President Obama's Weekly Address - November 3, 2012

Recovering and Rebuilding after the Storm

Can I Politicize Hurricane Sandy Yet?

Here's the quote of the day:

“The president has been all over this and he deserves great credit. I’ve been on the phone with him, like I said, yesterday, personally, three times. He gave me his number at the White House, told me to call him if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it. It’s been very good working with the president, and he and his administration have been coordinating with us great. It’s been wonderful.“

That quote brought to you Republican NewJersey Governor Chris Christie, whose state (my state) has been crushed by Hurricane Sandy. Major sections of the Jersey shore have been destroyed. I'm shocked at the devastation I see on the news reports on television.

Luckily, I was spared any damage or power outage. The storm made landfall about 90 minutes south of me, near Atlantic City (another destroyed city). I took a short walk around my neighborhood and couldn't go more than a couple of blocks without coming across downed trees, severed power lines and blocked streets.







But back to my point.

Kudos to Christie figuring out what's important and how crucial issues like federal disaster relief can be. I don't know if he was one of the Republican governors Mitt Romney called to offer advice*, you know because I suppose only Republican governors have been affected by the storm, but I wonder if Christie will have a come to Jesus moment at the voting booth next week. ... I doubt it.

Speaking of federal disaster relief, let's not forget, and really how can you at this point, that FEMA is in the crosshairs for Mitt Romney to gut if he's elected president. During a primary debate, Romney not only thought that disaster aid should be in the hands of the states, but went a step further and said that the private sector should be first in line for these types of situations.

Who knows what he's saying now, but last year, Mitt Romney said it was "immoral" for the government to borrow and spend money to pay for disaster relief. 

Importantly, he wasn't just talking about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which some conservatives say is a horrible waste of money. He was talking about "disaster relief."... 

..."Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," Romney told debate moderator John King. "And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?” 

When John King interrupted to clarify, "Including disaster relief?" Romney continued, "We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Sure! No federal relief for devastated states due to natural disasters. Let them fend for themselves since their coffers are always overflowing. And hell, while we're at it, it's the private, for-profit sector that should take care of the clean up and restoration of towns and cities that got washed away in the hurricane. Nothing like giving preference to the highest bidder when it comes to restoring essentials to survive. 

I really don't know what else to say about this except that we are witnessing, in live time, the differences between the two candidates in their response to the disaster we've seen here these last 36 hours. While President Obama admittedly has a bit of an advantage in actually being the president, he's suspended his campaign, continues to make sure help gets to ALL that need it, and is keeping in contact with state leaders regardless of political affiliation. Mitt Romney has "suspended his campaign" and decided to have "storm relief events" that look exactly the same as his campaign events.

Yesterday, the Republican team said it had canceled today's campaign event in Ohio. Mitt Romney was set to headline a "victory rally" at a specific venue in Dayton, alongside specific celebrity guests, but out of sensitivity, the event was scrapped. 

Instead, Romney will appear at the exact same venue at the exact same time with the exact same celebrity guests, but it will be billed as a "storm relief event." What about yesterday's promise about cancellations? A Republican official said Romney/Ryan hadn't broken its word because, technically, this is "not a campaign event per se." 

Hmm. The badge for today's "storm relief event" says "victory rally"; the sign on the door described the event as a "campaign rally"; they're playing the campaign warm-up songs for the audience; and before the "storm relief event" could begin, campaign officials showed the official campaign video on Romney's awesomeness.

But hey, it's not a campaign event if it we don't call it a campaign event, huh?

_________________________________
*Chris Christie was one of the governors that was called by Mitt Romney.

Quote of the Day

“Instead of doing everything he can to help Virginians and people on the East Coast recover from the loss of life and property that Irene dealt over the weekend, Cantor is parading around on Fox News talking about how he will hold federal aid hostage unless he gets to slash the budget. Anyone willing to play political games while people are suffering is unfit to be a congressman.”

~David Mills, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia.

Obama's Katrina -UPDATED

The Rude Pundit is spot on.

Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

It only took a couple of days before I started hearing the conservative pundits and assholes in general tried to dub the BP accident and subsequent oil spill clusterfuck "Obama's Katrina." Even Alex Witt-less on the "Obama News Network," also known as MSNBC, was asking if the federal response to the oil leak disaster was fast enough.

Question to Witt: Does the US Coast Guard work for British Petroleum or are they under the direction of the federal government and Commander in Chief, President Obama? Because the Coast Guard was there during the accident looking for survivors and leading in the rescue effort, you stupid twit. And coordinated efforts have been overseen by the government from the beginning. Yes, BP is in the middle of that, but are under government oversight to make sure the response has been cohesive.

I'm willing to bet that states' rights proponents were the first to run to the federal level for help or blame the feds for a lack of response, neither reaction being rational for their ideology. See Jindal, Bobby.

