America Still Hasn’t Learned the Lessons of Katrina

With Hurricane Harvey still ravaging Texas, a piece in Politico looks at the continuing problem plaguing America - a failure to take proactive actions to avert damage from hurricanes and rising sea levels.  Among the obstacles?  Republicans - with a few exceptions - who refuse to admit the reality of climate change and sea level rise; a fossilized Army Corps of Engineers; a pork barrel approach to funding appropriations; and a focus on disaster response rather than averting disasters.  Here in Hampton Roads, Virginia, cities like Norfolk are trying to forge onward alone (Miami-Dade County in Florida is doing likewise as is New York City after Hurricane Sandy) and has even hired Dutch consultants to devise ways to deal with sea level rise and the flooding goes with it.  Virginia Republicans meanwhile will not use the term sea level rise and instead refer to repetitive flooding, ignore the cause of the flooding.  As the piece notes, there are some bright spots, but overall little has been learned since Hurricane Katrina a dozen years ago.  Here are highlights:

Washington’s systems for protecting communities against weather disasters haven’t gotten better since that 2005 disaster, and in many ways may be worse. The State of Louisiana wasn't supposed to shoulder the Caminada Headland project itself: Rebuilding the island was originally the job of the Army Corps of Engineers, the 215-year-old entity charged with building and maintaining our country’s ports, harbors, locks, dams, levees and ecosystem restoration projects. Today, the agency is the single most important agency in coastal America's battle against rising seas, at the center of every major water-resources project in the country, either as builder or permitter. But the state of Louisiana, exasperated by federal delays and increasingly worried that the next big storm could just wipe out the port, eventually fronted the money and pumped the sand on its own. Today, despite years and millions of federal dollars poured into studying the Caminada Headland project and neighboring islands slated for restoration, the Corps has yet to push a dime toward construction.

Graves compares his experience with the Corps to that of a “battered ex-spouse”: “I feel like I’ve been lied to, cheated, kicked in the teeth over and over and over again.”

The sclerotic Army Corps of Engineers is the most visible and frustrating symptom of what many officials have come to see as the country’s backwards approach to disaster policy. From the way Congress appropriates money to the specific rebuilding efforts that federal agencies encourage, national policies almost uniformly look backwards, to the last storm, rather than ahead to the next. And the scale of the potential damage has caused agencies to become more risk-averse in ways that can obstruct, rather than help, local communities’ attempts to protect themselves. The Army Corps, for example, requires Louisiana to rebuild a full suite of five islands before it can reclaim any of the money it spent on the one headland—and is currently insisting it will take another half-decade simply to review an innovative wetlands restoration project the state has been working on for more than a decade and views as the linchpin of its coastal efforts. Meanwhile, new design standards inspired by Katrina have made levee projects wildly unaffordable.

As the effects of climate change play out, the risks posed by storms like Katrina and Harvey only stand to get worse. A not-yet-final draft of National Climate Assessment, produced by scientists across 13 federal agencies, predicts that global sea levels will likely rise between half a foot and 1.2 feet by 2050, and between one and four feet by the end of the century. In areas like the Northeast and the Gulf of Mexico, relative sea-level rise will happen much faster, researchers say. Coastal Louisiana is currently losing a football field’s worth of wetlands every 90 minutes, making it a harbinger for the crises that coastal communities around the country are expected to face.

Preparing for the looming disasters will require nimbleness, innovation, a willingness to take calculated risks and, as Louisiana has learned, respect for natural processes—all qualities that have been bred out of the Army Corps, and don’t get much consideration in federal policy. The agency molded itself around the earmark system, catering to the pet projects of individual lawmakers and then drawing them out as long as possible to keep the money flowing. Congress, too, learned to treat the Corps as a pork barrel: though Washington officially did away with earmarks a decade ago, lawmakers remain focused first and foremost on their local projects, pushing legislative language that serves their narrow ends without an eye to the mountain of red tape they are adding to the system as a whole.

And although preventing damage is widely considered to be cheaper than mopping up after the fact, congressional accounting creates incentives to spend money exactly the opposite way: Disaster relief bills are generally considered emergency spending, and thus not counted towards the federal deficit, while proactive investment in planning and protection must be funded through the normal budget cycle, which makes it look like cuttable federal spending at budget time.

