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Vice President Dick Cheney, while visiting Gulfport, Mississippi on a tour of the disaster zone, was told to f##k himself on live television during an interview. Crooks and Liars reports,

Off camera, a protester shouts, “Go f##k yourself, Mr. Cheney. Go f##k yourself.” The camera remains on Cheney while we hear scuffling in the background.

CNN’s reporter asks Cheney, “Are you getting a lot of that Mr. Vice President?”

Cheney replies, “First time I’ve heard it., Must be a friend of John…, er, ah - never mind.”

Cheney laughs it off, but there are many people dead that aren’t laughing right now.

Video: Cheney told to F himself

[via Crooks and Liars]

Rich Kyanka, who runs the popular Something Awful web community which is hosted in New Orleans, setup a PayPal account on September 3rd in an attempt to raise money to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In a matter of hours, $27,695.41 was raised, with Rich adding an additional $3,000 of his own money. Just as he was about to send the money to the Red Cross, however, PayPal locked the account and began a fraud investigation.

In an attempt to unlock the Something Awful account, Kyanka faxed copies of bank statements, credit card statements and his driver’s license. However, in an e-mail, PayPal told him he would have to wait “between three and five business days” while the investigation continued, Kyanka said.

Kyanka said he asked PayPal to donate the money directly from the account to the Red Cross.

However, PayPal declined, saying it has an exclusive charity relationship with United Way of America.

When Something Awful members complained about the choice of organization — citing, among other things, theft by the former head of the United Way of the National Capital Area, Kyanka decided to refund all the money back to donors and have them donate it directly to the Red Cross.

This wasn’t the only occurance, other websites also reported that accounts they had setup to raise money for Katrina victims were frozen. It’s a shame that the money was frozen, however, I am trying to understand the point of setting up an intermediate account in the first place — beyond the obvious donating and receiving recognition as a community or group. Why not simply urge the members of your community to give directly to the Red Cross, or other organization of their choosing?

[via Wired]

The Bush-Katrina timeline as told by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart (paraphrased, watch the must-see video for the full version):

• Aug 27th: (Two days before the storm hit) President Bush was easing into week five of his summer break in Crawford, Texas.
• Aug 28th: (Katrina pours down on the Gulf Coast) The President stayed at the ranch, but urged Gulf Residents to listen to officials who were closer to the action, than him.
• Aug 29th: (Katrina hits) The President boards Air Force One and takes off immediately in the opposite direction to Arizona for a Townhall meeting on Medicare.
• Aug 30th: (Katrina’s waters break through the levees) Bush headed directly into the eye of … San Diego; for a ceremony marking the end of World War II.
• Aug 31st: President Bush makes a monumental decision to cut his vacation short.
• Sep 1st: President Bush makes an appearance on Good Morning America. There he stated “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Anyone except the Weather Channel, CNN, most major networks, National Geographic, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and even a former levee engineer interviewed the Saturday before the storm hit.
• Sep 2nd: President Bush finally makes it to the disaster zone and in a speech remembers his druken days visiting the city. “I believe the town where I used to come, from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself — occassionally too much — will be that very same town.”

And in the face of inarguable evidence that the Federal response was bungled, bureaucratic and incompetent, the C.E.O. President turned to Michael Brown, the head of F.E.M.A., and let loose his righteous indignation at a tragedy compounded by mis-management, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Must-see video: The Daily Show Bush-Katrina Timeline

More Timelines

• Think Progress
• Times Online
• CNN
• The BBC

Just when you thought it wasn’t possible to add more fuel to the fire, in steps former First-Lady Barbara Bush commenting on the displaced citizens of Hurricane Katrina.

“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program “Marketplace.” “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

And to think we wondered where Bush Junior got his attitude from.

[via CNN]

It’s absolutely mind boggling that there are people out there who would try to make a quick buck off of the misfortune of others.

Even as millions of Americans rally to make donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Internet is brimming with swindles, come-ons and opportunistic pandering related to the relief effort in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And the frauds are more varied and more numerous than in past disasters, according to law enforcement officials and online watchdog groups.

Florida’s attorney general has already filed a fraud lawsuit against a man who started one of the earliest networks of Web sites - katrinahelp.com, katrinadonations.com and others - that stated they were collecting donations for storm victims.

In Missouri, a much wider constellation of Internet sites - with names like parishdonations.com and katrinafamilies.com - displayed pictures of the flood-ravaged South and drove traffic to a single site, InternetDonations.org, a nonprofit entity with apparent links to white separatist groups.

