Nearly four months after the maelstrom devastated New Orleans and much of the nearby Gulf Coast, the House was expected to vote Thursday on a final defense bill containing the storm assistance. The aid is mostly for reconstructing damaged buildings and aiding battered businesses and homeowners.

The Senate approved the measure 93-0 Wednesday night after the aid became entangled with — and then finally disengaged from — a fight over an unrelated effort to open oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge.

[..]

The $29 billion aid package is the result of two weeks of negotiating among lawmakers to nearly double Bush's initial funding request.

It includes:

$11.5 billion in Community Development Block Grants to spur economic development and help homeowners without flood insurance rebuild or repair their homes.

$4.4 billion for storm-related Defense Department expenses and facility damage.

$2.9 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to continue storm and flood repairs, begin reconstructing levees and accelerate studies on improving Gulf Coast flood protection.

$2.8 billion to repair damaged roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure.

$1.6 billion for education, including $645 million for schools that took in students, $750 million for schools affected by the hurricanes and $200 million for higher education.

$400 million for farmers and forests in Katrina disaster areas.

It was a huge victory for environmentalists and Senate Democrats who argued that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would jeopardize the wild ecosystem that characterizes the refuge's coastal plain where polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife thrive.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who has fought unsuccessfully for a quarter-century to open the plain to oil drilling, had hoped to garner enough votes to overcome a threatened filibuster by attaching the measure to the defense bill that included tens of billions of dollars for troops in Iraq and for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Instead, Stevens found himself a few votes shy of getting his wish.

"This has been the saddest day of my life," Stevens said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, R-Wash., an ardent defender of the refuge who led anti-drilling forces during the Senate debate, called Stevens' tactic "legislative blackmail" and "trickery" that united Democrats on the issue.

Republican leaders fell three votes short of the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster threat and advance the defense spending bill to a final vote, forcing GOP leaders to temporarily withdraw the bill and take out the drilling provision.

President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation that provides $8.7 billion in tax breaks over 10 years for Gulf Coast businesses, a measure he said is part of the government's plan to help the region rebuild from destructive hurricanes.

[..]

The measure, known as the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, sets up a special enterprise zone in the coastal area where businesses and jobs were destroyed following the Aug. 29 storm.

The tax breaks for business investment are aimed at luring companies into the region and keeping those that are already there. Companies can use a tax credit to defray salaries if they kept employees on the payroll even while shut down due to storm damage.

Vice President Dick Cheney cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate on Wednesday to seal the deal on a $39.7 billion deficit-reduction package.

Five moderate Republicans broke ranks, joining 44 Democrats and an independent to oppose the first entitlement-spending growth cuts in nearly a decade.

Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, among the five GOP holdouts, called the bill "a cynical piece of legislation that punishes our most vulnerable citizens."

[..]

The bill trims growth in Medicaid spending $4.8 billion and Medicare by $6.4 billion over five years. It also cuts $12.6 billion from student loan programs.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday passed a $602 billion bill that cuts funds for health, education and labor programs on the same day the Senate approved two separate rounds of cuts to health care programs for the poor.

By voice vote, the Senate approved the fiscal 2006 spending bill for the Health and Human Services, Labor and Education departments.

[..]

Some high-profile programs would suffer spending cuts in the labor, health and education bill, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the "No Child Left Behind" education program that had been a priority of President George W. Bush.

Job training programs also would be cut, as well as children's health and Head Start preschool programs for poor children.

Some members of the House Select Committee, which is ostensibly investigating the federal government's response to the crisis in the New Orleans area, insisted that Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco accept personal responsibility for the people who died.

U.S. Rep Jeff Miller, R-Fla., giving himself over wholly to demagoguery, told Blanco that the 1,086 Louisiana residents known to have died in the storm are about half the number of American lives lost in Iraq.

"You lost that many in one day," he said.

Is [Miller] so committed to partisan gamesmanship that he's willing to put Blanco's failings on par with the crumbling of the federal government's floodwalls?

