Where are the Democrats?

Are their vacations that important?

Complete Failure

There is almost no place to start, everyone has seen it for themselves. There is that one image that sticks, there are too many others to register. Mistake after misjudgement after incompetence, one after the other, each making things worse.

Bush strumming a guitar as the levies broke - their funding previously cut to finance the folly in Iraq. The LA National Guard is in Iraq as well.

This hurricane is our terrorist attack - they all said it would happen - and the Federal Government was completely ill-prepared, caught off-guard, without plans, and most important factor of all:

COMPLETE FAILURE of LEADERSHIP

I hope they just don't come up with tax cuts as the solution to this mess, but that's about all I expect.

This is a total repudiation of the Republican view of government: every man for himself, if you're poor, you haven't worked hard enough. Whatever happened to helping the least among us? The Christian values of charity? Honour thy neighbor? - they are nothing but p.r. slogans for the Republicans.

Yeah, politicizing this mess may be in bad form right now; I hesitate to do it. But would Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Rush, Hannity et. al hesistate for 1 nanosecond on whether to blame the Democrats if we were in charge? NO.

Oh and by the way, the head of FEMA worked earlier at the International Arabian Horses Association (!!!!!!!!!!), a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray. (go see Gilliard)

One p.s. re politicization: everything from day 1 of BushII was anti-Clinton: don't do what Clinton did, remove his rules, remove his people, reverse the policies. Well, if Bill Clinton was so bad, how come Junior has to beg him back into service while the largest crises occur in our land? I think you know the answer.

A b.j. wasn't so bad after all, was it? (that's a rhetorical question for our Republican friends and neighbors)

Katrina Ideas: WATER NOW

1) If it rains (it's raining in New Orleans as I post this, I heard on the radio):
Spread out a sheet - a shower curtain, a plasticized tablecloth, a sailboat sail, anything that is large and reasonably nonabsorbent and can be strung up or laid out on a rooftop with the edges elevated. At the lowest corner or center that is pulled to be the lowest point, have it feed into a bucket or other collection pot. Allow the rain to wash these clean for ten minutes (less if it's a hard rain). Empty the bucket, then start collecting - the water will be much cleaner than anything else you have around. Have additional containers ready to repeat the process if you can. You can even use heavy-duty plastic bags to hold water. KEEP IT COVERED once its collected - mosquitos and things will lay eggs in it and you'l have a bunch of wiggly stuff in the water after a couple of days if you don't.

2) If it's hot and sunny:
If you have a clean container and some plastic, plus something upright above the water level to tie it to, you can make a solar still. There are only 2 essential components to constructing the Solar Still -- a container to catch the water and a big sheet of clear plastic.

The sheet of clear plastic can be a ground cloth used under tents when backpacking or a thin painters' drop cloth. Both work well as long as they are clean and there are no tears or holes. It is a slow process but it can keep you alive. Make more stills if you have more people. One 6x6-foot plastic sheet can make enough water for one, maybe two people.

You need to make a "tent" above the water, with a wide base, and with the sides going all the way down to the water to keep the air from getting in. Above the level of the dirty water, you have to create something to catch collected evaporated droplets - they will accumulate on the inside of the clear plastic above the wastewater level, and they have to be channeled into your catchment container - like, if you have some tape and can make a pouch in the plastic at that point, good. The pouch should be shaped so that it actually hangs outward above the bottom part of the tent - you will be taking the water from the pouch. You can make a small hole in the side of the pouch if you have some way to close the hole off, like a chip clip or a hair clip or a rubber band, so that water does not leak into your outside container at a slow rate - you'd lose too much to evaporation that way. Collect first, then drain the pouch into your portable water container through that small hole, then reseal the hole to keep collecting. You will also need to arrange folds of the plastic that can stay in place (tape is good here, but even a little rope would work to put an angled channel in - funneling the drips to the lowest point, YOUR POUCH. All that is needed is to keep the breeze out of the interior, to keep the interior expanded so that a large surface area of wastewater is exposed to evaporation into the inside of your plastic, to allow the sunlight to heat the wastewater at the base of your still, and to channel the dripping droplets into your catchment pouch (or covered container). If you have a large rectangle that is open on top, already filled with wastewater, and which will close the sides for you, you can simplify the design by just running the platic or even a piece of hard platic or glass along the top - buty it should be pretty airtight to minimize evaporative loss to the breeze! Put the collection container at the lowest point in the sheet/glass, and try to angle that lowest end so that the container is the lowest point along that whole edge - you don't want your fresh water droplets dripping back into the wastewater instead of into your container.

The best floating solar stills have a little cone-shaped tent of clear plastic over a ring-shaped bottom that floats and the collection area is at the outer edge around the ring (like a channel that will hold the collected water rather than letting it fall beck into the sea). Land-based pit solar stills run the plastic above a bowl-shaped depression and put a rock in the center of the sheet so that everything drains to a small container at the center - but with water instead of earth down there, you would need a way to keep that central low point above the watewater, and a way to get the water OUT of the central collection container without disassembling the still, if possible. Tougher for me to describe a design for that without diagrams, but at least you now know the "central collection point" technique as well.

If you actually have a place to set up a larger still, here is one stationary "box type" design:
http://www.txses.org/epsea/stills.html

Frankly, they should be air dropping watermakers and solar stills and tough tyvek bags of drinking water to people, and the only way someone is going to get this information is if somebody attached to a relief effort reads it. But I have no other way of putting this info out there - the relief agencies are so overwhelmed that trying to get info to them is not fruitful.

Counterspin

d r i f t g l a s s is hell-arious!

Counterspin Central was Hesiod's website, where he did many great things, including the job on the Swift Boat Liar's that Kerry's campaign team should've but dint. So this is a bass-ackwards tribute to him.