Quake3World

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/09/ka ... ties_.html

any questions?

fag0t

mag0t...

I think my Dad trains those guys. Seriously.

if its on the web it must be true

booker wrote:if its on the web it must be true

moron alert?

Need more tinfoil babe?

booker wrote:if its on the web it must be true

Yea, if it's in the New York Times it must be a lie.

Freakaloin wrote:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/09/katrina_authorities_.html

any questions?

Expected actually. Did you see the reader's comments? LOL! Umm, once an area is under "Martial Law", the rules do change...

The "Swiss student's" comments were obviously made by a faker. LOL

Martial law doesn't say anything about hired mercenaries.

New Orleans isn't any different from Iraq as far as the Bush administration is concerned. They're using the same approach they used on Falluja and every other city they've decided to 'free' over there. It's the only way they know how to operate.

R00k wrote:Martial law doesn't say anything about hired mercenaries.

Not necessarily but it can imply military style organizations (see wiki quote below). Anyway, I meant something more general in that once any area in any country declares "***Martial Law***", you should expect that many of your usual "rights" are gone while you are in that region. I suspect it must feel alot like being in a harsh dictator's domain.

I also wonder how much looting will occur directly from the military personnel...

i.e. from the wikipedia: "Martial law is instituted most often when it becomes necessary to favor the activity of military authorities and organizations, usually for urgent unforeseen needs, and when the normal institutions of justice either cannot function or could be deemed too slow or too weak for the new situation"

Yes, but the hired armed guards don't have to answer to our government, just to their bosses in the company. I have a real problem with that.

George W. Bush Still Rocks!
Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 9, 2005

Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.

This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and reassuring matronly tones.

And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de Álava. Why did BushCo fail its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and America's apparent inability to take care of its own.

But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.

He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't matter. Corporate interests über alles, baby. Protect the core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece, really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead.

So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it would be different? Just look. All major social services are being gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in Guantánamo.

The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3 billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.

Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard is stuck over there, along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.

Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help "convey a positive image" about the government's response to the victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from his former job as head of something called the International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.

Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable, right, Dubya?

And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more than a little sad.

Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.

Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 090905.DTL

lol, cutting. some gaps between those paras would be nice.

didn't read the whole thing but my god what a beautiful metaphor:

...a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.

seremtan wrote:lol, cutting. some gaps between those paras would be nice.

I didn't realize it was going to be unbroken like that until after I posted it. Should have refreshed. :icon32:

[xeno]Julios wrote:didn't read the whole thing but my god what a beautiful metaphor:

...a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.

Yea it's well written. But I would have changed this:

And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish.

To this:

And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like Colonel Sanders ordering an investigation into what happened to all the chickens.

Here is a fairly major newspaper calling for the Bush administration to be driven out of Washington.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinio ... &cset=true

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.

get a rope...

His approval rating is now below 40.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050910/ap_ ... HNlYwM3MDM

hax103 wrote:

Freakaloin wrote:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/09/katrina_authorities_.html

any questions?

Expected actually. Did you see the reader's comments? LOL! Umm, once an area is under "Martial Law", the rules do change...

The "Swiss student's" comments were obviously made by a faker. LOL

Are you retarded? Has martial law been declared?

Nightshade wrote:

hax103 wrote:

Freakaloin wrote:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/09/ka ... ties_.html

any questions?

Expected actually. Did you see the reader's comments? LOL! Umm, once an area is under "Martial Law", the rules do change...

The "Swiss student's" comments were obviously made by a faker. LOL

Are you retarded? Has martial law been declared?

Thanks for the "retarted" comment. Heres a gift for u too

ROFL!

Earth to NightJerkOff! Earth to NightJerkOff!

Martial Law was declared for New Orleans on 31st August.

Here is a quote from the New York Times and a quote: "There's a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal authority for mandatory evacuations,"

see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/natio ... storm.html

Louisiana's constitution doesn't allow for martial law, only declaration for a state of emergency.

R00k wrote:Louisiana's constitution doesn't allow for martial law, only declaration for a state of emergency.

Some clarifications:

(1) The Louisiana constitution simply does not mention the term "martial law"

(2) The Louisiana constitution does mention explicitly (as you also said) a "state of emergency"

So, one might ask, "What the hell does - state of emergency - mean for the New Orleans situation?

Here is a quote: "The declaration of a state of emergency issued by Gov. Kathleen Blanco (of Louisiana) on Friday and set to continue for at least a month does give officials power to suspend civil liberties in the process of restoring order, and the Louisiana Homeland Security and Emergency Assistance and Disaster Act of 1993 gives the governor and heads of parishes power to commandeer property"

see http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2 ... al-law.php

So, it does sound like "martial law" (suspending civil liberties, etc.) to me and it seems that the phrase "martial law" is used very frequently by the USA news organizations and the mayor of New Orleans.