The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, having raised $400,000 for Hurricane Katrina victims, still hasn’t released any of the funds to the victims, all the while criticizing the Bush administration for its slow response to the disaster. An excerpt from Brit Hume’s reporting on this story:

[T]he CBC member Jesse Jackson, Jr., called the government’s lack of response, quote, “shockingly awful,” and Carolyn Kilpatrick said she was, quote, “ashamed of America.”

Say what?

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles has the info.

The CBC — what a bunch of disingenuous, two-faces horses arses! (db)

I’ve gotta stop having those incendiary daydreams . . .

Last night while being driven to a Christmas party on the Palos Verdes peninsula, as we drove past one of the big refineries in the Carson area, and while looking at the vista of humongous tanks just off the freeway, I had a most terrible vision — that of terrorists driving past this beast and firing rpg’s or stinger missiles into the refinery from the open door of a commercial van. Needless to say, if we were witnessing that kind of attack, we wouldn’t be getting out of there in one piece. It was a harrowing fantasy without the inherent feelings of dread associated with prescience.

No one so far is saying that this enormous explosion near London is anything but an accident, but it does make you consider the terrible.

A series of large explosions at a fuel depot which injured 43 people has been described as the “largest incident of its kind in peacetime Europe”.

The blasts near Hemel Hempstead were so powerful it rocked houses up to 40 miles away and was heard in Holland.

More than 60 billion gallons of fuel erupted in a ball of flames hundreds of feet in the sky, creating an acrid cloud of smoke which is stretching for miles and moving south-eastwards.

Thank God that no one has been reported killed, but there are injured, some seriously. Not too hard to image that one — with “60 billion gallons of fuel” involved! Will have to keep tuned to see what develops and is given as a cause.

Fuel is an absolute necessity for modern existence. All the nutters and NIMBY activists that have successfully stopped any new refineries being built in the U.S. for over 30 years are probably ecstatic this AM, and just can’t wait to use images from this blast to further their cause. All this really shows us is that we live in a world of risk. Always have! Always will.

The first conscious thought that I had on awakening this morning was of different ways to die. We have close family members nearing the end of their days, and friends with illnesses that have no positive prognosis, so they were on my mind. The way the thoughts floated through was like this — Back in the day, for most of humanity death came suddenly, violently, without overly-long-extended debilitation and suffering. Modern civilization and advanced medicine has changed that.

We trade some discomfort and diminished capacities for time — sometimes a lot more time. Sounds like a deal to me.

The Islamofascists terrorists want to take us back to harsh lives, with deaths strictly on their terms. Sounds like something definitely worth fighting back against!

Now in that vein, I sure hope that we are protecting our refineries. Never liked driving by one of those things before, really don’t now . . . (db)

Greta Perry, the Hooah Wife, gets a first hand interview from her hubby, LTC Perry, who is stationed in Lake Charles, Louisiana and working the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. She called for questions from her readers to go along with a couple of her own.

If you want to get some straight poop on what is going on back there, be sure and check out her post. (db)

Captain Ed focuses on the reality of Katrina’s devastation across income lines, and what seems to be the complete failure of mass media to have gotten anything right!

Without a doubt, the Ninth Ward got hit hard by the levee break, but from the previous media coverage, Americans had the impression that the poor of New Orleans comprised the only demographic of the dead. We heard nothing but how the hurricane had pulled back the sheet on the deep secret of American poverty and how the government doesn’t care about its poor citizenry. Now what are we to believe — that they don’t care about the rich either? Will Shep Smith cry in the Louisiana rain about the unfairness of the high death rate among the wealthy of Lakeview, too? [emph mine]

I, like many bloggers, bought into the madness during the height of Katrina coverage, and passed along too much of the now-found-to-be-bogus information. Thanks Capt. for continuing to bring to our attention what the MSM doesn’t feel deserves to be known. (db)

In his post on reasons for such a high death-toll in the 7.6 Pakistan earthquake of yesterday, fellow SCBA blogger Laer Pierce at Cheat Seeking Missiles makes the following observations:

You can be poor and happy, but not if you’re a nation. High standards of construction — not to mention education or medicine — require money.
(…)
Politics has consequences, sometimes life and death consequences. Hard environmentalists and anti-globalists want people in poor countries to stay poor, just like they want people in rich countries to become poorer. But they hatch these schemes in their well-engineered, reinforced, heated and cooled homes.

Let them try to stick to their beliefs in the village of Garhi Habibullah, where 300 bodies have been recovered from the ruins of a girls school.

Laer has a good bit of wisdom in the the rest of his post, and I highly recommend that you go there and check it out. The death toll was being estimated at over 30,000 this AM on FoxNews, which seems like a staggering amount for a 7.6 magnitude quake. Laer explains a lot of the reason for this, and perhaps, assigns some blame.

And truth be told — I, just like Laer, continue to procrastinate in being prepared for LA’s inevitable Big One! (db)

In light of hurricanes Katrina & Rita, Miami preacher and radio talk show host Doug Giles has a few words for surviving disasters great and small:

No where in the scripture has God ever assured anyone, baptized or not, of a carefree, no conflict existence. Televangelists might have sold that sack of crack to preening narcissistic apostates, but Christ never marketed that kind of deceptive dope. Ever since Adam and Eve derailed in the garden we have had to pay retail to live on this planet, and we will continue to do so until the credits run on this fallen-earth flick.

Whoa! Never one to back away from tellin’ it like it is, Doug continues with three bullet points for successful survival techniques:

1. Don’t curse God when things go south. (…)
2. Realize how short and fragile life really is. (…)
3. Bank treasure in heaven. (…)

I’m gonna let you go over to Doug’s place and read the fullness of each point, and they are required reading, gonna be a test later . . . for each of us! But I will let Doug’s closing words be the last here:

Regardless of how disheartening the difficulties can be, they should not send us into a tailspin. Rather, they should bring out the best in the believer. They can, if played correctly, bring us back to the biblical basics of faith, hope and love. If engaged properly they can serve us by shaking us down, shaping us up, softening our hearts and steeling our will in a right direction. And that’s exactly what I am praying for during this historical moment.

(db)