Steve Clemons of Washington Note is looking into allegations of fraud and FEMA contracting. This was a big story back in early 2005, which resulted in hearings presided over by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, chairs of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Federal Emergency Management Agency as part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Michael Brown testified at the hearings and defended FEMA. The Senate Panel found widespread FEMA fraud. More here. Lieberman and Collins' findings are here. The Sun Sentinel investigative series on the fraud is here.

Dissident Voice alleges Brown paid the claims to help Bush win the election. On contracting fraud and FEMA, check out this 2004 DOJ press release announcing Indictments.

by TChris

John Nichols points to a simple truth that drives the Bush administration: “When trouble hits, Halliburton hits it big.” Halliburton is assisted (as if it needs help) by Joe Allbaugh, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who is now a lobbyist and good friend of Michael Brown. Writes Nichols:

Conveniently, Allbaugh showed up in Louisiana on the day before [Vice President] Cheney's visit with the purpose, in the words of a Washington Post report, of "helping his clients get business."

He’s been effective, as this article makes clear:

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W Bush’s former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc and the other is Halliburton Co subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice president Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

FEMA hired another business with close ties to the administration, Bechtel Corp, to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Do these companies deserve our trust? Or our money?

by Last Night in Little Rock

Paramedics from San Francisco in NOLA wrote on RawStory this weekend that National Guardsmen were playing "cat and mouse" with looters and ignoring efforts to get food from nearby stores that was going to go bad anyway without refrigeration and should have been salvaged.

by Last Night in Little Rock

For no apparent reason, the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency refused to permit Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in Jefferson Parish, LA to reopen. Getting no explanation and taking matters into his own hands, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff ordered them to reopen for the people as noted here.

by TChris

Some Democrats remember that they’re supposed to stand up for the poor and powerless, not for the wealthy and their lobbyists. Here’s John Kerry:

The reality of what millions of Americans face every day was brought home this week. Americans saw on television the grave economic disparity that exists in this country. They were forced to confront the struggles that many African American families have faced for years due to lack of jobs and critical services to help open the doors of opportunity. They saw the people left behind literally and figuratively by the politicians who control Washington these days.

Some displaced children who have never been vaccinated will receive that basic service now that they’ve made it to a shelter. Kerry reminds us that 11 million other children aren’t receiving adequate health care. Must their homes be destroyed before they receive help?

Poverty, Race and a National Shame. No, that's not from Move-On or Daily Kos. It's from Newsweek, and it's the cover story.

Like many of us, Nora Ephron at Huffington Post has been puzzled by Dick Cheney's absence during Katrina and doesn't buy that it's because he was on vacation. She wonders whether the President and Cheney have had a falling out.

Could Cheney – and not just his aides -- possibly be involved in the Valerie Plame episode? Is Cheney not speaking to Karl Rove? Does the airplane/bicycle incident figure into this in any way? And how is it possible that the President is off on vacation and the Vice President is too? Not that it matters particularly if the President is on vacation; on some level, the President is always on vacation. But where was Cheney?

A few months ago, I heard of a lunch conversation that Cheney had with a political type in Wyoming. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it makes some sense. Here's the tale:

As President Bush begins his third tour of the Gulf Coast, here's what the rescue workers around him are seeing in New Orleans - a view of which he undoubtedly will be spared:

Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes....A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.

"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."

Mark Fiore outdoes himself. This is his best ever, please watch the whole thing.

The Sunday Mail has an agonizing report, quoting a rescue doctor in New Orleans:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Time.com posted this evening has several articles about Katrina, as a disaster for the victims, the people of the United States, and for the Bush Administration, with one aide virtually admitting that they really blew it:

Don't miss the New Yorker's Top of the Town. Here's a snippet:

...to a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them.

[hat tip Terry Kindlon.] On a much lighter note, check out Eyewitness Muse's Administration "Natural Terror" Color Charts. A sample: