The bad news: There was yet another mass shooting, one of the victims being a 10-year-old girl who was grazed and thankfully is in good condition. The good news: There were no deaths.
Happy Mother’s day:
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Gunmen opened fire on dozens of people marching in a Mother’s Day neighborhood parade in New Orleans on Sunday, wounding at least 17 people, police said.
Three suspects were seen running from the scene. Raw video at the link.
Sadly, yesterday, there was another shooting of one small child by another. Via TPM:
A five-year-old boy in Denton, Texas was left in critical condition after he was shot in the head by his eight-year-old friend Saturday morning. According to the Denton Record-Chronicle, the police said the two boys were alone in the bedroom when the older child found a .22 caliber rifle, pointed it at the other boy, and shot him.
Congratulations on the opening of your library. Now maybe you’ll go inside one. [...]
[A]s a resident of post-Katrina New Orleans, the one decision point that really has me fired up is how your library represents the choices you faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. [...]
Looting was the big problem?
As much as 80% of the city was flooded. Nearly a thousand Louisiana residents died, many in their own homes, drowned by storm surges that breached inadequate federal levees. Many thousands more were trapped in the Superdome and Convention Center for days without food, medicine, water, electricity, or working bathrooms.
And you were trying to figure out whether or not to quell an insurrection? These people were Americans, Mr. President. [...]
I am glad that you are slowing down, catching your breath and finding a way to live life to the fullest. In the meantime, tens of thousands of New Orleanians are still trying to find a way home, still displaced by the policies of your administration, still reeling from the failures of your decisions.
As the inimitable Garry Trudeau continues his wickedly satirical story arc about the George W. Bush “lie-bury”, Melissa Harris-Perry didn’t hold back either. She hosted The Rachel Maddow Show last night, and full-on skewered W in this segment:
What is the Decision Point that the Bush library asks you to confront when it comes to Hurricane Katrina? A disaster in which nearly 2,000 Americans died, many in their own homes. What’s the Decision Point that’s laid before you at the Bush library?
“Officials in New Orleans are overwhelmed. The president can send in troops, but those troops would serve in supporting roles and state efforts and would not have law enforcement powers unless the president invokes what’s called the Insurrection Act. President Bush had to make a choice: One, rely on the National Guard and local police. Two, send in federal troops in a supporting role with no law enforcement authority.
Three, invoke the Insurrection Act and send in troops to restore order.”
Excuse me, restoring order was the problem when it it came to Hurricane Katrina, seriously? The main dilemma faced by President Bush when it came to the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was quelling disorder?
The Bush library takes you through this whole scenario about how to deal with the problem of looters and how to restore law and order in New Orleans. That is the Decision Point. No mention at all of, you know, search and rescue.
Eight years later, the people of New Orleans, who were basically left to starve and dehydrate and die in our city, mostly elderly people and children, eight years later, these people are memorialized at the Bush library as public enemies, not as citizens who were in need of relief….
So it should be noted that the level of urgency that’s on display inside Decision Point Theater was not so much on display when it came to the decider himself.
This was President Bush, the morningthat Katrina made landfall, sharing a cake with John McCain in Arizona! This was after his administration had already been informed that levees in New Orleans had been breached. This was President Bush on Day Two of the disaster, yukking it up with the country music star in Southern California.
That night as the situation was growing worse and worse in New Orleans, George W. Bush decided to return to his ranch in Crawford, Texas to finish up his vacation.
When he finally headed back to D.C. the next day, President Bush got an aerial view of the damage in Louisiana and Mississippi.
But by Friday, five days into that disaster, his aides at the White House were putting together DVDs of news coverage to convince President Bush how bad things were in New Orleans. During those five days,
President Bush was not “on the edge of his seat” as the Bush library would like you to believe. He was basically checked out. That’s the real history.
The truth is, the American people have already decided how they felt about President Bush’s leadership during Katrina, and while his approval ratings before Katrina weren’t that impressive, they never recovered afterwards.
15 months after the failed response, Democrats took control of the House. They took control of the Senate. and they took a majority of gubernatorial seats across the country. The public has already decided.
But, hey, if you’re in Dallas this weekend, you’ve got some time, go see how President Bush “saved” a city from disaster, and “restored a sense of calm” in all of the disorder.
Saturday marks the third anniversary of the spill in 2010, but only a small fraction of the billions in fines and other money owed by BP has trickled in for use on restoration projects, environmental groups say.
Local, state and environmental groups are banking on money from several sources
However, BP is proud to use their money to pay people to go on the Tee Vee Machine and say reassuring things like this:
And they lavish us with ads like this repeatedly force ads like this down our throats:
Here’s what’s really going on:
Gulf Coast groups say the region is still struggling.
