Global Warming Headlines

World on the verge of climate 'catastrophe': UN chief

Climate change accelerating, top scientists warn

Climate change will affect poor countries most, but will be felt everywhere.

Huge death toll after Bangladesh typhoon

Climate change fuelling water crisis

Aid Workers: Climate Change, Rising Prices Threaten Africa's Food Supply

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You Don't Need A Weatherman

To know which way the wind blows.

It's been blowing since yesterday. I know my wind chimes haven't stopped ringing.

This is what the American 24/7 cable channels call 'severe weather'.

Except it's Alberta. It's Edmonton. It's November. When we should have snow. We have above average temperatures. Rain. And now wind storms.

90 km an hour that's a hurricane by any other name. Except we are landlocked.

I call it Weird Weather.

Wind warning for: City of Edmonton-St. Albert-Sherwood Park

Issued at 5:11 AM MST TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2007

STRONG NORTHWEST WINDS OF 60 GUSTING TO 90 KM/H HAVE DEVELOPED.

AN INTENSE LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM MOVED EASTWARD THROUGH CENTRAL ALBERTA OVERNIGHT. IN THE WAKE OF THE SYSTEM GUSTY WESTERLY WINDS HAVE DEVELOPED AND WINDS OF 60 GUSTING TO 90 KM/H ARE EXPECTED ACROSS THE WARNING REGIONS UNTIL MID AFTERNOON.

PLEASE REFER TO THE LATEST PUBLIC FORECASTS FOR FURTHER DETAILS.


SEE:

Environmentalists Caused Wildfires

Black and White

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wind weather, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, severe weather,fall

Felix lll

So who does more in the region? USAID to Nicaragua is the price of a Starbuck's coffee. Ok an expensive one, but cheap is as cheap does. Luckily Cuba had medical missions in place since Hurricane Mitch. Rather than waiting for swift boat aid from the U.S.

In response to the Nicaraguan government’s request for international assistance, USAID provided an initial $150,000 to support the relief efforts, in addition to the $25,000 for hurricane preparedness provided prior to Felix’s landfall. As Felix approached the region, USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance deployed 23 disaster response experts in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, and Mexico, to support response wherever the storm made landfall.

As Washington raises the profile of its assistance to the region, the U.S. military is helping victims of natural disasters. On Wednesday, it diverted the U.S. Navy amphibious ship USS Wasp from military exercises off Panama to help Nicaragua recover from Hurricane Felix. Venezuela also sent aid to Nicaragua, and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already established on the Miskito coast on medical missions were helping as well.

Cuban doctors assist hurricane evacuees in Nicaragua

The head of the Cuban medical brigade, Luis Carlos Avila, said eight Cuban doctors along with their patients had been evacuated from Puerto Cabezas, capital city of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region(RAAN), located 536 kilometers from Managua.

Avila noted that some 57 Cuban doctors and nurses are serving in RAAN while a similar number are serving in the South Atlantic Autonomous Region as part of the cooperation agreements established between the island and Nicaragua.

He added that in Waspam to the north and also a target for Hurricane Felix there is another 40 Cuban doctors. The arrival of Hurricane Felix forced the evacuation of some 10 000 people.

Along with Cuban doctors and local healthcare personnel, those working shoulder-to-shoulder with them in these improvised facilities include 20 young Nicaraguans in their fifth year of medical school at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, in Cuba).

The group is part of the 59 students who in the weeks previous to the disaster had been carrying out community work in remote areas of Nicaragua under the supervision of instructors in the Cuban medical brigade.

Cuban health cooperation benefits poorest hondurans

The Cuban Medical Brigades that arrived to Honduras on November 3, 1998, after the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch, have assisted more than 1.6 million people and continue to offer care with a staff of 280 healthcare professionals.

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua: Thousands of people on Nicaragua's remote Caribbean coast urgently need food, water, medical supplies and tools to rebuild their communities following Hurricane Felix, residents and a U.N. official said.

