People, people! Obviously the problem isn’t that everyone at FEMA and the DHS are Bush’s buddies with no disaster experience whatsoever, it’s that we don’t have any Republican presidential candidates in charge of teh operation:
I’ve read way too much of this shit today, and I can’t take much more. :mad:
Thank God it’s almost time to go him to my 6 month old daughter, whose laugh can make me forget everything else.
There’s no need to invoke Rove, Bush himself summed the situation up beautifully today:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050902-6.html
Funny you should mention that–President Hu Jintao of China will be visiting the White House next week . . .
Am I the only person reminded of those “troubleshoeter” sequences on the local news where the company screwing over the old lady suddenly starts playing nice when the cameras show up?
Let’s remember that Bush declared Louisiana to be in a state of emergency on Saturday…two days before Katrina hit. That was the signal for Governor Blanco to mobilize the National Guard and do something. What, exactly, did she do? And where, exactly, has she been lately?
An interesting tidbit on how people are responding…
Cops join in looting a walmart.
Is it any wonder that things have become chaotic?
If we’re spreading blame around, I’d like to heap some at the feet of the Louisiana Governor. Kathleen Blanco’s office, IMO, had the highest level of immediate responsibility for planning this disaster’s aftermath. That is who should have leapt into action once it became clear NO was in the path.
I apologize for my vagueness, but I’m not a TV watcher. Last night I turned on the TV for the first time in probably six months, looking for Katrina video. At 9 p.m. my time that turned out to be mostly Fox and that Greta thing who looks like half her face is paralyzed. I did come across a blonde news personality who I’m guessing is famous for her style of not keeping her feelings and opinions out of her reporting. She was interviewing some federal government honcho who said, “We didn’t hear from the governor until today that there were shortages at the Super Dome.” I actually gasped when I heard this. I don’t admire the blonde’s reporting style, but I did enjoy her comeback, which was something like, “Perhaps you didn’t receive the engraved invitation until today. . .”
That’s funny and all…but state’s do have governors for just this reason. They sort of, uh, govern what’s going on in their state. That means they are the liason with the federal officials.
The political failures have been astounding, starting with the Mayor who declared mandatory evacuation but had no consideration for those who id not have the means to do so, to the Governor who seems to be a deer caught ion the headlights, to Bush’s inability to lead and failing to jump in when there were local failures.
Seems like a good place to share this quatrain from Nostradamus:
Catharina, the storm of Columbus’ New World,
Shall hit the newborn child of Orleans,
And bring down the reign of a Georgian shrub;
That scrotum-faced, pinheaded pile of doggie crap.
[It’s not really from Nostradamus.]
I couldnt agree more. And what infurates me the most is everyones propensity to place blame instead of rolling up their sleves and do what neds to be done. I think they are currently doing that but to me it sems a few days too late.
And Canada is sending the Navy…
Wolf Blitzer just spoke with a woman who was evacuated along with about 300 other guests from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel last night.
Maybe all those poor black people should have gone there instead of the convention center or the SuperDome.
But at least they got the important people out. :rolleyes:
Your point here is lost on me.
It would be assumed that guests of the Ritz-Carlton would be white and/or wealthy.
After the Ritz-Carlton, the Hyatt:
Yeah, well I probably chose the wrong Katrina thread to post that too. There are so many to choose from and I just picked this one.
But with that said, I feel that this example is indicative of the way this whole clusterfuck has been handled. FEMA Director Brown actually said to Paula Zahn yesterday that they just learned about the situation at the convention center on Thursday. Hell, I knew about it on Wednesday since it had been all over the news since then. (Kudos to Zahn for calling him on his bullshit, by the way.)
So FEMA doesn’t know about the convention center where people are dying of dehydration, living in squalid conditions, and being subjected to assaults, rapes and threats from the roving gangs of armed thugs. Even after it has been reported by all the news outlets, they still make no effort to get food and water to these people until today. But they were able to put together a rescue effort to save those holed up in the Ritz-Carlton last night? Motherfuck! :mad:
I wonder if those buses weren’t hired privately - I saw footage last night of a guy whose boss had hired a bus to take him, his employees, and some of the people stranded in the neighborhood around his business out, and supposedly they were commandeered by the authorities to use in the Superdome-Astrodome transport.
I say “supposedly” because you never know what’s rumor and what’s fact. Even if you have an “eyewitness” you still have nothing to guage their credibility, you have no way to know if they knew ALL the facts or just THOUGHT they knew all the facts, and you never know if what they are saying was indeed FACT or if it was their PRECEPTION of the facts.
Sorry, “perception”.