contributions

To all U.S. citizens in the bellaciao community:
I urge each and every American citizen reading these pages to write, email, phone, meet face-to-face, use the Goodyear Blimp, whatever it takes, to ask your senators, in the strongest tones possible, to write articles of impeachment of the President of the U.S.
We have more than enough evidence that this president has deliberately committed acts of treason, willful neglect of a planning and recovery, and depleting the funding of the Gulf (…)

by Brian Knowlton
President George W. Bush faced increasingly bitter political challenges Sunday from local and state officials in the battered Gulf Coast as he struggled to show mastery over a disaster that his administration now acknowledges almost surely claimed thousands of lives and had yet to bare its full, ugly toll. A Louisiana senator, Mary Landrieu, said she was so angry about federal failures and second-guessing that if she heard any more criticism, even from the president, (…)

By Dan Balz
The first week of September 2005 likely will be remembered as one of the most troubled weeks of George W. Bush’s presidency, a time in which natural disaster combined with bureaucratic bungling in ways that threatened to inundate an administration already on the defensive.
Even before Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast last Monday, Bush was buffeted by public dissatisfaction over the war in Iraq and consumer outrage over rising gasoline prices. But the federal (…)

President Bush planned a return to the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast Monday for a third look at Katrina’s effect with visits to Baton Rouge, and Poplarville, Miss.
But none of his activities - including a stream of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level federal officials to the area and on the airwaves Sunday - have quieted the complaints that Washington moved too slowly in the storm’s aftermath.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, broke down on NBC’s (…)

by BOB HERBERT
Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president’s failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.
The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately (…)

US Embassy in Baghdad inquires into reports that American troops in Iraq have mutinied against their officers.
WMR has learned that the US embassy in Baghdad is checking into reports that U.S. troops in Iraq, including National Guardsmen, Army and Marine Corps Reserves, and regular military troops from Louisiana and Mississippi, have mutinied against their officers and are demanding to be immediately sent back home to help their families.
It is not known whether the reported mutinies (…)

BUSH MISSING SPEECHES
By Peter Fredson
A Slight Satire
September 5, 2005
Due to the annoying interruption of GWB’s vacation by the wrath of God in the Gulf Coast, Mr. Bush will be unable to give some of the speeches he had prepared to enlighten the American public on the State of the Nation, particularly in Iraq.
Therefore I have taken the liberty by virtue of divine guidance to give the main excerpts from the tragically missing speeches so people can tell what GWB was thinking. I (…)

Missing VP raises health questions again
by Greg Lloyd Smith
WASHINGTON, D.C. — (OfficialWire) — 09/05/05 — Is it just me or is someone missing? Thinking out loud, has anyone noticed that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney has not been heard from recently? Oh, I know, he’s on vacation, but no interviews, no photo-ops, nothing. I would have thought that we should have heard his take on the recent debacle in New Orleans or at least the party-line about how the government is doing ’all that it (…)

By Marjorie Cohn
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community (…)

by Mary MacElveen
Never in my wildest nightmares did I ever think that I would hear the word refugee used in relation to the citizens of the United States of America. But, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, our worst nightmare has come true.
Some may say "I cannot believe this is happening to us" and my reply to them is similar situations have happened across the globe for a very long time and it stands to reason and given the stupidity of this government, our time would come.
My heart (…)