Felix devastated remote jungle beaches and communities along the Miskito coastline when it struck Tuesday as a Category 5 hurricane, destroying crops, erasing homes and killing scores of people.

The U.N. representative in Nicaragua, Alfredo Missair, said Friday that more than 100,000 Nicaraguans were directly affected by the storm and the country will need US$43.5 million (€32 million) in aid over the next six months

Nicaraguan television reported that Canada offered US$1 million (€730,000) to Central American countries affected by Felix, and 10,000 blankets for Nicaragua. Taiwan and Japan also donated money and supplies, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos said.

The U.S. Embassy in Managua said in a statement Saturday that it will donate US$1 million (€730,000) through the United States Agency for International Development to help an estimated 30,000 people.

The U.S. also sent four helicopters from the USS Wasp, rerouted to Nicaragua from Panama, and two helicopters and a reconnaissance plane from a military base in Honduras to help assess damage, rescue victims, and deliver supplies. Venezuela also sent aid and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already established on the Miskito coast on medical missions were helping as well.

The dead from Hurricane Felix wash up on the beaches

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Felix II

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Carlos Fuller, the deputy director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, described the southern hurricane activity as part of a "strange" weather pattern.

"About 10 years ago, we saw one develop in the south Atlantic where your professor would tell you that never occurs.

"Unfortunately, the two hurricanes have been Category Five hurricanes, they made landfall as Category Five hurricanes. It is the first time in history and we have data going back to 1885; this has never happened," the meteorologist said.

Fuller said a high-pressure system, known as the Bermuda High, kept both 'Dean' and 'Felix' on a westerly track.

As the remnants of powerful Hurricane Felix dissipate today over Central American mountains, some meteorologists are voicing concerns about the computer models that were meant to forecast the storm's intensification. "In general, computer models did very poorly in forecasting the development of this system," said Keith Blackwell, a hurricane researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile.

Felix set a record by strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane—the category for the most destructive storms on the Saffir-Simpson scale—in only 51 hours.

"It strengthened more rapidly than any other storm on record, anywhere in the world," Blackwell said.

If the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season ended tomorrow, we would still call it extraordinary. The year's first two hurricanes, Dean and Felix, both reached Category 5 classification. That's a record, one among many that these two storms helped establish.

To begin with, in the archives (which go back to 1851, with varying degrees of completeness) only three other seasons - 1960, 1961 and 2005 - had more than one of these monster storms. And no season can rival this additional feat: Both Dean and Felix struck land at full Category 5 strength.

There hadn't been a Category 5 landfall in what hurricane experts call the Atlantic basin (the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic north of the equator) since 1992's Hurricane Andrew ravaged southern Florida. Now we've seen two in two weeks.

The scariest factoid, however, is this : We've now witnessed eight Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic basin in the past five years (Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean and Felix).

You have to go back to the 1960s, with six recorded Category 5s, to find another decade that even approaches the present one in this regard. (And if you look beyond the Atlantic? In June, Cyclone Gonu was a Category 5 and the strongest storm ever observed in the Arabian Sea.)

It's hard to keep up with the crazed weather. As I write, a heat wave has killed over 50 people in the Midwest and South, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees in Evening Shade, Arkansas. Torrential storms have flooded Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota. California has its second largest wildfire ever. Texas and Kansas are battening down for new storms, while still recovering from last month's floods, along with Oklahoma, which is now getting flooded again. A few weeks before, a massive rainstorm closed down the New York City subways. That doesn't count over 2,000 dead and millions displaced in India and Bangladesh floods, runaway forest fires in Greece, the hottest-ever temperature in Japan, or unprecedented melting of Arctic icecaps. Tomorrow the weather will ricochet off the charts someplace else.

This surge of weird weather offers a powerful warning. Placed in context, its lessons could also help us overcome the denial that's prevented the United States from taking action on global climate change. They could give courage to elected representatives who've wanted to act but have been hobbled by timidity. They could create a political opening to defeat prominent elected climate-change deniers whose seats used to seem unassailable and are running for reelection in hard-hit states. They could help the Senate leadership stand strong and call the bluff of those threatening a filibuster or a Bush veto. As Samuel Johnson wrote, knowing you’ll be hanged in two weeks concentrates one’s mind wonderfully. What's happening to our weather just might foreshadow that hanging.

A few years ago, global warming felt remote to most Americans. Although they heard it debated, it didn’t seem real. The media gave “equal time” to deniers and the most respected scientists. Now 84% of Americans view human activity as at least contributing to global climate change, and 70% demand greater government action. Responses have shifted in the wake of Katrina and the succession of local disasters; Gore's Inconvenient Truth; the international IPCC report and similar impeccably credentialed scientific studies; and the start of serious media coverage, from Parade and the AARP magazine to Vogue. Add the impact of so many ordinary citizens speaking out, and Americans are starting to link the disasters they're seeing around them with what's happening to the planet.

When people's communities are hit with exceptional floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, or runaway wildfires, or they see these events on TV, even conservatives who would have once treated them as random "acts of God" start recognizing their deeper roots in the patterns of human action. In a May 2006 poll of South Carolina hunters and fishermen, for instance, 68% agreed that global warming was an urgent problem requiring immediate action, and a similar number said they'd seen the immediate impact of climate change on local fish and wildlife. Even before this summer's parade of calamities, 75% of all Americans said recent weather had been stranger than usual

So our national frame on the weather is beginning to shift. Each new "natural disaster" now reinforces the sense that just maybe not all these disasters are so natural after all. And if we fail to seriously address their roots, similar ones or worse will dominate our future.

Of course global climate change doesn’t cause every extreme weather event. And not all our fellow citizens are quite ready to act on the full enormity of the climate crisis, still resisting much of what needs to be done, such as increasing gas taxes. But most Americans want someone to do something, even if they're ambivalent about paying the costs. The more our warnings resonate with what people see around them, the more they can draw broader links, and the more the Exxon-funded denials ring hollow.

This situation expands political possibilities. While memory of this summer of disasters is still fresh, why not begin now to make a major issue of the rabid global climate change denial of Senators like Oklahoma's James Inhofe, Texas’s John Cornyn, and Oregon's Gordon Smith. Inhofe, who's called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has been considered to have a safe seat. But his approval rating, just after last November's election, was a lowly 46%, and Cornyn's 45%, both lower than just-defeated Virginia Senator George Allen. So they may already be more vulnerable than conventional wisdom suggests. Gordon Smith's race has long been forecast as tight. Instead of writing off the prime deniers as unbeatable, or dismissing global climate change as too complex to make an electoral difference, why not brand them with their stands, juxtaposing their dismissal of the crisis with images of flooded homes and farms?

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Felix

No wall to wall coverage on America's 24/7 cable news networks in the aftermath of last weeks fatal double Hurricanes. Because of course they did not hit the U.S.

What might have happened if the hurricanes had veered north into the United States instead of churning on similar paths west through the Caribbean?

Instead they look out to the Atlantic.

Invest 99L - Possible tropical depression off the US east coast

The Miskito Indians were the excuse used by the American created the Contra's in their war against the current President of Nicaragua. But they seem to have forgotten them now.

Felix's dead wash ashore
PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua–Bodies of Miskito Indians killed by Hurricane Felix floated in the Caribbean off Central America and washed up on beaches yesterday as the death toll from the storm rose to almost 100.

And then the numbers increased.

Hurricane death toll hits 130 on Nicaragua coast


Felix was as strong as Mitch which hit just nine years ago. Not a common hurricane but a force 5 massive damaging Hurricane not worthy of more than a mere mention between reports on missing people and Fred Thompson's announcement of running for President.

