The Washington Post reported yesterday that:

The massive federally funded program for rebuilding Louisiana homes is short nearly $3 billion, administrators told a state legislative panel here today, leaving uncertain for now how the owners of roughly 100,000 flood-wrecked houses here will be compensated.

To get a sense of how bad things still are in the Crescent City, and to find out how you can help the children of New Orleans have the summer camps that they need and deserve, please make the jump.

The Sidwell Friends Alumni Association had their annual gala last night, and one of the singers was an alum named Erik Thorson.  He is a country musician from Nashville who has written the usual lovesick blues songs and some folksy ones as well.

Indicative of the way the political winds are blowing, however, Mr. Thorson wowed the crowd with a new song that hits right at the heart of George W. Bush's hypocrisy:  Bush wants to send more and more of our young people to die, yet when he himself had the chance to defend the Red, White and Blue, he was "The Man Who Didn't Go."

Check it out for yourself.  This song should be sung at the march on Washington on the 27th and at every rally where people want to be reminded why this entire war (and especially this "surge") must be stopped.

Regular readers of DailyKos do not need a reminder of the nefarious role Diebold has played in undermining our democracy.  

The latest news is that on Monday, February 13, a key motion in a class action securities fraud case is going to be filed against Diebold and some of its officers and directors in the Northern District of Ohio.  The complaint alleges that defendants violated securities laws, causing artificial inflation of the Diebold's stock price. According to the complaint, Diebold "lacked a credible state of internal controls and corporate compliance and remained unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products."  Also alleged are false and misleading statements about internal company problems, and over $2.7 million in insider trading proceeds.

When the story breaks on Monday morning, let's be sure to call, write and blog our local news outlets so that they get on this story and, more importantly, give it the importance it deserves.  If you agree, please recommend this diary so we can alert our Sunday bloggers as well.

(more after the jump)

Rep. Rick Johnson of Missouri, a veteran of the first Gulf War, is fed up with the hypocritical way President Bush has used our troops as cannon fodder and photo op backgrounds while cutting their benefits and not taking care of their families.  He has come up with an innovative, cost-free and poignant way to honor the fallen, while exposing the true costs of the war:  require that Missouri lower its flags to half mast every time a soldier dies.

Hey, this idea is great!  Why don't we get comparable bills going in all 50 states!  (more below)

A year ago today, Congress was the scene of an historic challenge to the Electoral College vote that gave George Bush the White House for a second time under disputed circumstances.  A year later, we know that the pattern of shady practices, half-truths and outright lies that we saw during the Ohio recount have become the hallmarks of Bush's tawdry tenure as president.

Today we should celebrate and send donations to the heroes of the day: Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, as well as Rep. John Conyers and the valiant Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus who have kept the heat on Bush and his cronies all year.  We also should give credit where credit is due to the Green Party and Libertarian Party, who deserve our thanks for continuing the battle after John Kerry decided that his chance at a rematch in 2008 was worth more than counting every vote.  

More on the flip.

Reuters, has reported that the Senate voted on Thursday to honor Rosa Parks by making her the first women to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.  This would seem to be a no-brainer for the House to approve this on Friday, but given that there were even holdouts in June when the Senate voted on the historic anti-lynching measure, you never know what may happen when a female African American civil rights icon is to be honored.

I know we are all focused on the Fitzgerald indictments, but please take a minute to call your House member and ask them to support allowing Sister Rosa to lie in state in the Rotunda.

More below the fold.

As we begin Indictments Week, let's take a minute to think about how the Presidential line of succession, as specified by the United States Constitution and under United States Code Title 3, Section 19 (a.k.a. the Presidential Succession Act of 1947), will affect the way things play out.

U.S. News had a story on a possible Cheney resignation last week, which may have been a way for the GOP to float the idea of a Condi vice presidency as a prelude to a presidency in 2008.

More after the flip.

I know you are looking for diversions until the Fitzgerald indictments come out.  So how about contemplating an article by investigative reporters Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman that starts out like this:

Forget your tinfoil.  Given what we've seen since November 2004, the truth of what these Ohio-based activist-writers have been saying all along deserves another look.  More after the flip.

Monday is called Columbus Day on the calendar on my wall.  For those of us who have read Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" or Hans Koning's Columbus:  HIs Enterprise, however, we know that we must stop celebrating the notion of "discovery" that masks the rapacious search for "Gold, glory and God" by Columbus and a generation of conquerors (conquistadores) from Europe. Don't even get me started on how this paradigm has infected our body politic and created bad ramifications all the way up to the present.

Resources for those who want to do something to set the record straight below the fold.

War profiteering is as toxic as the water in New Orleans.  Privatizing the cleanup and rebuilding of the Gulf should also be verboten.

