No, he’s saving it for Rolling Stone (do keep up).
You won’t see my sister’s picture in any magazine and you’ll probably only read about her here, but yesterday she and other retired pharmacists not only used their vehicles and their contacts to have prescription meds donated and transported to the evacuees in south Alabama (incidentally, PFIZER PHARMACEUTICALS demands major kudos as they donated a fortune of prescription meds and fast shipped them to Montgomery, where volunteers relayed them down) but she also called her contacts with Medicaid to get them to relax their privacy standards in telling what medications some people were on (the ones who had their ID but couldn’t remember the names of the medications) and to the Alabama Pharmaceutical Association to convince them to relax standards in dispensing non-addictive medication, making it possible to give people who knew their medication and their dosage for heart pills/seizure medication/psychotropics/insulin, etc., but who for obvious reasons didn’t have their prescriptions handy and whose doctor’s offices were underwater. This saved lives, probably far more than the three Penn saved.
Kathi will never get recognition for this, and she doesn’t want it. She was being a wonderful and proactive person anonymously because she cared. While I am ashamed to say I pitted her in the first days of the disaster, she is very much a hero to me now, and not in the least because she DIDN’T have a photographer or entourage to stand by and say “What A Wonderful Person Is She- here’s her being concerned and if you look to the back you can see the Huey Long Bridge”.
I’m glad some good came of Penn’s adventure. I still think it was born more of self importance than of real interest and that professionals would have done better. This whole thing has been a monumental conglameration of carbuncular clusterfucks and if Penn did something to ameliorate it then hurra, but I’ll never buy another issue of Rolling Stone for sending a media whore celebrity to do what a real journalist or a real First Responder could have done better.
No harm, no foul. There are worse people to mixed up with than Sampiro
Now several people mentioned that “He tried” or words to the effect of he did his best.
Two things come to mind, first was a conversation between a 16yr old Rick and his football coach Mr. Bogle
Coach: Here is what I want you to do…
Rick: I’ll try
Coach at a full roar (At 6’5" and 300 lbs when coach roared, the walls rattled):
Listen Rick even a fucking steer can TRY. I want you to fucking do it. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Rick: Yes sir.
Or about doing your best (or trying your best)
From The Rock
The people in NOLA don’t need people who try, they need the people that can do it.
BTW, 4 pages in and nobody has made a Film Actors Guild crack? Jeez you guys are slipping.
I’ve noticed several mentions of how it wasn’t appropriate (or whatever word would be best to describe his action) for Penn to give money to the victims. I’m not sure I understand, because if the goal was to rescue them, wouldn’t they need funds in the near future? To wherever they were going? To buy necessities whenever assistance runs low/out? To help look for a job (or have someone babysit while they do), buy some much-needed clothes or OTC medications they haven’t been supplied with?
I have no idea how much he gave, but if all I got out with were the clothes on my back and nothing to return to, I’d be more than grateful for anything anyone (including him, for even not nice ulterior motives) had to offer. Including cash.
Goddamn, Rick, think for a minute. They needed “people that can do it” Monday, and they’ve needed them working in the state of Louisiana for decades. If they had had that, this would not have been such a huge disaster that it required Sean Penn’s aid. (;)) To chastise Penn at this stage for taking space from other rescue people, especially when it seems he really did something, even if it wasn’t a lot, strikes me as silly.
I have to retreat from my previous position concerning reporters and whether or not they should intervene. This post is from a message board I visit. (I received permission from SDMB to link it.) The poster works for CNN, I think in an executive capacity. He is responding to a poster who questions why reporters in helicopters did not rescue victims. It opened my eyes.
[Princess Bride]You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.[/PB]
Obviously, you have a differnent measure of the word sucess than the rest of the world.
If he rescued one person, he succeeded. How could you possibly argue that success in helping people is not really success? What are you, fucking simple?