Hurricane Katrina provided the real wakeup call, though: Residents saw firsthand that without the wetlands to help absorb their power, winds and waves pounded their communities with ferocious strength. In the wake of the storm, the Louisiana legislature passed major reforms aimed at professionalizing the state’s levee boards and coastal protection efforts. It embraced the concept of “multiple lines of defense”—a modern understanding of interlocking coastal systems, in which barrier islands and marshes play a role along with manmade structures like levees and pumping stations to shield communities from storms.

Today, Louisiana’s approach is seen as a model for states facing looming coastal crises, and its experts regularly host visitors from around the world seeking to learn from its resiliency efforts. Indeed, Louisiana is fostering this reputation, with a $60 million new “water campus” under construction in Baton Rouge, its flagship research center, the Water Institute of the Gulf, to be housed in a sleek, glass-encased building that straddles the levee and floats out over the main channel of the Mississippi River. But all this hard-won expertise has come with a side effect: A growing realization that the federal government—whose funding and know-how have been key to all projects of this scale—was far more of an obstacle than an ally. And the biggest frustration was with the Army Corps.

Hurricane Katrina showed that severe storms could be far harsher than previously thought, so the Corps adopted new mandates for federal levees to be built significantly bigger and stronger—a change that made sense in theory but instantly multiplied the price tag on projects to the point they became effectively impossible. One project, a massive levee system designed to protect highly vulnerable bayou communities and a major oil and gas hub in Terrebonne Parish, was approved by Congress at $887 million in 2007, just weeks before the new standards came out. When the post-Katrina standards were applied to it, the price tag suddenly multiplied nearly twelvefold, to $10.3 billion. . . . . they had virtually no shot of ever seeing it built.

[T]here’s a much bigger problem that the country is facing. And in this sense, the Corps—strangled in red tape as it may be—is no more than a tool of a larger system. Across government, virtually the entire philosophy of disaster relief is to react after disaster strikes rather than help communities and residents to prepare in advance. This leaves Congress funding billions in disaster aid when an investment of millions ahead of time could have warded off the worst. And the problem is only likely to grow as a warmer climate brings more frequent and severe hurricanes, floods and droughts.

The rare Republican who acknowledges the scientific consensus around climate change, Graves does not shrink from the future projections. He knows them first-hand—and sees them as a tool for solidly conservative fiscal planning rather than fanning environmentalist fears. “Statistically, we can prove that we have increased vulnerability. We’re spending more on coastal storms, and some of these areas are being inundated with increased frequency,” he says. “So, call it what you want, there’s an adaptation issue here that needs to be addressed—and it’s more fiscally conservative to step in and be proactive on some of these investments than it is to continue to rebuild after they’ve flooded and continue to be reactive.”

Hurricane Harvey is certain to teach this lesson again, in some form. With the storm expected to wreak billions of dollars in damage, there will likely be another of round of disaster aid, perhaps some more legislation directing the Corps to investigate the problem. But until the system fundamentally changes, it will simply be a waiting game, until the next, even stronger storm hits.

The GOP’s Real Problem: A Refusal to Repudiate the Bush/Cheney Disaster and the Ideology That Cause It

I exited the Republican Party as the Bush/Cheney nightmare began.  As noted many times before, one of the big reason for my exit was the fusion of the GOP and the Christofascists.  Related to it was the GOP rejection of logic and reason and the embrace of extremism that lead directly to the fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I still remember watching the news as the cretinous George Bush announced the launch of the Iraq War - a war based on lies and a deliberate duping of the American public.  Add to the military disasters - which have needlessly thrown away thousands of American lives - the bankrupting of the country and the setting of the stage for the economic melt down, and one gets the root of the nation's current debt crisis and continued economic malaise.  Yet no one who is still in the Republican Party will take ownership and responsibility.  They - and this include some former GOP colleagues - rant about run away spending under Obama, yet the real debt explosion occurred on their lawless teams watch.  Andrew Sullivan sums up the problem well in a statement of the real historic facts that need to be daily thrown in the face of every member of the GOP when then start bloviating about the need for spending cuts.  Here are highlights:

When you have a party that hasn’t been able to repudiate the worst administration in modern times, and actually still attempt to hail it as some kind of achievement with respect to Iraq or Afghanistan or the debt, you cannot persuade anyone you have changed, or want to change.

Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance, accept weak and false intelligence to launch a war they were too incompetent to fight or win, sat back as one of the worst hurricanes all but took out a major city, and was so negligent in bank regulation that we ended up with Lehman and all that subsequently took place.

