and 16 feet below sea level in the area that failed during the storm. But information in the individual soil borings that were used to draw the cross section show the peaty layer extending as...

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin testified before Congress again Wednesday on the response to Hurricane Katrina. Nagin answered questions on what the city needs from the federal government to continue the cleanup process. He told them that New Orleans' greatest needs are temporary housing and help for small businesses. On Tuesday the committee looked at documents that showed Nagin opened up the Convention Center but failed to provide enough food and water. On Wednesday the committee asked more questions about the incident. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told Nagin, "We can't find any evidence of a request from the city...

A Louisiana man who helped many evacuees from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Louisiana coast on Aug. 29, 2005, is running for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for governor. T. Lee Horne is a resident of Franklin, La., the community to which many Libertarians sent money and relief materials after the townsfolk made it clear they would not seek or accept government assistance for hurricane refugees. In fact, when volunteers with the Red Cross got lost on their way to New Orleans, they were sheltered by Franklin volunteers. The Red Cross workers said the town...

Sources close to the Lieutenant Governor reveal to The Louisiana Weekly that Mitch Landrieu will run for Mayor of New Orleans in the April 22 primary. With qualifying less than a month away, almost ever political observer views Landrieu as the immediate front runner, as problems continue to mount for incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin. Landrieu's decision is only the latest development in what is becoming the most eventful election year in recent memory. In a normal election cycle, 2006 would be a somewhat dull election year. But no more. Voters will cast ballots in possibly three statewide elections, a series...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to their damaged neighborhoods, according to an analysis released Thursday by a Brown University sociologist. Blacks and the poor were disproportionately affected by Katrina, according to the study led by Brown Professor John R. Logan. The analysis concludes that the difficulty in moving back to the city could mean a massive loss of population, overwhelmingly among blacks. New Orleans was more than 65 percent black before Katrina hit in August,...