Current TV is running some amazing footage from Hurricane Katrina today. They have five segments, adding up to an hour long program, filmed by Doug Kiesling, a freelance Weather Journalist. My wife and I watched it from 7-8 AM. It is next on at 11 AM (then presumably 3 PM, etc.).  read more »

This diary was originally written once the lessons of Hurricane Katrina had sunk in a bit. This week is the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Two years ag...I remember watching on the weather channel as a category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the Gulf Coast and thinking, "THAT is going to be really bad."

But no one in the Bush Administration seemed to think that. They thought about celebrating John McCain's birthday, buying shoes in NYC, vacationing...while one hell of a hurricane was bearing down on America's Gulf Coast.

The people of America's Gulf coast didn't matter to the Bush Administration. Those people we watched die of neglect in New Orleans died because Republican America considered them insignificant...worthless...useless.  read more »

It is two years after Hurricane Katrina and what has become President Bush's emblematic war on the poor and black of New Orleans.

The anniversary is remembered by Walter Mosley, writing in The Nation:

We are coming up on the two-year mark since the Katrina debacle in Louisiana and Mississippi. I hesitate to call this date an anniversary because the word implies, in some way, a celebration, a birth. What we are scratching on the calendar is more like a notch on a raw gravestone, a count of the days and years that have passed without a reckoning for those who died, those who lost loved ones and for a city that is still in critical condition.

Not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age.

UPATE: Thursday MSM links after the jump.

You can help focus this issue politically . The Jewish Funds For Justice  read more »

The global warming "debate" is not what the right wing portrays it as. Long ago a solid, overwhelming consensus was reached among scientists that a.) global warming is happening, b.) that humans are contributing to warming, and c.) warming will seriously impact our civilization in the near future...maybe already is.

The debate among scientists has shifted to details. Will there be localized cooling in the North Atlantic? Where will there be droughts and where flooding? How rapidly and how bumpy will the changes be? But the main question for all of society is whether it is too late to do anything. THAT is the new global warming debate. I have two answers to this: we sure had BETTER be able to do something about it and YES, WE CAN!

I have been aware of global warming science for at least 25 years. The science goes back even further, to the 1960's when measuring carbon dioxide levels and the observation that carbon dioxide was increasing were first done by Roger Revelle. Way back then, Revelle noticed changes and predicted that temperatures would rise as a result. When I became aware of global warming some 25 years ago, many predictions were made: increased storminess, Northward migration of tropical diseases, increased variability of temperature extremes, etc. What has astonished me as I read about current global warming science is just how many of the predictions of 25 years ago are coming true. In science the value of a theory is in its predictive value. From what I can tell as an informed, though not professional, observer is that the predictive value of the global warming models has been good. Details may be inacurate, but the general predictions have come true.  read more »

I just posted a rant about the government's use of "the weather" to clear themselves of any responsability over at culturekitchen. My pet peeve? The refusal to link the freakishly hot and stormy weather to any environmental upheavals caused by the last hurricane season, including Hurricane Katrina.

I mean, if Puerto Rican's and countries all across the Caribbean have created preparedness plans for not just the before and during of a hurricane but particularly the environmental upheavals that come after it, why can't U.S. Americans? Do y'all really believe the U.S. is above any laws of nature?  read more »