Quotes of the Morning: The Full Press

“Bush cut short his vacation by two days last week to return to Washington.”
-Associated Press, September 7, 2005

“Yep. He had to quit his vacation a mere 3 days after the disaster after only 4 ½ weeks of time off. Poor bastich. We should do something nice for him. How about eliminating the death tax? That way when Poppy dies he won’t be left with only one of the smaller mansions. Oh, and let’s not allow those pesky reporters in to New Orleans. They’ll probably want to talk about the thousands upon thousands dead and the devastation and stuff like that. That would look bad. I mean, don’t these people realize that the wealthy have suffered too?”
-Skippy

''The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house, and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
-George ‘Dubya’ Bush, September 2, 2005

“So let’s all just agree to not show the devastation and ruined lives. This war.. oops, I mean disaster.. will play better at home if we can avoid all showing what happened because of the bad planning. I mean, that idea has worked for us swimmingly in Iraq. This is the same thing, right? Dang, where’s a missing white woman when you need one?”
-Skippy

“When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.
The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.
‘It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,’ said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors' group that defends free expression.”
-Reuters, September 7, 2005

“At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it's pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration's takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.
First, there were the FEMA orders barring members of the press from photographing anything to do with the recovery of the bodies of the dead.
Perhaps there could be guidelines about photographs which in any way clearly identified the deceased. No one wants to get first confirmation of the death of a loved one by seeing their body on the nightly news. But a blanket ban serves only to prevent the public from knowing what really happened last week. And the right of FEMA or any branch of the federal government for that matter to issue such a ban on American soil seems highly dubious to me. It's one thing with military casualties: the military operates under its own legal code and not under normal civilian rules. But this is happening on American soil. This isn't a war zone. Nor is it any longer a situation where police or National Guard troops are in the midst of retaking control from mobs or looters. This is a recovery from a natural disaster.”
-Joshua Marshall, September 7, 2005

“While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.
At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.”
-Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News: The Daily Nightly, September 7, 2005

“And now, the suitably ironic ending.”
-Skippy

“We love our freedoms, we hold them dear, and we're willing to defend them. We love freedom to speak, we love freedom to assemble, we love freedom of the press. We love those freedoms.”
-George ‘Dubya’ Bush, September 5, 2002