Adding... Stay tuned for the sabotage conspiracy to take wing, right wing that is. Of course, the President had said just recently that we need to expand oil drilling while we begin a transitional phase to other sources of energy in order to ween ourselves off of the Middle East teet, so why would this be sabotage? Wouldn't he have said the opposite so he can have an "I told you so" moment? Fucking wingnuts...

UPDATE (7:30pm): See what I mean? CONSPIRACY!!!



Great job, Neil Cavuto! But I wouldn't expect anything different. Seriously, does "Heckuva Job, Brownie" really have any credibility? It's not like we're talking about Arabian horses.

Douchebag of the Week: Dana Milbank

President Obama's press conference last Monday afternoon apparently ruffled the feathers of Washington press insiders when he called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney for a question regarding Iran. Anyone following Pitney on a regular basis knows that he has spent the last two weeks trying to contact Iranian protesters on the ground through various technological means, like Twitter and Facebook.

When called upon, Pitney asked, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian. We solicited questions on tonight from people who are still courageous enough to be communicating online. And one of them wanted to ask you this: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of -- of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?"

Pretty pertinent question, don't you think? Well Dana Milbank didn't. In fact, Milbank probably didn't even hear the question because he was so incensed that a mere blogger would be called upon instead of, well the Washington Post's Dana Milbank for example, perhaps to ask about President Obama's bathing suit paparazzi photo again. Titillating.

Milbank immediately took to his blog after the press conference and inaccurately "reported" the exchange between Pitney and the White House and spent the rest of the week trashing President Obama and his "staged" press conference, while Pitney continued the work of a real journalist getting as much information as possible from sources literally on the streets of Iran.

Staged press conferences, Dana? How quickly we forget Jeff Gannon. Or is that James Guckert? How quickly we forget the cabal of Fox reporters and conservative pundits doing the bidding of the Bush White House; an exclusive little group including the repugnant Neil Boortz and the crying lunatic, Glenn Beck.

Pitney then appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources, in an apparent "pre-arranged, staged" ambush flanked on either side by Milbank and the Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter, to accuse him of "collusion" with the White House, but Nico held his own, called Milbank out on his bathing suit silliness and slapped the whiny little bitch into next week.




According to multiple sources, at the end of the segment Milbank leaned in to Pitney and said, "You're such a dick." Perhaps if Milbank would do some actual journalistic work instead of the equivalent of a political gossip column for a newspaper who's credibility is continually fading (see: Dan Froomkin firing), maybe he'll get called on to ask a question. As long as it's not: "President Obama: Boxers or briefs?"

The Washington Post's faux reporter, Dana Milbank: Douchebag of the Week.

_______________
Adding... I would be remiss not to remind readers of the staged news conference conducted by FEMA during the California wildfires in October of 2007, and this dipshit Milbank is seriously going to call Pitney a staged White House plant? Fuck you, Dana.

T Minus 73 Days

"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well."

- Happy 54th Birthday to former FEMA director Michael D. Brown. You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie.

T Minus 140 Days

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

- To Michael Brown, the former director of FEMA who lied on his resumé when he applied for the position, September 2, 2005

US Missile Strikes US Spy Satellite

NY TIMES: A missile interceptor launched from a Navy warship has struck a dying American spy satellite orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon announced late Wednesday.

Completing a mission in which an interceptor designed for missile defense was used for the first time to attack a satellite, the Lake Erie, an Aegis-class cruiser, fired a single missile on Wednesday night. Officials cautioned that while early information indicated that the interceptor’s “kill vehicle” had hit the satellite, it would be 24 hours before it could be determined whether the fuel tank with 1,000 pounds of toxic hydrazine had been destroyed as planned.

Was the reason we shot this thing down really because of a possible toxic fuel spill? Or is it that now we have proven to China that we can shoot down a satellite in space just like they did last year? I always thought that inoperable satellites and falling debris from space burned up as it reentered the atmosphere.

Steve Benen at Carpetbagger notes:

...Some experts said the military is seizing an opportunity to test its controversial missile defense system against a satellite target.

But others noted that the Standard Missile-3 has successfully been tested against warhead targets, which are far smaller than the satellite.

“There has to be another reason behind this,” said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a liberal arms-control advocacy organization. “In the history of the space age, there has not been a single human being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space.”

An even closer look suggests most of the explanation for shooting the satellite down don’t hold up — the gas isn’t especially dangerous, and other hydrazine-filled objects have crashed on Earth to no effect.

The always-great Noah Shachtman quoted one military satellite observer saying, “Everything they said made sense except for the reason for doing the intercept in the first place.”