Nagin and Blanco have both made notable mistakes since this crisis began, but it is dishonest and mean-spirited of Congress to suggest that mistakes made by either one makes them liable for nearly 1,100 lives.

Maybe a small percentage of those who perished would still be alive if Nagin and Blanco had worked together to provide transportation.

But if the federal government's floodwalls had held, it's doubtful anybody would have died at all.

Natural disasters have a way of exposing the cracks in the foundation of our civilization -- the scary things that we all suspect to be just under the surface, but that, in ordinary times, we would prefer not to think about. The sudden visibility of poverty in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the city is the most vivid example of this effect. So, too, is the fact -- now plain for all to see -- that the Department of Homeland Security, the arm of the federal government responsible for ensuring our safety in times of national emergency, has become little more than an arm of big business, a radical experiment in President Bush's brand of market-based government.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said President Bush should be impeached if he authorized the spying on American citizens, the AP reports. Lewis, who said he would “sign a bill of impeachment if one was drawn up,” is the “first major House figure to suggest impeaching Bush.”

In a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) also took Bush to task: "These renegade assaults on the Constitution and our system of laws strike at the very core of our values, and foster a sense of mistrust and apprehension about the reach of government."

[A] bill backed by Louisiana officials to allow residents who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina to recover a portion of their equity ran into Senate opposition and now likely won’t be taken up until next year.

The $29 billion hurricane assistance bill, which passed at 4 a.m. New Orleans time by 308-106, would, among other things, give Louisiana $2 billion as its share of bidding revenue and $4 billion over 30 years as the state's share of drilling royalty revenue -- all associated with the proposed exploration of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. Another $1 billion would be produced from giving Louisiana a share of future digital spectrum bidding proceeds.

Critics said the proposal, which also provides a financing source for heating and air-conditioning assistance for low-income households and for homeland security, was an attempt to buy support for the controversial drilling provisions long opposed by environmentalists.

Both Vitter and Landrieu credited Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, with adding the revenue-sharing provisions to his ANWR proposal.

"Sen. Stevens brought this idea to fruition after seeing the devastation along our coast firsthand and tonight gives us renewed hope for comprehensive protection for all the parishes through south Louisiana," Landrieu said.

The United States sunk into a quagmire soon after its troops invaded Florida in 1816 to capture runaway slaves and to close down the largest station of the underground railroad in North America which was run by escaped Africans and their Seminole allies and had been attracting thousands of enslaved people. The U.S. violent occupation lasted forty-two years, resulted in 1500 U.S. military deaths, and cost Congress and taxpayers $40,000,000, and brought devestation and misery to the penninsula.

On Christmas Day Colonel Taylor's men awoke to find 26 U.S. dead and 112 wounded. Four dead Seminoles died and none had been captured. The battle at Lake Okeechobee was the most devestating U.S. defeat in more than four decades of Florida warfare, and one of its of the worst defeats in centuries of aggression against Native Americans.

Taylor's army limped back to Fort Gardner, and as his men tended the wounded and mourned the dead, he wrote a report that declared victory and claimed "the Indians were driven in every direction."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's AIDS charity paid nearly a half-million dollars in consulting fees to members of his political inner circle, according to tax returns providing the first financial accounting of the presidential hopeful's nonprofit.

[Samaritan's Purse], headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham (who called Islam an "evil" religion), was censured just three years ago for proselytizing while using a USAID grant to assist Salvadoran earthquake victims. At a Christian AIDS conference in February 2002 (attended by USAID officials), Graham indicated that he'd bring the same approach to HIV prevention, declaring, "Only a massive societal change in behavior can stop the spread of AIDS, and only Jesus Christ can bring about this change."

Frist formed the charity in 2003. It drew attention in August 2004 when it held a benefit concert in New York during the Republican National Convention at which President Bush was nominated for re-election."

