Biased, partisan, joint GOP congressional panel to whitewash Katrina is now dead

We learn from the LA Times, via Markos, that the congressional Republicans' effort to establish a joint House-Senate commission, made up mostly of Republicans, to "investigate" the Katrina mess is now dead. Why? Because Dems would have nothing to do with a political panel whose only purpose is to whitewash what went wrong.

More still needs to be done. We need to push for an independent non-partisan panel, made up equally of Dems and Republicans, or even no political partisans at all, to find out what went wrong so we can fix it. Otherwise we won't be prepared if and when Osama strikes again. So far the Republicans still appear to be talking about doing partisan Republican-led investigations in the House and Senate, but separately rather than jointly. This is still absurd. The GOP should stop playing partisan politics with this investigation. We need to know what went wrong, not waste even more money playing politics with this tragedy.

Kudos to you guys, our readers, for helping to jump on this issue - judging by the feedback, a LOT of you called the Hill last week to voice your concern in response to our alert. And thanks to Markos (and other bloggers, I suspect) for directing his readers to our site last week so that they could act on our Katrina Commission alert.

And finally, kudos to the Democrats. They stuck to their guns on this issue and it worked. Amazing how that happens :-) And I suspect that your calls to the Hill helped reinforce the effort the Dems were making - both in bucking up the Dems and softening up the Republicans - so again you all get credit for helping.

The trick now is to keep the pressure up and ensure that the nation gets its independent Katrina commission. We owe it to those who died in this hurricane, those who survived and suffered, and to all of us who need a government that is actually prepared to deal with the next disaster whenever it hits.

I think tomorrow we're going to do another alert, and this time, let's do a detailed report on what individual offices are saying. I'll need your guys' help, again, to do that. Stay tuned for an alert tomorrow, and thanks again.

PS I would be remiss not to remind folks that we got t-shirts to protest this partisan panel :-)