These were not minor errors. They were catastrophic misjudgments which took an era of peace, surplus and prosperity and replaced it with a dystopia of massive debt, a lawless executive branch, two unwinnable wars, and a record of war crimes that had their source in the very Oval Office.

When will the Republicans hold themselves accountable for the things that have persuaded so many that this bunch of fanatics and deniers are unfit for government? When will they speak of Bush and Cheney and repudiate them?

The answer to Andrew's question unfortunately, never.  Those who saw the errors and would demand accountability have either been driven from the GOP or have exiled themselves because they could no longer stand the insanity, hate and bigotry.

Quote of the Day: Refuting the GOP Claim that Obama's First Term Has Been a "Failure"

I - like most of us I suspect - love immediate gratification.  It's an aspect of human nature I suspect.  But sometimes our desires for immediate gratification simply cannot be met given all of the attendant circumstances.  A case in point is the nation's economy.  Having launched my law firm with the intent to focus heavily on real estate as it turns out right before the real estate market collapsed I know first had the financial cost the economic collapse shepherded in by Bush?Cheney and the GOP controlled Congress.  As a result, I had high hopes for Obama and recall sitting with a group of gays and straights in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West on Inauguration  Day 2009.  Many people were in tears that day.  Have all of our hopes been realized?  Certainly not, but compared to where the nation was we have come a long way.  Yes, we might have gone even further toward full recovery, but we had a major obstacle: the GOP controlled House of Representatives which obstructed virtually everything Obama sought to do from Inauguration Day onward. But did Obama fail us?  Andrew Sullivan sums up the reality of what Obama has accomplished - in spite of the Republicans.  Here are the principal highlights:

I have no idea what standard people are using to declare Obama's first term a failure. To save us from a Great Depression, rescue the auto industry, re-regulate Wall Street, decimate al Qaeda, kill bin Laden and Qaddafi and provide universal healthcare? That's failure? 

Unemployment is lower now than it was when he took office, and moving downward. Next year's IMF-predicted US growth is higher than any other developed country. Compared with austerity-ridden Europe, where unemployment is still climbing, Obama's, Geithner's and Bernanke's leadership has been stellar. The US has never exported as much as now as a percentage of GDP ever. Given the catastrophe Obama walked into, and the froth-flecked obstructionism of his opposition, he's had a remarkably successful, historic first term. His long game also makes much of the progress promised durable only if he gets a second term.

He told us it would take two terms; he predicted obstruction and setbacks; yet he has persisted - and succeeded. But take his second term away? Back to ballooning, rather than shrinking deficits, millions left without access to private health insurance, a guaranteed war against Iran, climate change policy handed over to the oil and coal companies, and massive spending on defense we don't need. Not to mention torture.

And a highlight from Chait's case against Romney:

[T]he reality remains that a vote for Romney is a vote for his party — a party that, by almost universal acclimation, utterly failed when last entrusted with governing. Romney may be brainier, more competent, and more mentally nimble than George W. Bush. But his party has, unbelievably, grown far more extreme in the years since Bush departed.  .  .  .  .  The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world.

And Andrew doesn't even factor the contrast so far between Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy compared to the failed GOP response after Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, and did I mention that Romney has surrounded him with countless former Bus/Cheney advisers? 

The GOP Fears the Ghost of Katrina

As the delusional and out of touch Republicans begin their coven in Tampa, one ghost is hanging over the convention: the prospect of Hurricane Issac hitting New Orleans just as the show comes to its crescendo.  Equally terrifying is the prospect that the Obama administration's response to wherever the storm hits will further under score the GOP incompetence that followed Hurricane Katrina almost exactly 7 years ago.  Politico has this on the ghost's specter:

Republicans have begun to whisper a grim word that sums up all their fears about the 2012 party gathering: Katrina.

No longer is GOP fretting focused on the prospect of Tropical Storm Isaac striking Tampa and blowing up party’s plans to crown Mitt Romney as its nominee. There’s still the possibility of logistical disruptions, but an epic meteorological mess doesn’t appear to be in the offing here.

Instead, party officials and convention planners are increasingly anxious about a different and possibly more damaging scenario: a split-screen broadcast of Republicans partying in Tampa alongside images of serious storm damage in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

Some Republicans here worry the juxtaposition of events could revive memories of the disastrous 2005 storms — Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — and the government’s terrible handling of them.

