Doors locked/Blinds pulled

"I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes
And make it go away
How long, how long must we sing this song?"

-U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

Reuters AlertNet:

The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.

The Bush administration also has prevented the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism that the government is trying to block images that put the war in a bad light.

The White House is under fire for its handling of the relief effort, which many officials have charged was slow and bureacratic, contributing to the death and mayhem in New Orleans after the storm struck on Aug. 29.

Salt Lake Tribune-Utah:

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

TalkLeft:

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today," Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard said on CBS' The Early Show. "So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

Steve Gilliard, The News Blog:

Occasionally, people will write that I hate Bush. Which I don't. I just feel a tremendous sadness when I think of him. He was supposed to lead and protect and he has failed. Like he has his entire life. He can lie to get elected, but he cannot govern, nor can he lead.

People think he will escape this.

This is far from over. When the funeral pyres light the New Orleans sky and there is no other way to dispose of that many dead left to fester for months in heat, his failure will be in stark and brutal relief.

This is Pearl Harbor and Bush is in charge of the port.