NOW:

"Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott and his wife sued State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. to force the insurer to pay for damage to their house in Pascagoula on the Gulf of Mexico, which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina."
- Wall Street Journal, 12/16/05

THEN:

"The Democrats seem to think that the answer is a lawsuit. Sue everybody."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 7/20/01

"I'm among many Mississippi citizens who believe tort reform is needed."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 5/8/02

"You know, obviously we should [enact tort reform]...Someday it will happen, and the sooner the better."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 1/24/01

" Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi today credited the agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and tort reform initiatives passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Bush with the overall upturn in the national economy."
- Sen. Trent Lott press release, 12/2/05

"If their answer to everything is more lawsuits, then yes, that's a problem, because I certainly don't support that."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/2/02

"It's sue, sue, sue... That's not the answer."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/4/01

Ralph Reed, the political strategist and candidate for lieutenant governor, said recently that his work for disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff was a mistake that — if given the chance — he wouldn't repeat.

"Had I known then what I know now, I would not have undertaken that work," Reed said, according to the text of a speech posted on his campaign Web site this week.

[R]eed's remarks ... may also be a reaction to rising Christian concerns about his connections to the Abramoff scandal.

Last month, the evangelical weekly World, with a national circulation of 140,000, published a critical piece about Reed that portrayed the former head of the Christian Coalition as a "shrewd businessman who has spent years leveraging his evangelical and conservative contacts."

Dec. 14, 2005 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

H. RES. 579 Expressing the sense of the House that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected.

Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS of Virginia submitted the following

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;
(2) strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and
(3) expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions.

**********************
Mr. ISRAEL. Madam Speaker, My difficulty with this resolution is that
it excludes some symbols and includes only certain symbols. So I would ask the gentlewoman, in the spirit of diversity, and of the many faiths that we celebrate in this body and throughout America, I would ask her not to withdraw the resolution, but allow this resolution to attract a very significant number of votes, maybe a unanimous vote, simply by adding the words "Kwanzaa,'' "Ramadan,'' and "Chanukah'' to her resolution. . . include holidays of all faiths so that this resolution can reflect the best of America, which is a place of justice for all.

Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS of Virginia. Madam Speaker, The reason for this
resolution is that the attack has not been on the menorah or any of the other symbols of the other religions. But the attack has been and is being made on red and green colors, on candy canes, on Santa Claus, which are not even religious symbols. That is the point of the resolution.

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature...

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.

The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.

Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Day in and day out, The Tennessean challenged powerful political machines and corrupt corporations, exposed scandals in the society class, and even took on the revered Tennessee Valley Authority ... The Tennessean exposed fraud in city government, environmental damage caused by coal mining, and abuse in retirement homes. It fought vigorously for civil rights.

In 1957, he investigated the Teamsters Union in Tennessee, which, at the time, was engaged in systematic violence, intimidation, and the bribery of a judge. His reports got the attention of then chief counsel to the Senate Labor-Management Rackets Committee chair Robert F. Kennedy, who brought the committee to Tennessee. The two men became fast friends, and in 1960 Seigenthaler joined Kennedy's Justice Department at the attorney general's right-hand man.

NEW ORLEANS - A program that put Hurricane Katrina evacuees in hotels at government expense while they sought other housing must be extended until Feb. 7, a month beyond the deadline set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Judge Stanwood Duval's temporary restraining order came in a class action lawsuit filed in November by advocates for hurricane victims. Attorneys pressing the lawsuit said FEMA should not be allowed to end the hotel program because it has failed to provide other housing aid, such as rental assistance checks, to many victims who qualify for it.

Also, information on how to apply for the aid has been slow to reach those who need it most, the attorneys said.

The issue has been subjected to endless hype and spin: the Bush team claims they were never given authority to act, Louisiana's Gov. Blanco says Washington was unresponsive, and others pointing to the larger context of our stretched-out armed forces, especially the National Guard.

Reporter Robert Travis Scott attempts to unravel the truth in a good piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, drawing mostly on the mountain of documents Louisiana officials have turned over to Congress investigating the Katrina response.

But the story's headline -- "Politics delayed troops dispatch to N.O." -- doesn't match the evidence in the story that it was the White House, not just "politics," that caused hundreds to die as residents waited for troops to arrive.