“The hydrazine tank is a 1-meter sphere containing about 400 liters of hydrazine. The stated hazard area is about 2 hectares, something like 1/10,000,000,000 of the area under the orbit,” he adds. The potential for actual harm in unbelievably small. Which means the hydrazine rationale just doesn’t hold up, literally not within orders of magnitude.”

“The cynic in me says that the idea that this is being done to protect the lives of humans is simply a feel-good cover story tossed to the media,” another veteran space security specialist adds. “It is true that hydrazine is very toxic and could result injury or death, but the odds of this happening are minuscule. The average person in American is many thousands of times more likely to be killed in a car accident than by any falling debris. In fact, no one has ever been killed by space debris (I have heard of one or two being struck but only minor injuries). So pretty much everything else you can think of (including getting hit by an asteroid/comet) is many times more likely than dying from this. Having the US government spend millions of dollars to destroy a billion-dollar failure to save zero lives is comedic gold.” […]

So what could that other reason be?

Our veteran space security specialist believes there are several. To him, the satellite shot is a chance for the military to try out its missile defense capabilities; a way to keep secret material out of the wrong hands; and a warning to the Chinese, after they destroyed a satellite about a year ago.

But the real kicker for me one line that gave me goosebumps in the Times article challenging Murphy's Law: "In the event that any of the hydrazine fuel falls on a populated area, the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday issued directions to communities on how to deal with dangerous debris from the satellite."

FEMA?! ...Holy shit.

CDC Suppressed Toxic Trailer Warnings

FEMA, oh FEMA... is there nothing you can't fuck up?

An exclusive CBS report reveals that the Center for Disease Control suppressed warnings of dangerously toxic levels of formaldehyde in the trailers that have been used for displaced persons from New Orleans provided by FEMA for two years, unless they've been evicted that is.

...the nation's top public health agency, suppressed repeated warnings from one of its top scientists, raising questions about whether the CDC bowed to pressure from FEMA to conceal the long-term health risks of formaldehyde in the trailers it distributed to hurricane victims - health risks like cancer and birth defects...

...Dr. Christopher De Rosa, director of the CDC's Division of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine, told his superiors "there is no safe level of exposure" to formaldehyde in trailers. That warning never made its way into any public report about the trailers...

...two of his staff members had been directed by FEMA officials to not "address longer term health effects" of formaldehyde in this February 2007 report... In fact, it wasn't until October 2007 - after eight months and pressure from congressional investigators that the CDC revised its February report and finally issued warnings about cancer and other long-term health risks of formaldehyde.

We all know that FEMA has been a dismal failure when it comes to basically anything they are involved in, from the response to Hurricane Katrina, to the fake news conference regarding the California fires last October. The whole department is a microcosm of the unethical cronyism and broken bureaucracy that has permeated this government to the core under the intrepid leadership of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; and now we find out that this corrupt administration has so systematically and thoroughly destroyed every governmental agency and department that even the CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL has been treated like a crack whore by the pimps in the White House.

This is unconscionable. There are about 40,000 families still living in formaldehyde-laced trailers that have been forgotten not only by the government, but by all of us. They've been displaced for over two years, breathing in toxic, cancer-causing fumes, left to rot while Bush and all his buddies raze low income housing in New Orleans that was only slightly damaged by Katrina in order to cleanse the city of these "undesirables" and dole out the land for high income hotel and construction projects. And now comes word of a CDC report that came out in February of 2007 omitting vital health threatening information but is revised eight months later only after pressure from the Homeland Security Committee?

These criminals should be taken into the main square and shot.

FEMA: Fraudulent Embarrassing Moronic Administration

By now we've all heard that in an attempt to show how great FEMA was handling things while fires raged in southern California, external affairs director Pat Philbin staged a fake news conference. How insane is it, that an organization under the Office of Homeland Security, after their response in New Orleans (or lack of) to Hurricane Katrina, has to stage a news conference to show the country how much better they are handling the latest disaster?

Of course, the White House claims not to know that this happened and does not condone it. Yeah, right.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said it was not appropriate that the questions were posed by agency staff members instead of reporters. FEMA was responsible for the "error in judgment," she said, adding that the White House did not know about it beforehand and did not condone it.
"FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error in judgment when they were attempting to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regard to the wildfires in California," Perino said. "It's not something I would have condoned. And they - I'm sure - will not do it again."

An error in judgement?! Perino also reported that any action taken against those responsible would be handled by FEMA. And to her credit she was right.

CNN reports that John "Pat" Philbin, the Director of Public Affairs responsible for FEMA's recent faked news conference, is effectively receiving a promotion... Philbin is slated to become Director of Public Affairs for the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell.

Heckuva job, Pat.


UPDATE: Philbin denied!

Olbermann: “…We’re told that a high ranking member of the Bush administration reviewed someone’s record, found him lacking and then severed ties with him. An event some have long prophesied as the first horseman of the apocalypse.”