Bush says he takes responsibility for US failures (nsr)

[Free Range Lobster]

hopefully he'll quit now.

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.

Bush said he wants to know what went right and what went wrong so that he can determine whether the United States was prepared for another storm, or an attack.

"I'm not going to defend the process going in, but I am going to defend the people who are on the front line of saving lives," Bush said.

Earlier in the day, the White House announced the president will address the nation Thursday night about recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast. (Full story)
New Orleans may lose 160,000 homes

Katrina and the floodwaters that swept through New Orleans may have damaged 160,000 homes beyond repair, an official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday.

Col. Richard Wagenaar said that one of the local government's biggest challenges would be letting residents return to look at their homes.

Water flowed into the city from Lake Pontchartrain through five breaches in three levees after the storm hit August 29, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged. (Watch Wagenaar describe the levee repairs -- 3:34)

Workers should be able to pump the remaining water out of the city by the end of October, said Wagenaar, the New Orleans district commander of the Corps of Engineers.

"It's set up by neighborhoods," he said. "Some of them will be done by early October, other ones by mid-, late October -- if everything goes right, Mother Nature doesn't give us any rain and our pumps continue working."

Wagenaar said the process would speed up once water recedes around the city's main pumping station -- Pump Station No. 6 -- and its 1920s-era pumps can go back online. That's not expected for another two weeks. (Watch the efforts to pump New Orleans dry -- 2:40)

He said that workers were focusing on making "semi-permanent" repairs to the levee system that protects the low-lying city -- that could take two or three months. More permanent fixes would be made once investigators have determined why the levees failed.

"The levee at the Mississippi River and Gulf outlet is virtually gone," he said. In the event of another hurricane or strong tropical storm, St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, would "have zero protection on one side of their parish at this time."

Ninety percent of the 10-mile-long, 17-foot-high levee on the east flank of the river is gone, leaving only a small, 60-foot-long levee intact.

"Should another storm come in, it could do more damage than it already has," Wagenaar added.
Bodies found in hospital

Rescue workers have removed 45 bodies from a downtown New Orleans hospital that was surrounded by floodwaters from Katrina, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals said.

The bodies were recovered Sunday from Memorial Medical Center, spokeswoman Melissa Walker said.

Tenet Healthcare Corp., the company that owns the hospital, said in a statement that "a significant number had passed before the hurricane." (Watch the grim process of recovering victims -- 1:34)

Tenet spokesman Steven Campanini wrote that the hospital was told Wednesday "that we were on our own to evacuate, [and] we brought our own helicopters to take the patients out."

He said, "Every living patient was evacuated by Friday afternoon."

The statement said that once all of the patients were evacuated, officials brought in guards to secure the hospital until the coroner could remove the bodies.

Officials have confirmed 279 deaths in Louisiana in the wake of the hurricane.

Meanwhile, authorities were considering launching a criminal investigation into the failure to evacuate St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish.

Thirty-four residents died when the facility was flooded.

Repeated attempts by CNN to reach the nursing home's owners for comment have been unsuccessful. Authorities said they too have been unable to find them.
Other developments

* The acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency would focus on getting evacuees out of shelters and into more permanent homes. David Paulison, a 30-year veteran of fire and rescue work, was appointed Monday after Michael Brown resigned. (Watch Paulison discuss FEMA's plans)

* Bush has been criticized for his leadership in the federal response to the disaster. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll released Monday, a majority of those interviewed -- 54 percent -- said they disapproved of the president's handling of the crisis. (Full story)

* White and black Americans view the federal response in starkly different ways, with more blacks viewing race as a factor, according to another CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey released Monday. (Full story)

* The Department of Homeland security reportedly plans to send a team of about 30 investigators and auditors to the Gulf Coast to make sure that relief aid is spent properly, according to The Associated Press.

* A limited number of cargo and commercial flights are scheduled to start flying into Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday, the director of the agency that runs the airport said.

[CUBUCK]

hopefully he'll quit now.

Yes, and Cheney will take over

[oosik]

Just to be redundant, go to http://www.google.com and enter the word

failure

then press "I'm feeling lucky"

[dbp]

Just to be redundant, go to http://www.google.com and enter the word

failure

then press "I'm feeling lucky"

I am not exactly a fan of Bush, but Google Bombs are pretty stupid.

[The AD]

EDIT: can't link the image I found so nevermind...

[natty dread]

Maybe he'll start apologizing for his various other fuck ups now...not.

[Viva]

Maybe he'll start apologizing for his various other fuck ups now...not.

Now, now. A "fuck up" to you is $$$ to some Bush supporter elsewhere.

[Blurred]

I'm looking for the ski forum. Has anyone seen it?

[Plakespear]

The ski forum won't be back for a few more weeks. Perhaps when the white ribbon of death opens next month, it might come out of hiding.

[Powder Seeker]

The ski forum won't be back for a few more weeks. Perhaps when the white ribbon of death opens next month, it might come out of hiding.

Let's hope so.

[natty dread]

A Fatal Incuriosity
By MAUREEN DOWD
I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.

Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.

At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.

Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.

As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."

President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

[Benny Profane]

Well, that's kinda fucked up, the way she connects the nursing home tragedy with bushie boy's stupidity and boneheadness. But she's preaching to the chior anyhoo, so I guess a lot of people will get some perverse pleasure out of that one.

What's he got to lose with a little humility? He's in lame duck land, and he's trying to absorb a lot of the blame so the Republicans can still hold the Congress and Senate with the upcoming elections.

[Mcwop]

Well, that's kinda fucked up, the way she connects the nursing home tragedy with bushie boy's stupidity and boneheadness. But she's preaching to the chior anyhoo, so I guess a lot of people will get some perverse pleasure out of that one.

What's he got to lose with a little humility? He's in lame duck land, and he's trying to absorb a lot of the blame so the Republicans can still hold the Congress and Senate with the upcoming elections.

Don't worry some in congress are buying their own ticket to the unemployment lineall on their own.

On Sept. 2 — five days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast — Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., who represents New Orleans and is a senior member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was allowed through the military blockades set up around the city to reach the Superdome, where thousands of evacuees had been taken.

Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A 5-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request.

[Stu Gotz]

"Hi, I'm George W. and I'm an incompetent." That is what the President tentatively declared yesterday when he accepted "responsibility" for the Katrina fiasco. Ok, maybe he just implied it. But it is clear that the President just enrolled in Dr. Karl Rove's (Director of the Federal Emergency Image Management Agency) Twelve Step Poll Recovery Program.

Dr. Karl insisted that his patient enroll in the program when it became apparent that the "shift the blame to the locals" strategy wasn't working. Even Brit Hume was having difficulty with the talking points.

[Benny Profane]

I don't want to be a defender of stupid bush for brains, but after hearing local authorities interviewed over the past few weeks, I'd have to say that he's not the only bonehead. Especially that chief of police. I'm guessing that his qualifications are being somebody's second cousin.