I can’t believe this thread is 5 pages long. Such petty bitching, and not one Pit thread about those no-bid contracts Halliburton got the other day to rebuild the Navy shipyards damanged by Katrina.
It was said on CNN last night (Larry King) that Penn and his boats rescued about 40 people. Penn was defended by the Police Chief. Suck on it.
Such petty bitching. People should be ashamed of themselves.
I don’t mean to single you out, and I agree that it is a shame that such an obvious attempt at distraction by the right has been given so much attention, but if there is an issue that you think isn’t being addressed, start a thread about it yourself! I mean it - take ownership of the content of the board. You paid for it. If nobody else wants to talk about it, it will die in silence, but so be it. At least you tried, and nobody will be the worse for it.
Maybe there is no Pit thread because it didn’t happen. From the article–bolding mine–
*The subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc., won the **competitive bid ** *contract last July ** to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters.
Contrapuntal didn’t you know that being efective at handling major projects like disaster clean up, while also being the most cost effective bidder, is EVIL?! EVIL I SAY!
At a one to one ratio of resucers to people rescued, lots of folks are going to die. Not very effective.
Go ask Scruloose over in this thread. These men and women are heros. No photographers, and they can remember to put the fucking plug in the bottom of their boats. Thousands rescued (maybe because they did remember to put the plug in the bottom of their boats)
Oh, and did I mention they didn’t have to bail their boats out with a plastic cup?
Huh? If you are saying that I am defending FEMA and the president, they you would be 100% wrong. I think that just about everybody in any position of authority in this mess pretty much fucked up by the numbers. With the shinning exception of the Coast Guard. Those guys (and ladies) handled the mission. Everybody else no. They all fucked up.
So he failed because he didn’t rescue enough people. Your logic is faulty. A 1:1 ratio would only fail if there were not enough rescuers. So, Sean Penn is actually helping to increase the potential for success, not reduce it.
In reality, it seems, you cannot produce any specific criteria to judge Sean Penn on. You just want to snipe, I guess. Because the final equation appears to stand. Sean Penn possesses negative qualities A through Z, and still rescued someone. Given that negative qualities A through Z continue to be rather benign (self-aggrandizement, media whore, starring in Fast Times at Ridgemont High…), he’s still doing pretty damn good.
I was agreeing with you and disagreeing with the person you responded to. Sorry it didn’t come out that way. (Can someone pick me up a coffee on their way back?)
Nah, I swore off starting Pit threads. I actually swore off reading Pit threads, but I want all the information I can find about Katrina since it is, after all, a once-in-a-lifetime event. A historical landmark. Which means I’m reading threads everywhere I can find them. I got involved in this one…well, I have no idea why I got involved in this one, since I have no particular interest in Sean Penn other than that I think he’s a good actor, but it bothered me that anyone who pitched in to help and did anything good were being hailed, unless he’s an actor. Fuck all those people he helped, I guess. They don’t matter because of who helped them. Petty fucking bullshit bitching. Jesus, some people suck.
I’m waiting for someone to blame Penn for not being in Jefferson Parish, helping rescue those 30+ nursing home patients who drowned while waiting for rescue, the ones that the president of Jefferson Parish cried about on Tim Russert’s show. The bodies are being recovered as I type. Petty fucking bullshit when so many people died because there wasn’t a celebrity (or anyone else) there to help them.
In any case, it seems I was wrong about Halliburton. I saw a few TV news reports about it, but didn’t bother to go look for solid cites, mainly because I don’t really give a shit even if I had been right. I should have deleted it.
Sean Penn is fairly goofy and his mission might not have been a brilliant idea because he was probably ill-prepared. But he helped people. I don’t care if he does a TV special and ends up making a bajillion dollars from it.
I do reserve the right to giggle over the picture, because it’s pretty funny. But still, thank you, Sean Penn for doing something–no matter what your motive or intent might have been.
No harm, no foul. There are worse people to mixed up with than Sampiro