Am I getting any fanfic writing done?

Why, no. No, I'm not.

Wanna know why?

I'm too busy beating my head against the wall and screaming obscenities. That's why.

Now, saying George Bush lied is sort of like saying that grass is green and the sky is blue. I know this.

But when you've got a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions like Hurricane Katrina and you lie about it?

Well, now. We're talking about something else entirely.

The RudePundit (as the name implies, most of the language in this blog is not worksafe) went home for the holidays and documented in excruciating detail with pictures how the entire region is still in dire straights. (The Katrina links, however, are worksafe.)

The photos are devastating and Mr. Rude's exploration of his hometown and environs will make you sick with grief.

Read his journey home, then read the latest from AP. Better, go watch the video.

Remember Bush how said, "No one knew the levees would break?"

Remember how quite a few people called bullshit on that?

I really hate being right. Especially when you've got, to quote Editor & Publisher:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

The footage - along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press - show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Excuse me. I need to go somewhere and scream very loudly. I'm feeling just a little bit overwhelmed.

via Firedoglake:

The Birmingham News (of Alabama for you non-U.S. people) recently found photographs that chronicled the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Ala., dating from 1950 to 1965. These photographs were taken by the newspaper's photographers, but hidden from sight.

Here's a little background.

Hundreds of photos from that era were lost, sold, stolen or stored in archives. Some of those pictures appear today for the first time in the newspaper, in an eight-page special section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten."

The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."

Cohn, who grew up in Mountain Brook and is a master's candidate at the University of Missouri, researched the images and discovered that many had never been published.

"These images were hidden in plain sight," Cohn said. "When I first started looking through this stuff, I was seeing a lot of images that I'd never seen before. I started going through everything on the subject that I could find to get a fuller picture of what was going on."

[snip, snip]

In all, Cohn said, he found 5,000 images from 1950 to 1965 in the cardboard box. He examined 2,000 and estimated that most had not been published.

Why weren't more of the photos published 40 or 50 years ago?

"It was difficult for people to see," said Horace Huntley, director of oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "People were embarrassed by it. The city fathers were embarrassed by it."

What followed was two years of research to get the story behind the story. Photographers, reporters, clergymen, elected officials, civil rights leaders, historians, witnesses, and participants were all interviewed.

The Birmingham News has published some of the photos just this past Sunday, although you can still see the photos online at the Unseen. Unforgotten. website. There are also plans to use some of the images in a special exhibition at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute beginning March 13.

To save my Flist the image overload, I picked four haunting pictures to tempt you into visiting the site:

( This is why they fought. )

( A profile in cowardice. )

( It's the pissed off guy in the background that makes this one. )

( This is what strength looks like. )

I urge everyone to visit Unseen. Unforgotten., especially my countrymen. The illuminating pictures of this period are educational and bring home just what the Civil Rights Movement was up against.