Public outrage over the George W. Bush administration’s response to those catastrophes — Katrina especially — shadowed the president and the GOP for years. For Republicans, Katrina is their version of the Carter administration’s failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 — an enduring symbol of collective incompetence, a political wound that will not heal.

What one hopes will come out of the storm coverage over the next few days is the fact that among the many cuts sought under the Romney-Ryan budget is emergency response agencies that are needed in precisely this type of situation.  The rich would benefit while others might be left literally to drown.  Such are the GOP's "values" nowadays.

Labor Day Weekend Five Years Ago - Katrina Aftermath

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a repost of a post I did roughly three years ago that described the efforts of my former b/f and I in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation to New Orleans, my late grandmother's home town. Perhaps we were a bit crazy to undertake the adventure, but I know that we touched some lives and helped individuals who had largely lost everything. I continue to believe that the story line based on our experiences would make for a hysterically funny screenplay - sort of a "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!" in nature. Here's the post:

Since we are in the midst of hurricane season (June 1 through November 30), I wanted to recount an adventure [my former partner], Raymond and I had Labor Day weekend of 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived on the Gulf Coast and loving the City of New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina, Raymond and I were so so sick of watching the television images of Hurricane Katrina victims that Raymond felt we had to do something. Perhaps it was craziness in some ways, but what followed is a trip I will never forget.

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Raymond began calling the Red Cross and various telephone numbers shown on TV seeking to find a way to bring some evacuees to live in our house and/or assist in getting back on their feet. Finally, he made contact with a woman in an office in Baton Rouge assisting evacuees. Through her, we had a contact and arranged to go to Baton Rouge to pick up people to come back to Norfolk. Thinking that we had firm plan in place, we rented a van and drove south, carrying extra tanks of gasoline (some given to us near the Alabama border by a Baptist Church team head back to Georgia) and slept in rest areas during the trip. We got as far as Jackson, Mississippi and hit a wall. Our contact who was supposed to meet us in Baton Rouge disappeared in the confusion generated by Chimperator Bush's PR visit to Baton Rouge the day we were to arrive.

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Unable to confirm any arrangement, we were reluctant to drive another 120 miles each way to Baton Rouge where chaos was in full reign. Hence, we went to the Jackson Mississippi Coliseum where the Red Cross was warehousing evacuees like animals. Our volunteered assistance was turned down by the Red Cross because of "liability concerns." Next we headed northward to Meridian, Mississippi where a large Methodist Church had several hundred evacuees. We nearly had a family decide to go with us, but the father - who was a basket case - in the last resort wanted to stay in the false hope of being able to return to New Orleans.

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Leaving Meridian, we finally stopped at a cute little restaurant called the Santa Fe Cafe in the tiny town Forrest, Mississippi, since we had not had a normal meal in several days. Upon being seated, the waitress immediately says to us "You boys aren't from around here, are you?" Thinking we were probably about to be beaten up or killed, we explained the basis for our quest. When the waitress told other employees, we soon had them all talking to us and we ended up with food - a fabulous southern style buffet - on the house. They refused to let us pay for anything. Anyone traveling from Meridian to Tuscaloosa should look up this restaurant, which is just off the interstate.

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Finally, we wound up visiting a Red Cross relief event at the Talladega Speedway in Alabama. There, we met some evacuees who gave us the phone numbers of several evacuees stranded in Atlanta who were about to run out of hotel vouchers. We finally picked up seven evacuees in Atlanta - by chance all seven were gay - and drove back to Norfolk. Some of the members of our church, First Lutheran of Norfolk, began helping the evacuees with funds and support. One older couple took in three of the evacuees since nine people in our house was madness.

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We and our evacuees were very frustrated—having faced adversity at every turn as they try to find jobs and housing in the area. It was a maze of bureaucratic red tape since day one. People have been very critical of New Orleans officials and they way they handled things, but from what I saw, the Norfolk area would be just as bad if it happened here this year at some point.

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An account of our adventure was printed in the Virginia Lawyers Weekly. Without a doubt, I have to be one of the most out attorneys in the Commonwealth of Virginia after that September 2006 article.