The disaster industry will so get underway reconstructing the devastated countries according to its neo-con agenda.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing shock therapy on countries in various states of shock for at least three decades, most notably after Latin America’s military coups and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say that today’s disaster capitalism really hit its stride with Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished countries were desperate for reconstruction aid -- and it came, but with strings attached. In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what the Financial Times called “speed sell-offs after the storm.” It passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric company and its petroleum sector.

All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua.”

Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank’s emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities -- more than 80 percent of the wave’s victims -- the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like roads and schools, bank documents recognize that re-building them “may strain public finances” and suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, they have only one idea). “For certain investments,” notes the bank’s tsunami-response plan, “it may be appropriate to utilize private financing.”

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Double Trouble

Two Hurricanes have hit Mexico and Nicaragua , but don't expect the folks at CNN and Fox who do their Wild Weather/Wicked Weather reports to make much about this since all they care about is their gulf coast. There will be no wall to wall coverage, just updates.

Oh yes and remember last year when the hurricane season was milder and all the climate change deniers rejoiced at how wrong predictions were for a nasty hurricane season. Well this year it is a nasty hurricane season as predicted due to climate change. However since they have not hit the U.S. corporate America could care less.

The U.S. still has not paid up its funding obligations to Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch.

Hurricanes swept ashore in Nicaragua and Mexico within hours of each other Tuesday, the first time Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have made landfall on the same day since the National Hurricane Center began keeping records in the 1940s.

Felix arrived first, punishing sparsely populated northern Nicaragua with 160 mph winds before dawn, then plowing inland across Honduras, threatening floods and mudslides in a region still recovering from Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people in 1998.

More than 1,900 miles away, Henriette swelled to hurricane strength Tuesday afternoon and roared onto the southern tip of Mexico's Baja Peninsula, an area thick with some of Latin America's swankiest hotels and vacation homes.

Tuesday was historic for two reasons: It was the first time on record that two Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes made landfall in the same year, with Felix coming two weeks after Hurricane Dean slammed into southern Mexico.

And Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes had never made landfall on the same date, according to records that began in 1949.

A NOAA map on Tuesday shows hurricanes Henriette, left center, and Felix. There were no reports of serious damage from Henriette, but Felix cut a swath of destruction as it headed into Honduras.

This storm will now be true test of the Harpers Development Agenda with his new found interest in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lets see how quick he responds to this disaster.

As they say there is always a silver lining in every storm cloud this case Alvaro Orozco who has gone into hiding, may not be deported to Nicaragua since his home may not be there anymore. Wishful thinking.




SEE:

Hurricane and Howard Dean

Mother Prevails

Remember Katrina and Rita?

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After Katrina

George W. Bush failed to be on site in New York immediately after 9/11. He failed again when Katrina devastated New Orleans.

On September 14, 2001 he cruised over WTC site in a helicopter, shades of flying over New Orleans, and does his famous photo-op with the Firemen at Ground Zero.

==Around mid-afternoon on Friday, Bush finally appears in New York City with a large Congressional delegation and takes a quick helicopter tour of the devastated area with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki as warplanes fly overhead. Afterwards, Bush visits Ground Zero, where he engages in a rare impromptu exchange with a crowd. As rescue personnel chant “U.S.A! U.S.A.!,” Bush climbs atop a small pile of rubble and uses a bullhorn to thank them for their efforts. When some workers call out that they can’t hear, Bush responds "I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!" The crowd reacts with cheers and more chants of “U.S.A.!” Workers at Ground Zero are clearly encouraged by Bush’s visit, but there is also annoyance over the two hour shutdown of rescue work caused by the extremely tight security measures. [nyt.Sep.14.2001 / cnn.Sep.14.2001 / dmn.Sep.15.2001]

After talking to state officials and emergency teams in New York, the president flew to Camp David for what a senior US official called a "decision-making meeting" later on Saturday with top advisors.

