10 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes by Tom DeLay

After being locked up in jail for nearly three months, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released on Thursday after agreeing to testify before a grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration leaked a covert CIA operative's name.

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." -- Former Education Secretary William Bennett

Nicknames granted by President George W. Bush.

"Leaving Brooklyn Oy vey!"

Sworn in: John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative protege of the late William H. Rehnquist, succeeded him Thursday and became the nation's youngest chief justice in two centuries, winning support from more than three-fourths of the Senate after promising he would be no ideologue.

Sheehan calls McCain "warmonger" after meeting.

Oops. Make that was indicted today. "A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post."

First lady Laura Bush made her reality TV debut Tuesday, helping with a taping of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" in a sweltering community building as she toured hurricane relief sites on the Mississippi coast.

A Texas grand jury is deciding whether to indict U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay on conspiracy charges related to fund-raising activities by a political action committee he created.

Bob Cesca: Bigotry In The Name Of Jesus H. Christ

Nearly 250 New Orleans police officers -- roughly 15 percent of the force -- could face a special tribunal because they left their posts without permission during Hurricane Katrina and the storm's chaotic aftermath

Former FEMA director (and newly re-hired as a consultant) Michael Brown blamed others for most government failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday, especially Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. He aggressively defended his own role.

The 13 most corrupt members of Congress.

China set new regulations on Internet news content on Sunday, widening a campaign of controls it has imposed on other Web sites, such as discussion groups.

Rumors of deaths at the New Orleans Dome were greatly exaggerated.

Vice President Dick Cheney plans to work from home after surgery on Saturday.

Majority Leader Sen. Bill Frist now facing two investigations concerning his investment activities.

Hurricane Rita caused an estimated $2.5 billion to $5 billion in insured losses in eastern Texas and western Louisiana.

President George W. Bush, still smarting over criticism for his slow response to Katrina, flew to a Colorado military base on Friday to monitor Hurricane Rita after abruptly canceling a trip to Texas to avoid interfering with relief operations.

Actor Warren Beatty leveled a blistering political assault on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday night, accusing him of governing "by show, by spin, by cosmetics and photos ops" while imposing Bush administration policies on California.

Many poor residents stuck in Houston during the Hurricane Rita evacuations. (Where have we heard this before?)

After five months of hearings and deliberations, a high-level election-reform commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended that Congress require electronic-voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper audit trail by 2008.

The Federal Election Commission dismissed complaints that Republican and conservative groups improperly worked with Ralph Nader to get him on state presidential ballots last year.

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved John Roberts' nomination as the next Supreme Court chief justice in a 13-5 vote.

Handbook for Blogger and Cyber-Dissidents.

Bush administration to home-state Texas bound Hurricane Rita: Please don't mess with Texas.

The FBI is joining the Bush adminstration's war on porn. The new "anti-obscenity squad" will seek to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family's hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent.

Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, an untiring campaigner who helped track down hundreds of Nazi war criminals, died Tuesday in Vienna aged 96. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach and social action. The Center confronts important contemporary issues including racism, antisemitism, terrorism and genocide and is accredited as an NGO both at the United Nations and UNESCO.

New Orleans is closed again.

Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history.

Clinton turns on Bush. "What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin defended his plan to return up to 180,000 people to the city within a week and a half despite concerns about the short supply of drinking water and heavily polluted floodwaters. "We must offer the people of New Orleans every chance for a sense of closure and the opportunity for a new beginning."

President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil.

So Pat Robertson didn't blame Ellen Degeneres for Hurricane Katrina? (It seems so plausible versus appearing as a hoax/satire.)

How has the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper has kept publishing throughout the disaster?

How the photo of the President Bush "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible." note came about.

Text of President Bush's address on Thursday. "In this place, there is a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful "second line" symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the second line."

Taxpayers will pay the bill for the massive reconstruction program outlined by President Bush for the hurricane ravaged-Gulf Coast and the huge expense will worsen the nation's budget deficit.

"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again." -- President George W. Bush

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger all but declared Wednesday that he would run for a second term next year, saying, "I am not in this for the short run."

Ex-FEMA chief Brown tells of frustration and chaos in New Orleans.

Unfortunate President Bush Photo of the Day.