Obama’s Katrina? Maybe Worse

With the British Petroleum oil spill disaster continuing to see huge amounts of oil being released into the Gulf of Mexico, the political enemies of the Obama administration continue to depict the disaster as Obama's Katrina. This view, of course conveniently re-writes history in therms of the abject failure of the Bush/Cheney regime to properly react to the Hurricane Katrina debacle even as it played out worldwide on television. This view also conveniently ignores the fact that much of the laxness in regulation of offshore drilling likewise traces back directly to the deregulation mantra of Bush/Cheney and the Congressional GOP. Despite my past experience in the oil industry, I am finding no sympathy for BP as it becomes increasingly apparent that safety issues were ignored and that even now more concern seems to be focused on PR and saving money that ending the catastrophe that BP's negligence set in motion. That, however, does not excuse Obama and company for their flawed response to the disaster and Obama's failure to provide the strong leadership that those who elected him expect. Frank Rich has a good column in today's New York Times that looks at the President's fumbled handling of this ongoing disaster. Here are some highlights:
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FOR Barack Obama’s knee-jerk foes, of course it was his Katrina. But for the rest of us, there’s the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove worse if it drags on much longer. It might not only wreck the ecology of a region but capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency.
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Before we look at why, it would be helpful to briefly revisit that increasingly airbrushed late summer of 2005. Whatever Obama’s failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush’s top disaster managers — the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious “Brownie” — professed ignorance of New Orleans’s humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party’s former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.
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The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start — however haltingly and inarticulately at times. It was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL.
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Obama’s news conference on Thursday — explaining in detail the government’s response, its mistakes and its precise relationship to BP — was at least three weeks overdue. It was also his first full news conference in 10 months. Obama’s recurrent tardiness in defining exactly what he wants done on a given issue — a lapse also evident in the protracted rollout of the White House’s specific health care priorities — remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government.
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Long before Obama took office, the public was plenty skeptical that government could do anything right. Eight years of epic Bush ineptitude and waste only added to Washington’s odor. Now Obama is stuck between a rock and a Tea Party. His credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video from the gulf. And this in an election year when the very idea of a viable federal government is under angrier assault than at any time since the Gingrich revolution and militia mobilization of 1994-5 and arguably since the birth of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s.
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The new American “culture war,” Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Washington Post, is not “over guns, gays or abortion” but pits “the principles of free enterprise” against the “European-style statism” he accuses Obama of fomenting. . . . The stakes are high. To win this culture war, the right must rewrite history — and not just that of the Bush response to Katrina. In his jeremiad, Brooks held only “government housing policy” responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown and gave a pass to what he regards as an already overregulated Wall Street. Palin has brazenly accused Obama of being in financial hock to Big Oil when it’s her own “drill, baby, drill” party that has collected three-quarters of Big Oil’s campaign cash for decades.
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The Tea Party is meanwhile busy rewriting America’s early history under Beck’s tutelage by enforcing a vision of the Constitution tantamount to the Creationists’ view of Genesis. We must obey the words of the founding fathers literally — or what the Tea Partiers think those words to be.
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The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big. It’s the crunch moment for government to make its case — as Obama belatedly started to do on Thursday. But words are no match for results. As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP’s pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president’s argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks. It’s not just the gulf that could suffer for decades to come.

Brad Pitt’s Gifts to New Orleans

I will concede that I've been a Brad Pitt fan for years - at least since he played Louis in An Interview With the Vampire or starred in Legends of the Fall (see the photo at right). But he has proven that he is much more than a pretty face and beautiful body. He has spoken out for LGBT equality and marriage equality and, given what he is doing in New Orleans, he puts his money where his mouth is unlike so many self-centered others. The New York Times has a story on Pitt's home building endeavor in New Orleans' Ninth Ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. (My former partner and I put up 7 evacuees from that part of New Orleans back in 2005, so I heard first hand accounts from those who lost everything - see this prior post). Would that there were more celebrities like Pitt. Here are some story highlights:

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In 2007, frustrated by the slow pace of rebuilding in the Lower Ninth, Brad Pitt set up a foundation called Make It Right; the foundation then commissioned 13 architecture firms to design affordable, green houses. The organization plans to build 150 homes, all for returning Lower Ninth residents. So far, just 15 of them are occupied, but those 15 make a big impression.
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Indeed, from the main route into the Lower Ninth, the Claiborne Avenue Bridge, it’s impossible to miss the Brad Pitt Houses, as everyone here calls them. They are sprawling, angular buildings in bold hues not usually seen outside a gelateria. Monuments to the city’s resilience, and to Hollywood’s big heart, they are also New Orleans’s newest tourist attraction.
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But “Brad Pitt’s neighborhood” is a beehive of activity, with builders and landscapers vastly outnumbering residents. A sign in front of each of the houses gives the name and city of its architect. One, called the Float House, was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Los Angeles. The main part of the house is built to rise with surging flood waters, on pylons that keep it from coming loose. It’s difficult to see the innovative foundation, but unusual external features are easy to spot, such as a kind of trellis cut into intricate patterns and painted turquoise, set against the raspberry-hued building.
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[L]ike other architects I spoke to, he expressed admiration for Mr. Pitt. “He deserves a great deal of credit,” Mr. Dart said, adding that Mr. Pitt had “done more for New Orleans” than any government agency.
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Ms. Leggett-Barnes, whose house was designed by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, is — literally — the poster child for Make It Right; her image, plastered on bus-shelter signs around the city, urges former residents to return to the neighborhood. “There may be people who want to move back,” she said, “but don’t know that it’s possible.”

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Brad, I salute your efforts and desire to help others. Would that we had more people in society and government office that had a sense of giving back to others.

McCain's Preacher, John Hagee Again Blames Gays for Katrina

After momentarily retracting his anti-gay comments wherein he had blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans - probably because he is causing John McCain to have to defend him - Boss Hogge look alike, John Hagee, is once again running his mouth and back to gay baiting and what some might construe as race baiting. To demonstrate that they are not closet case racists, I hope Tim Russert and cohorts report on Hagee's latest case of diarrhea of the mouth and McCain's embrace of Hagee's endorsement. Here are highlights from the Dallas Morning News:

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In a conference call with religious supporters, Hagee denounced Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for pressing a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. He called it "a cheap political ploy" aimed at "making Condoleezza Rice a vice presidential candidate and building a midnight legacy for George Bush."

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Hagee also defended himself against charges he's anti-Catholic. . . . Critics say Hagee called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and said Katrina hit New Orleans because of a planned gay-rights parade. Hagee blamed the flap over his "great whore" comments on a "man trying to raise money for the Catholic League." That would be Catholic League President Bill Donahue. Hagee says he was denouncing the apostate church, both Catholic and Protestant.

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When a woman on the call asked why he seemed to have backed away from his Katrina comments in face of criticism, Hagee said he hadn't. As for the Katrina, he said he said, God controls hurricanes and "God always punishes unconfessed sin." You do the math.

McCain to Face New Orleans Protest Over Anti-gay Pastor Hagee

Hopefully John McCain will learn that there is a down side to cozying up to a vile gay-hater like maga church pastor John Hagee, who this week told a radio host that he stands by his comments that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans because sinful gays were planning an event there (i.e., Southern Decadence). As Toweleroad is reporting, the flier shown above, is one that McCain will be greeted by. MoveOn is behind the action, asking people to sign a petition which will be delivered to McCain at his photo-op in a number of hours. The petition reads: "John Hagee continues to blame the people of New Orleans for the catastrophe of Katrina. Senator McCain: If you reject intolerance and bigotry, reject Hagee's political support and stop courting hate-mongers like him." You can sign the petition here.

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It is amazing to me how supposed "men of God" seem to specialize in dishing out hate. What would Jesus say? Here are some more highlights from Think Progress:

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On September 18, 2006, Pastor John Hagee — whose endorsement Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said this past Sunday he was “glad to have” — told NPR’s Terry Gross that “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.” “New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God,” Hagee said, because “there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.”

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On his radio show yesterday, right-wing talker Dennis Prager asked Hagee to respond to “the various charges made against him” in a fact sheet put out by the Democratic National Committee. Asked about his comments on Hurricane Katrina, Hagee said “the topic of that day was cursing and blessing”:

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HAGEE: Yes. The topic of that day was cursing and blessing. … What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it’s called a curse. Prager followed up by asking if all natural disasters are a result of “the divine hand” and if there is “any natural disaster that is not the result of sin?” Hagee responded by saying “it’s a result of God’s permissible will” and “that there was going to be a massive homosexual rally there the following Monday,” which he said “was sin”:

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PRAGER: Right, but in the case, did NPR get, is this quote correct though that in the case of New Orleans you do feel it was sin?

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HAGEE: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The rally never happened.