September 14: President Bush declares a national emergency. The Senate adopts a resolution authorizing the use of U.S. armed forces against those responsible for the attacks. President Bush visits the World Trade Center site. Federal officials release names of the 19 hijackers. Bush declares a "national day of prayer and remembrance." Many Americans attend religious services. Congress unanimously approves $40 billion for emergency aid, including $20 billion for New York. President Bush activates 50,000 national guard and reserve members to help with recovery and security.

After Katrina he failed to visit New Orleans until the anniversary of 9/11. Weeks after the hurricane hit. And then it was for another photo op like 9/11.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) Sunday, September 11, 2005;

-- President Bush arrived in Louisiana Sunday as the official death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 400 and the search for bodies continued nearly two weeks after the storm hit the Gulf Coast.

The visit is Bush's third to the region but his first chance to get a first-hand look at the streets of New Orleans, which were flooded after levees protecting the low-lying city broke.

Two days after the storm hit, Bush surveyed Katrina's destruction from Air Force One on his way back to Washington from Crawford, Texas, where he'd spent a month's vacation. He visited other parts of the region in two subsequent visits.

He was on vacation prior to Katrina as he was prior to 9/11.

“News coverage has pointedly stressed that W.'s month-long stay at his ranch in Crawford is the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. Washington Post supercomputers calculated that if you add up all his weekends at Camp David, layovers at Kennebunkport and assorted to-ing and fro-ing, W. will have spent 42 percent of his presidency ‘at vacation spots or en route.’” Charles Krauthammer, “A Vacation Bush Deserves,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2001.

Yesterday he commemorated his regimes failure to support the people of New Orleans then and now. And as usual there was no mea culpa.

President Bush and other officials observed the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, honoring the dead and touring still ruined neighborhoods.

However the real scandal is not that he arrived late after Hurricane Katrina, but that after two years the City has not been rebuilt, funds have been squandered.

A recent report from the RFK Center for Human Rights and the Institute for Southern Studies estimated that the Bush administration was overstating federal funding for the Gulf Coast rebuilding campaign by as much as 300%, with about $35 billion of an estimated $114 billion actually spent.

With America's largest black city and thousands of blacks stranded in the immediate aftermath of the storm the failure to rescue them smacked of racism.

That the federal government has utterly failed in these lethal days is universally obvious.

Is it because so many of these people are black and poor? Is it because Bush has successfully stolen a second term and just doesn't care? Is it because this gouged and battered organization that was once our government has been so thoroughly exhausted by war and corruption that it cannot or will not manage so basic a task as bringing the necessities of life to its needlessly dying citizens?

But to hear of dead bodies being stacked outside a professional football stadium to avoid further stench where ten thousand Americans can't get water, food or sanitary facilities.To see dazed elders who've just lost their homes or hospital rooms being laid on sidewalks to die. To watch crying children stretched out on the ground, separated from their parents, dehydrated, overheated, starving....this is too much to bear.

How utterly can our nation have failed? How totally bankrupt can we be?

And the guy in charge of all this who should have been fired; Homeland Security boss Chertoff, wasn't.

Congressional investigators lambasted the U.S. government for its response to Hurricane Katrina, saying a lack of a clear chain of command hindered relief efforts and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff or another top official should have been the point person on relief efforts.

The Government Accountability Office also found that the government still lacks sufficient plans and training programs to prepare for catastrophic disasters like the Aug. 29 storm that devastated much of the Gulf Coast area. But it also singled out Chertoff in several shortcomings.

Until now, Chertoff has largely escaped widespread criticism of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. By contrast, then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, the principal federal official at the disaster site, quit his job after becoming the public face of the failures.

The report said that neither Chertoff nor any of his deputies in the disaster area acted as President George W. Bush's overall storm coordinator, "which serves to underscore the immaturity of and weaknesses relating to the current national response framework."