A federal judge declared the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools unconstitutional Wednesday in a case brought by the same atheist whose previous battle against the words "under God" was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds.

Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press? Maybe not so much.

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility." -- President George W. Bush

Brownie resigns.

How Bush Blew It -- Bureaucratic timidity. Bad phone lines. And a failure of imagination. Why the government was so slow to respond to catastrophe.

Pat Robertson: Ellen Degeneres caused Hurriance Katrina because she was chosen (again) to host the Emmy Awards. "By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God's wrath. Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres' hometown?"

"Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say somebody is at fault. And, look, I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on, and we'll continually assess inside my administration." -- President George W. Bush

"The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.

Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans."

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin created many new friends and probably as many enemies for his decision to pointedly chastise both Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Bush administration for talking too much and working too little. Now, however, difficult questions are being directed at the mayor.

Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Sunday he will not ask Supreme Court nominee John Roberts whether he would vote to overturn the landmark decision that legalized abortion.

President Bush issued a proclamation Thursday suspending the minimum pay scale requirements for federal contractors working in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

In making the decision to suspend provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, Bush wrote to Congress that the wage imposed under the 1931 law will "increase the cost to the Federal Government of providing Federal assistance to these areas."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has once again emerged as a contender for the Supreme Court. Bush said this week the list of potential nominees "is wide open, which should create some good speculation here in Washington." Then Bush looked across the table in the White House Cabinet Room and added, "Make sure you notice when I said that, I looked right at Al Gonzales, who can really create speculation."

39% job approval -- lowest ever.

25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath.

"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" -- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, speaking to children evacuated to the Astrodome

"Brownie" is out.

The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans. "Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed."

KayneWestforPresident.com -- "Pimping the system to change the system."

A political organization formed by House Majority leader Tom DeLay and a prominent Texas business group face charges of taking illegal corporate money during the 2002 legislative campaigns.

Top U.S. disaster official Michael Brown, under fire over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, cited prior emergency-management experience in an official biography but his duties were "more like an intern".

"Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself!"

The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.

There are an awful lot of chiefs around the White House these days when it comes to Hurricane Katrina.

Republicans in Congress on Wednesday rejected calls by Democrats to suspend work on tax cuts, that would mainly benefit the rich, and spending reductions on social programs because of the huge costs of hurricane relief.

Is the term "refugee" racist when applied to victims of Hurricane Katrina?

The California Legislature made history Tuesday as the Assembly passed a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. The bill, which would change California's legal definition of marriage from "a civil contract between a man and a woman" to a "civil contract between two persons," now goes to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has signaled that he will veto it.

Hurricane Katrina will reduce employment by 400,000 people in coming months while trimming economic growth by as much as a full percentage point in the second half of this year.

Katrinagate.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this ... this ... is working very well for them." -- Former First Lady Barbara Bush, touring the Houston Astrodome hurricane relief center.

The Hollywood invasion. "Actor John Travolta and his wife, actress Kelly Preston, flew in their own private jet to deliver five tons of food for victims of Hurricane Katrina."

"Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot." -- Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president

Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

New Orleans' mayor warns that 10,000 people may have died from the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

President Bush on Monday nominated John Roberts to succeed William H. Rehnquist as chief justice and called on the Senate to confirm him before the Supreme Court opens its fall term on Oct. 3.

New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening of cancer, ending a 33-year Supreme Court career during which he oversaw the court's conservative shift, presided over an impeachment trial and helped decide a presidential election. His death creates a rare second vacancy on the nation's highest court.

Hurricane Sluggo. (WMV video)

The Rebellion of the Talking Heads. "And when they hear politicians slap — you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours."

And the first no-bid contract goes to: Halliburton. "The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina."

"The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast."

New Orleans: Apocalypse. "It's unfortunate that I'm getting used to anarchy and chaos when this was once a vital, vibrant community of people who looked out for one another. And it's degraded to this."

"The results are not acceptable." -- President George W. Bush

"They don't have a clue what's going on down here." -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

"Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

They're already calling it Lake George.

Major airports in the East and Southeast could run out of jet fuel as soon as next week if refinery and pipeline shutdowns aren't resolved soon.

President Bush will tour the hurricane devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.