Author: Dean Pajevic

Just announced via breaking news on CNN. Mayor Ray Nagin just held a press conference and said that “the city is OUT of money.” The plan, of course, had been to bring people back to the city and employ them…. why isn’t that working? A commentator said that there are garbage piles 15 feet high that only private contractors are picking up.

From the A.P. at Yahoo:

NEW ORLEANS – Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the city is laying off as many as 3,000 employees – or about half the city’s workforce – because of the damage done to New Orleans’ finances by Hurricane Katrina. Nagin announced with “great sadness” that he had been unable to find the money to keep the workers on the payroll. He said only non-essential workers would be laid off and that no firefighters or police would be among those let go.

And — probably related to the political impact of hurricane Katrina — the Dept. of Commerce “has issued a blanket media policy to employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), requiring that all requests for contact from national media be first approved by the Dept.,” according to Raw Story.

Does this mean that we would have not received the National Weather Service’s urgent warning on Sunday before Katrina hit? Because the courageous weather analyst who wrote it would have been forced to go through the Dept. of Commerce? Do they answer their phones on Sundays? What are their criteria? Would they have made him edit the dire warning he issued, which turned out to be prescient?

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His first in FOUR months (since May) …

President Bush scheduled a news conference on Tuesday, his first after a string of major developments, including his naming of two Supreme Court justices, two massive hurricanes, and the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. […]

[Bush is to] open the news conference with a statement summarizing recent developments and calling on Congress to work with him on pressing ahead on his agenda. … NYT

CNN, etc. will carry it live. The New York Times has live video, as does the White House, WaPo, and C-SPAN.

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One week after it was reported that Sony Pictures had rejected Albert Brooks’s latest movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World [aaaaahhhhhh … Albert Brooks is funny!] … because of concern that the title would offend Muslims, Sony’s computer entertainment division was under fire from the Catholic Church in Italy for a series of print ads depicting a young man wearing a crown of thorns in honor of the tenth anniversary of Sony’s PlayStation. The ad was headlined “Ten Years of Passion.” Antonio Sciortino, editor of the magazine Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), wrote: “This time they’ve gone too far. … Read all.

Have you seen any other examples of questionable taste recently (not counting Harriet Miers)?

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MSNBC: Breaking news. This is from a different grand jury (?). So, he faces two separate indictments.

Lou Dobbs on CNN is confirming via an A.P. wire.

Update [2005-10-4 16:15:59 by susanhu]:

Alternet’s PEEK has “Peek: DeLay Grand Jury foreman speaks (video).”

‘There is enough evidence.’ For more than one indictment perhaps?

VIdeo

From PBS Newshour

October 4, 2005, 12:15pm EDT

DELAY INDICTED ON NEW MONEY LAUNDERING CHARGE

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was indicted again Monday on charges of conspiring to launder money and money laundering, following an indictment last week that caused him to step down from his leadership post.

Sept. 28, 2005:

Two experts discuss the first indictment of Tom DeLay.

The money laundering charge carries a penalty of up to life in prison. The charge of conspiracy to launder money is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, reported the Associated Press.

Last week, DeLay was charged with conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. Defense lawyers asked a judge Monday to toss out the indictment, contending it was based on a statute that did not take effect until 2003, a year after the alleged acts.

The new indictment from District Attorney Ronnie Earle came just hours after the new grand jurors in Texas were sworn in.

“Ronnie Earle has stooped to a new low with his brand of prosecutorial abuse,” Delay said in a statement.

“He is trying to pull the legal equivalent of a ‘do-over’ since he knows very well that the charges he brought against me last week are totally manufactured and illegitimate. This is an abomination of justice.”

A statement from Earle’s office outlined the new charges but did not address DeLay’s criticism.

More than 40 grand jury indictments have been returned so far in Earle’s two-and-a-half-year investigation of Republican campaign tactics during 2002 state House elections in Texas …

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Caption? Mine might be: I just nominated my Mommy. I’m scared of my Mommy. I’m scared of Harriet Mommy too. I wasn’t kiddin’ about the pit bull part. My hind end still hurts! Me lookin’ awful gray lately. Me awful tired. Me want pillow.

“Stone cold” … “ate nails for breakfast” … mixed up with Ben Barnes, a former lobbyist to the state lottery, and who we remember from the “60 Minutes”-Dubya-Nat’l Guard scandal. (Philly Daily News, last week, discovered that Miers “managed” the Nat’l Guard scandal during “Bush’s Texas gubenatorial campaign in 1998 (when he was starting to eye the White House) [and] paid Miers $19,000 to run an internal pre-emptive probe of the potential scandal.”)

“Miers had stormy tenure at Texas Lottery,” from the A.P., 45 minutes ago, via the SJ Mercury News (sub. free).

Ben Barnes to break silence on “60 Minutes”: The Republican campaign gets ready for shock waves, as the former Texas official who says he pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Air National Guard finally goes public. (Salon, Sept. 1, 2004)

AUSTIN, Texas – Harriet Miers proved to be a tough, no-nonsense administrator during her five years heading the Texas Lottery Commission, firing two executive directors to stamp out scandal but leaving unexpectedly … One of those firings stirred up questions about whether political influence helped George W. Bush avoid active duty in Vietnam.

[Her nomination to the high court prompts] closer scrutiny of Miers’ years in Texas as a private attorney, a member of the Dallas City Council and chairwoman of the three-member commission that oversees the state’s lottery operations.

“Although she’s a small-framed woman, we all believed she came through the Marines and maybe ate nails for breakfast because she’s one tough cookie,” said Horace Taylor, a former lottery employee who worked for Miers.

Then-Gov. George W. Bush appointed Miers to a six-year-term on the commission shortly after he was elected governor in 1994. After she’d been on the job 18 months, news surfaced that the lottery director’s boyfriend had been employed as a consultant for GTECH, the lottery’s main contractor.

The Miers-led commission fired the director, Nora Linares, in January 1997, … Linares filed suit against the commission but later dropped that lawsuit and instead sued GTECH. An agreement ending the dispute with the commission exonerated Linares…

It was [also] a lawsuit… [that] helped to ignite questions about whether Bush used political influence to avoid active duty during the Vietnam War. ….

[It was] suggested that former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes … a lobbyist for GTECH until January 1997, helped the company keep its state contract to run the lottery in exchange for keeping silent about how he had helped Bush get into the National Guard in the late 1960s. […]

Miers resigned as lottery commission chairman in 2000, a year early …

More from Greg Palast below:

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