After all Katrina was not a surprise to the administration since they had anticipated it.

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all."

Some critics are suggesting President Bush was as least partly responsible for the flooding in New Orleans. In a widely quoted opinion piece, former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal says that "the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature," and cites years of reduced funding for federal flood-control projects around New Orleans.

Our fact-checking confirms that Bush indeed cut funding for projects specifically designed to strengthen levees. Indeed, local officials had been complaining about that for years.

And with a lame duck President and an administration running on the spot nothing has changed. The failures that led to the destruction of New Orleans plague the White House still.

When investigating the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, a House of Representatives select committee cited a “failure of initiative” at all levels of government. The storm killed 1,836 people, caused an estimated $81 billion in damage, and displaced some two million people. The population of New Orleans is currently about 66 percent of its pre-Katrina level, and the city’s uneven recovery is examined in depth in this New York Times interactive feature. The Department of Homeland Security has since quadrupled its stockpiles of emergency supplies and sought to improve emergency planning at the community level. The 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act signed by President Bush in August promises to provide increased funding for emergency communications and first responders. Yet some experts believe the lessons of the disaster appear to have gone unlearned. In his recent book, The Edge of Disaster, CFR’s Stephen Flynn says the levees that failed to protect New Orleans two years ago are being rebuilt to the same standard as before, capable only of enduring a Category 3 hurricane.

Now compare Bush's slow response to President Johnson's visit to hurricane ravaged New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy. And a visit to the same lower ninth ward that Bush visited yesterday.

Lyndon Johnson received high marks for visiting the Lower Ninth Ward and victims in shelters a day after Hurricane Betsy ravaged New Orleans. ("I put aside all the problems on my desk to come to Louisiana as soon as I could," Johnson said.)

President Lyndon Baines Johnson flew into New Orleans the day after Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 and announced at the airport, "I am here because I want to see with my own eyes what the unhappy alliance of wind and water have done to this land and people."

The day after. Not a week later.

LBJ believed in the 'Great Society'. Bush believes in 'compassionate conservatism'. The latter is an ideological reaction to the former. And it has proven to be more of a failure than the Great Society ever was.


SEE:

Our Living Earth

Surge Blackout

What He Didn't Say

Soul of a City

Remember Katrina and Rita?

Katrina Mission Accomplished

Katrina: It's a Dog-Gone Crime

This is What Global Warming Looks Like

A Paradox called Katrina

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Hurricane and Howard Dean

Mexico, Belize bracing for wrath of Dean

Texas Warily Watches Dean and Prepares

Reminded me; we had not heard from or about Howard Dean in a while.

So has Dean been as big a disaster for the Democrats as his hurricane namesake appears to be for Jamaica and Mexico?

Not so says this article.

Bloggers and Billionaires, MoveOn and Howard Dean: The Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Plus I get to use the screamin' Dean photo again.

And this YouTube flashback.





SEE:

Sach Dean

Purple Wave USA

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Surge Blackout

With bad news like this;

An Iraqi power plant rebuilt with tens of millions of U.S. dollars fell into disrepair once transferred to the Baghdad government, according to the U.S. office that tracks reconstruction spending.

The Iraqis' failure to maintain the 320-megawatt Dora plant, considered an important source of power for electricity-starved Baghdad, is just one of the issues hindering attempts to rebuild the country, the latest audit report to Congress concludes.

The U.S. Government has decided to do this; US drops Baghdad electricity reports

While the Iraqi government points fingers elsewhere.Iraq Electricity Ministry blames provinces

This proves George Bush was right the U.S. is not capable of nation building. Or even maintaining infrastructure in Iraq or at home.

The Bush administration has shown little progress - and in some cases backtracked - on its pledge to do a better job in awarding contracts to small, Gulf Coast businesses for Hurricane Katrina work, a congressional analysis shows.

The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document missteps in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.

See:

What He Didn't Say

Iraq; The War For Oil

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