Environmental groups say an unusually high number of sick dolphins are washing up on shore. They’re also finding tar balls on beaches, particularly after big storms.
On April 19, 2013, GAP released Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups? The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government’s widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [...]
Conclusions from the report strongly suggest that the dispersant Corexit was widely applied in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared.In reality, the oil/Corexit mixture became less visible, yet much more toxic than the oil alone. Nonetheless, indications are that both BP and the government were pleased with what Corexit accomplished. The report is available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three
Nor do they pollute the air with noxious fumes when they never explode.
Nor do those explosions that never happen ever kill people.
So, of course, no forward-looking country with clear-thinking leaders would ever consider exposing its citizens to even more noxious ammonia factories. Nor would they encourage any powerful corporations to engage in any undertakings that would rely on chemicals that could easily pollute and ignite the way the plant in West, Texas did.
The U.S. could soon be home to a lot more ammonia factories — not a comforting thought after a deadly explosion at an ammonia fertilizer plant in Texas on Wednesday evening. You can blame the fracking boom. [...]
Australian company Incitec Pivot this week announced [PDF] that it will be building a hulking new $850 million ammonia facility in Waggaman, La., just outside New Orleans. [...]
U.S.-based Mosaic announced in December that it may build a $700 million ammonia plant in St. James Parish, La. U.S.-based CHS Inc. said in September that it would construct a $1.2 billion ammonia plant in North Dakota. Also in September, Egypt’s largest company, Orascom Construction, said it would spend $1.4 billion to build a fertilizer plant in Iowa.
Well, erm, okay, but surely ammonia production has a good safety record overall, and the Texas disaster was just an anomaly. Right?
The Dallas Morning News reports that the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded Wednesday night told the Environmental Protection Agency and local public safety officials that it presented “no risk of fire or explosion.”
They lied to the EPA and were not in compliance with EPA regulations (EPA regulations do not allow felony violations of 18 USC 1001). If the company was in compliance with EPA regulations, then the 540,000 lbs of the explosive ammonium nitrate, stored at the facility, would not have blown up.
He’s in meltdown mode because of his now-pulled his tax plan, the one that would have replaced the income and corporate tax with a new sales tax. As TPM notes, he made the tax proposal a centerpiece of his second term agenda.
More from TPM, including a reminder that Paul Ryan’s/the House GOP budget is a losing proposition:
Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA), considered a leading presidential contender in 2016, is suffering a political meltdown in his home state… In an ominous sign for national Republicans, the immediate cause is a sweeping economic agenda with strong parallels to the House GOP’s latest budget. [...]
His retreat was a concession to the reality that the [tax] proposal was headed towards a humiliating defeat — and taking Jindal down with it along the way… [His] plans generated complaints from economists that they would require regressive tax increaseson the poor and middle class to secure lower taxes for the wealthy.
He’s going down in flames because of “his political style, his travel out of state, his budget cuts, additional talk of more budget cuts, and of course the tax plan,” per pollster Bernie Pinsonat.
It doesn’t help that Jindal refuses to take federal money from the Affordable Care Act to expand the state’s Medicaid system.
In fact, he has now become a leader in the fight to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows creationism to be taught in public schools.
And if all that isn’t enough, he’s about to be on Real Time! He told me about this appearance a few days ago, and I nearly forgot, but that’s okay. We DVR it every week.
Here’s the press release:
Louisiana Science Activist Zack Kopplin Is a Guest on “Real Time with Bill Maher”
Who: Bill Maher, Zack Kopplin, Sebastian Junger, Abby Huntsman, Senator Bernie Sanders, Stephen Moore
What: Zack Kopplin, a Louisiana native and Rice University sophomore who, as a high school student, launched a campaign to repeal Louisiana’s creationism law, will be interviewed as the mid-show guest and panelist on this week’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Last year, Kopplin’s research on hundreds of creationist voucher schools generated international attention. Kopplin has been named the first-ever “Troublemaker of the Year.”
He is also a recipient of the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award and National Center for Science Education’s Friend of Darwin Award.
His activism has been previously featured on “Moyers and Company,” “Viewpoint with John Fugelsang,” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Kopplin was highlighted as a “Footsoldier” on “The Melissa Harris-Perry Show.”
Kopplin is organizing a movement calling for a Second Giant Leap for humankind, which will be achieved by increasing science funding and teaching evidence based- science.
Lt. Col Barry Wingard is the lawyer for Gitmo detainee Fayiz Al-Kandari. For their ongoing story + related topics, please click on the link below: Kuwaiti Citizen Detained at Guantanamo since 2002
You can read the complete story here or on Wikipedia.
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