Both the Bush Administration and Louisiana officials were involved in political jockeying. The story, which focuses on the Louisiana side, reveals painful emails that show how much time and energy state leaders were pouring into PR battles in the heart of the disaster:

"By the weekend, the Bush administration will have a full-blown PR disaster/scandal on their hands because of the late response to needs in New Orleans," according to a Sept. 1 e-mail message sent by Blanco communications director Bob Mann ...

Kopplin advised the Blanco staff by e-mail that "we need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts."

Any paranoia that Blanco officials might have had about a GOP agenda was fed by phone calls and e-mail messages from national media and other sources. For example, an ABC News reporter wrote Blanco's press secretary, "2 senior GOP aides have called me to suggest we should be focusing more blame on Governor Blanco." ...

An e-mail message between Blanco aides said a prominent New Orleans banker "called . . . this morning and has it on very good authority that (White House strategist) Karl Rove is directing effort to put blame on kbb (governor) for mess saying that the reason feds not on ground sooner was that she refused to give up her authority."

The issue was never -- as the White House and right-wing pundits attempted to claim -- that Blanco and Louisiana leaders hadn't asked for troop involvement. The story marshalls evidence which shows that this claim is at best an excuse, and at worst a lie:

* On the day Katrina hit, Blanco told Bush "We need everything you've got" -- which made Bush's claim a day later that the governor had "not specifically requested troops" look like he was wiggling out on a technicality.

* On August 30, after a trip to the Superdome, Blanco's National Guard chief, Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, specifically requested federal military involvement to Lt. Gen. Russel Honore of the federal response task force, and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

* On August 31, "Blanco called Bush at 2:20 p.m. to say she wanted a federal troop mobilization 'today' and asked that someone communicate to her when the soldiers would arrive."

The White House was especially adamant about a federal take-over. The drama reached its height on August 31, when Louisiana leaders discovered that Karl Rove was making federalization a crusade from his White House perch:

[T]he mention of Rove, a shrewd and aggressive molder of public opinion, was a red flag. Blanco aides feared his involvement meant the federalization issue had become a political flash point, as internal memos indicated that week. At one point a memo from Kopplin said, "Rove is on the prowl."

But more to the point, there was no reason for Governor Blanco to give up control. And experts she consulted told her she shouldn't, especially considering that the main point of federal intervention -- getting other states to commit their guard detachments -- wasn't an issue, since many were already sending them, some without approval:

Blanco officials talked to military brass about the consequences of federalizing, with most officers advising the governor to maintain control over her Guard troops.

Among the most important recommendations was the one by Blum, the National Guard Bureau chief, who said the governor had nothing to gain by federalizing her Guard, according to Ryder's notes. Besides, massive numbers of Guard units now were flowing in quickly from other states, Blum pointed out.

So what ended up happening? On September 3, President Bush sauntered into the White House Rose Garden to announce federal troop deployments.

Under Bush's order that morning, Blanco and Landreneau [of Louisiana] would keep authority over the Guard, and the president and Honore [of the federal response] would rule federal forces in the region.

It was the same point they had started with when Landreneau had called Honore four days earlier asking for help.

Make no mistake: as many have said, there is plenty of blame to spread around in criticizing the Katrina response. But in the rush for "balance" and he-said, she-said reporting, let's not forget there are sometimes basic truths -- in this case, the fact that the White House's zeal for control and a PR victory resulted in hundreds of lost lives:

[By the time troops were deployed], many people had died, or had lived through frightful and inhumane conditions waiting to be rescued or bused out. By the end of the day, the Superdome and convention center would be evacuated.

For more Katrina coverage, visit Facing South's spinoff investigative project, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

Tonight so many victims of the hurricane and the flood are far from home and friends and familiar things. You need to know that our whole nation cares about you, and in the journey ahead you're not alone. To all who carry a burden of loss, I extend the deepest sympathy of our country. To every person who has served and sacrificed in this emergency, I offer the gratitude of our country. And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.

[T]he federal government will undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans, and other Gulf Coast cities, so they can rebuild in a sensible, well-planned way. Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone, from roads and bridges to schools and water systems. Our goal is to get the work done quickly. And taxpayers expect this work to be done honestly and wisely