Gulf residents need jobs to help them rebuild their lives.  A new Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or Works Progress Administration (WPA) project is needed to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans, Biloxi, and other Gulf cities.  

[more after the flip]

As the hearings for John Roberts get underway, let's start with the elephant in the living room.  Why did Bush nominate a man to Sandra Day O'Connor's seat?  Yes, Roberts now is slated to replace Rehnquist, but that was not Bush's intent.  He was intentionally trying to lower the already unrepresentative number of women on the High Court.  And we were going to go along without a wimper.

Rather than agreeing to a debate within the GOP's "unfair identity politics" frame, we should start today's hearings by asserting the "fundamental fairness" frame.  In the 24 years since Justice O'Connor was elevated to the Supreme Court, tens of thousands of women have gone to law school, hundreds have reached the pinnacle of their profession as judges/professors/litigators, and dozens are as qualified as any of the nine people currently gracing the High Court bench.  Bush needs to hear that we are disappointed that he did not appoint a woman, and that we expect that the second of his two appointments will be a woman (not "torture" Gonzalez or other male neocons).  [more on the flip]

Imagine a group of nine people with the power to determine key issues in men's lives, and only one of them was a man.  Wouldn't that seem to be unfair on its face?  Men are 50 percent of the population, so how could a court constituted of 8 women and 1 man  have the moral standing to dispense justice when its membership is so grossly unrepresentative?  This is especially unfair given the large number of both men and women who have graduated at the top of their law school classes, served in prestigious clerkships, held important legal jobs, and served as judges in federal and state courts.

In a few minutes, the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) will start a meeting where the power of the State Advisory Committees (SACs) will be diminished and the national board will increase its power to make decisions that are as "impartial" as a 4R, 1D, 1I (formerly R) body can be.

A nationwide toll-free number is available for you to call in and hear the proceedings.  Even if you are at work and have to listen on muted speaker-phone, let's show them by our presence that we will not let our civil rights go down without a fight.

More on the flip.

With four Republicans, one Independent who used to be a Republican, and one Democrat (Michael Yaki from California), the supposedly non-partisan eight-member United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) is a shell of its former self.  While pro-civil rights advocates in the 50 State Advisory Committees (SACs) continue the proud history of a group that used to be at the forefront of enforcing civil rights compliance in the federal government, the national USCCR is planning to hold a meeting tomorrow (Friday, August 26) where the future of the SACs is on the line.  The reactionaries on the USCCR board have always been afraid that progressives on the state level can undermine their evil deeds, so now the plan is to eliminate the requirement that the SACs be representative of the groups being protected under federal law.

More on how you can help after the flip.

Once again today I received an email from John Kerry.  Once again it had a simplistic analysis of why the GOP was on the run.  Once again the only way for me to help keep the GOP on the run was to "send the GOP a message" by giving Kerry more money.

Kerry should stop asking us for money for his "Friends of John Kerry, Inc." when he does not tell us what he is going to use the money for.  He ended up Campaign 2004 with millions in the bank that could have been used to help other Dems.  He refused to help us win the Ohio recount.  And now he wants more of our money for an indeterminate purpose?

No thanks.

More analysis and complete text of his letter on the flip.

Update [2005-5-11 12:24:33 by GrainofSand]: 12:23 PM ET: AP reports people returning to buildings.

++++++++++++++++++

sez NYT and WaPo:

+++++++++++++

The U.S. Capitol and White House were evacuated Wednesday. War planes were seen flying overhead and security cars rushed away from the buildings.

Reporters in the White House were told to move to a more secure location.

President Bush was not at the White House at the time.

A guard in the West Wing of the White House shouted at reporters, "Go down into the basement."

"Leave, run," security officers shouted to staff and reporters at the Capitol.

"This is not a drill," guards shouted as they moved people away from the building.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/politics/11wire-evac.html?

The campaign to make voting machine companies more accountable is gaining momentum.  The Velvet Revolution folks reported yesterday that Rep. Maxine Waters and Green Presidential candidate  David Cobb are the latest to join Rep. John Conyers and many organizations who are calling on voting machine companies to open their machines and records.

Go to the Washington Post today (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8448-2005Mar4.html) and you will see that Bush has granted pardons to the strangest group of people, including an arsonist, a guy accused of bootlegging in South Carolina in 1959 and only given three years of probation, someone convicted of disposing of stolen explosives, and someone who stole government property.  

Given that the Bush spin machine never does anything for no reason, and given that these pardons were dropped on a Friday afternoon so that they appeared this Saturday morning in the paper, we Kossacks might want to spend a few hours checking to see who these eight people are.