NOLA, McCain, The Curse of John Hagee, and other matters

Writing on the City of New Orleans: Any resident of the Nevada outback has to be pleased that the Internet(s)’s Tubes reach into the sagebrush zone so that we can discover that presumptive Republican presidential candidate John Sidney McCain III (R-AZ) has declared in regard to the drowning of New Orleans that, “…never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.” Or, “There was (sic) unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.” [NYT] The part that Elisabeth Bumiller forgot to insert in her fluffy article was that the day New Orleans was drowning Senator John Sidney McCain III was not advising the President of the United States to put qualified people in charge of the rescue operations, he was not advising that the President get a grip on the “dimensions” of the disaster, he was not urging the President to augment and improve communications – he was handing the President a cake. Some reporters are beginning to ask John Sidney McCain III about Reverend Hagee’s repeated comments about Katrina as ‘divine retribution.’ That doesn’t mean McCain’s necessarily opposed to bulldozing the Ninth Ward. Newt Gingrich thinks McCain should distance himself from Hagee’s anti-Catholic remarks, but ‘not-so-much’ about homosexuality – which is why Hagee made the despicable anti-NOLA remarks in the first place. [Think Progress]

Photo from: “McCain throws Bush under the Levee” Daily Kos

No woman no cry: Americans United for Change notes that Senator John Ensign (R-NV) was one of the Senate members who supported the Republican filibuster of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and that Representatives Jon Porter (R-NV3) and Dean Heller (R-NV2) voted against the House version of the bill last July. Our intrepid defenders of socialism for the corporations and free enterprise for the rest of us are obviously willing to ignore the following:

“The unemployment rate for women maintaining a family is higher than for men and women generally, reaching 6.9% in December, up from 6.2% a year ago… Less than half (about 37%) of all unemployed workers receive unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Jobless women are even less likely than men to receive UI benefits because of eligibility rules that disproportionately disqualify women.” [National Women’s Law Center, 1/28/08]

“Women are 30% to 40% more likely than men to have a subprime mortgage loan, even though their credit scores are equal to (or slightly better than) men’s. This puts women at greater risk of rising and unaffordable mortgage payments and foreclosure.” [National Women’s Law Center, 1/28/08]

“Women’s lower incomes mean that rising energy and food prices take a bigger bite out of their family budgets. And lower-income women and their families rely on state services such as Medicaid, child support enforcement, and child care assistance, which face cutbacks as a growing number of states confront budget deficits.” [National Women’s Law Center, 1/28/08]

“The downturn has caused women’s wages to fall and this decline is significantly larger than what men have suffered. In 2007, the real median wage for adult women workers dropped 3 percent; wages for adult male workers dropped by .5 percent over the same period. Women’s wages are also more volatile than men’s wages, and they face a much higher risk of seeing large drops in income than men do.” [Senator Kennedy Press Release, 4/18/08]

“Women have significantly fewer savings to fall back on in a time of economic hardship. Non-married women have a net worth 48% lower than non-married men, and women are less likely than men to participate in employer-sponsored retirement savings programs.” [Senator Kennedy Press Release, 4/18/08]

My God How the Money Rolls In? Tatitlek Support Services, Inc. (Anchorage,Alaska) has been awarded a DoD a fixed price $319,246,604 “infinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract” to provide “civilians on the battlefield foreign language specialist role players to support the USMC pre-deployment training at Twentynine Palms, CA. [AAP]

Happy Talk Keep Talking Happy Talk: Congressman Paul Hodes has asked Rep. John Tierney, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs (Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) to hold a hearing on the New York Times report on how Defense Department officials used “undue influence with former military officers serving as ‘independent’ military analysts. [MMFA]