[Full Article]

In what will most likely amount to a footnote in the Katrina relief effort, the FCC handed over control of 1-800-RED-CROSS to the nonprofit group, removing it from the hands of corporate digit-squatter 800Ideas.com which was hoping for a pay-off.

“They weren’t going to give it to us, and they were going to charge us ridiculous amounts of money to use it,” says Chuck Connor, senior vice president of communication and marketing for the American Red Cross. “They were talking about the kinds of money that changed hands for 1-800-FLOWERS, which is ridiculous.”

…

The Red Cross finally asked the FCC to intervene last Friday in the wake of Katrina. The commission ruled the same day, noting its longstanding policies “against warehousing, hoarding and brokering of toll-free numbers” and the importance of the Red Cross’ work.

Visit the American Red Cross to learn how you can help.

[via Wired]

The Bush administration is continuing to duck questions about accountability, what went wrong, and why it took so long to respond. And in the midst of the chaos, Bush has had to gall to express his confidence in his administration’s ability to deal with another disaster, natural or otherwise. The people want to know, from what does he derive that confidence, based on the response?

The Bush administration’s lack of response in this crisis isn’t going unnoticed. The world has already begun voicing its opinions.

Malaysia’s Berita Harian

When the tsunami hit Asia last December, Bush succeeded in showing off his abilities by offering appropriate and well-organised humanitarian aid, but it seems he has been unresponsive, disorganised and discriminatory in dealing with the Katrina disaster.

Australia’s The Age

President Bush is increasingly seen as out of touch with ordinary people and with reality on the ground - in New Orleans and Iraq - and also on issues such as climate change. The president and, by association, Republicans are highly vulnerable for the first time in years. How the Administration responds has broader implications, too - a deeply unpopular, lame duck president could alter the balance of global leadership.

Nahum Barnea in Israel’s Yediot Aharonot

Just as 11 September 2001 changed the American agenda from internal matters to foreign policy and the war on terror, so Katrina is liable to take America back to its internal agenda: dealing with the environment, society, and the gaps between whites and blacks and between rich and poor.

Nick Reimer in Germany’s die tageszeitung

New Orleans has already become a symbol: never before in human history has a natural disaster been predicted in such exact detail. Despite this, the prediction had no effect. It’s as if mankind has lost the power to correct its own mistakes: In New Orleans, it slid into catastrophe submissively and with eyes wide open. Climate change has already arrived.

Zimbabwe’s Herald

The fact that New Orleans is a southern town predominantly populated by African-Americans explains why President George W. Bush did not see the need to cut short his holiday. All that Bush has done so far is to issue threats against the victims, and deploying trigger-happy American troops - fresh from abusing Iraqi prisoners - to go and “restore order”.

During the Concert for Hurricane Relief, Kanye West decided to ignore the teleprompters and attempted to speak his mind during a narration with Mike Meyers.

(Mike Meyers reads from the teleprompter)

Kanye West: “I hate the way they portray us in the media.

“If you see a black family it says they are looting. If you see a white family it says they are looking for food.

“And you know that it’s been five days because most of the people are black and even for me to complain about — I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation so now I’m calling my business manager right now, to see what is the biggest amount I can give.

“And just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help with the set up, the way that America is set up to help — The poor, the black people, the less well off as slow as possible. I mean, this is, Red Cross is doing everything they can.

“We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war right now fighting another way and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.”

(Mike Meyers tries to get back on script and reads from the teleprompter)

Kanye West: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

(Mike Meyers turns with an astonished look and the camera cuts)

NBC decided to delete Kanye’s remarks in the West Coast broadcast of the telethon.

The must-see video is on Crooks and Liars.

[via Crooks and Liars]

Our complacent media, admist the horror of Hurricane Katrina, may have finally grown a spine.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

…

And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.

The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.

He and others are calling the debacle the “anti 9-11″: “The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled,” he wrote on Sunday.

“Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.”

[via The BBC]

Of all of the websites tracking the Katrina disaster, surely one of the most remarkable is Scipionus.com.

Visitors swoop down over a map of the Gulf Coast that’s awash in hundreds of red teardrops, each denoting information about specific geographical points in the area. That’s pretty amazing in itself, but there’s more: All of the information on the map has been provided by ordinary citizens, most of whom presumably have come to the site in search of information on the flood themselves.

[Full Article]