Bush Losing Support From His Base

And Bush will have another chance to evoke 9/11 this afternoon.

Today's New York Post front page features what reporters Ian Bishop and Andy Geller are calling "the first look at the historic medal that President Bush will present today in an extraordinary White House ceremony to the families of 443 public-safety officers who perished on 9/11."

FEMA and the White House

Spencer S. Hsu writes in The Washington Post: "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency."

A New York Times editorial , citing a Sept. 7 Chicago Tribune story by Andrew Zajac and Andrew Martin , notes: "Mr. Altshuler and Mr. Rhode had worked in the White House's Office of National Advance Operations. Those are the people who decide where the president will stand on stage and which loyal supporters will be permitted into the audience - and how many firefighters will be diverted from rescue duty to surround the president as he patrols the New Orleans airport trying to look busy."

Craig Gordon and Daniel Wagner write in Newsday: "New questions surfaced yesterday about whether the White House inflated FEMA chief Michael Brown's past work experience when he took over the agency."

And Daren Fonda and Rita Healy write in Time about "discrepancies in his online legal profile and official bio, including a description of Brown released by the White House at the time of his nomination in 2001 to the job as deputy chief of FEMA."

Ken Silverstein writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Vice President Dick Cheney defended the administration's FEMA appointees in remarks to reporters Thursday."

John Dickerson writes in Slate: "If Brown hasn't yet packed up his 'me' wall, it may be because of his political utility as a scapegoat. As a focal point of public rage, Brown remains useful to Bush as a fall guy."

White House Under a Cloud

Martin Schram writes for the Scripps Howard News Service: "The eye of Hurricane Katrina apparently is still swirling 1,088 miles north-northeast of New Orleans. According to the latest Rove Radar Report warning, it is stalled ominously above 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

David Gregory writes for NBC News: "On all fronts Thursday, it was administration damage control."

On the NBC Nightly News , Gregory replayed Barbara Bush's now notorious comment about how "so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them."