I love this! From another blog that had me rolling:
Inner Peace.
By following the simple advice I heard on a Dr. Phil show, I have finally found inner peace. I am passing this on to you because it definitely worked for me and we could all use more calm in our lives.
Dr. Phil proclaimed that the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started. So I looked around my house to see things I started and hadn't finished; and before leaving the house this morning I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bottle of Stoli, a package of Oreos, the remainder of both Prozac and Valium prescriptions, the rest of the cheesecake, two pints of ice cream, some saltines and a box of chocolates.
And you have no idea how fucking good I feel.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
BOHICA!
Look. Another dick-stompin' hurricane bears down on the United States. Rita is as big and as nasty as Katrina, and it is headed for areas as heavily populated as New Orleans. But wait! What's this? People in Texas are leaving! They learned from that clusterfuck in New Orleans that they needed to leave. None of that I'm-on-welfare-and-living-in-subsidized-government housing-so-I'll-just-continue-letting-the-government-babysit-me problems. No mayor trying to push the blame on other people because of piss-poor planning.
Naturally, the better planning done by Texas will be twisted by the Democrats, liberals, and NAACP (one of the biggest racist organizations out there) into a race/politics issue, because it was Bush's fault that Katrina formed and hit The Big Easy.
Watch and see...
Naturally, the better planning done by Texas will be twisted by the Democrats, liberals, and NAACP (one of the biggest racist organizations out there) into a race/politics issue, because it was Bush's fault that Katrina formed and hit The Big Easy.
Watch and see...
Thursday, September 15, 2005
And she's outta here!
Well, Hurricane Ophelia has come and gone. Actually, right now she is just off the Outer Banks of NC, but at least she's away from me. It rained pretty good last night, and we had winds come through the area running about 60-70 MPH. I lost a shingle on the roof. We lost power in the city in the major business area, and some asshats took advantage of the "darker than a bag of assholes" night to break into several businesses to steal (maybe they were from New Orleans, and I have to refer to them as "finders").
We are still getting outer feeder bands, but all we really have to worry about is some low-area flooding.
Another notch in my hurricane belt!
We are still getting outer feeder bands, but all we really have to worry about is some low-area flooding.
Another notch in my hurricane belt!
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Hurricane Ophelia
Ok. Hurricane Ophelia is about 150 miles south of where I live right now. It is raining fairly heavy, and the winds are gusting to about 30 miles per hour. Forecasters are saying that this thing is going to beat up on us for about two days before it gets out of here. There must be something about this damned county.
Look at a map of the US. Find the NC-SC border at the coast. Now, you will notice immediately north of the state line is a small concave coastline, followed by a second, slightly larger concave coastline. On that second coastline, you can see a river in the very middle of it. That is where Onslow County is. Since 1996, we have endured Hurricanes Bertha, Fran, Bonnie, David, Floyd, Isabel, and Charley.
Unlike the local and state authorities in New Orleans, we know what to do. I'll update after the hurricane passes.
Look at a map of the US. Find the NC-SC border at the coast. Now, you will notice immediately north of the state line is a small concave coastline, followed by a second, slightly larger concave coastline. On that second coastline, you can see a river in the very middle of it. That is where Onslow County is. Since 1996, we have endured Hurricanes Bertha, Fran, Bonnie, David, Floyd, Isabel, and Charley.
Unlike the local and state authorities in New Orleans, we know what to do. I'll update after the hurricane passes.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Who to blame??????
I read the following at another blog, and I felt that it needed to be repeated here. Some folks are better at putting thoughts similar to mine on paper. This gentleman is one. Enjoy!
Thoughts on Katrina
Okay, I've decided to put up one big post that covers a lot of ground, just so everyone knows where I stand in the issues surrounding FEMA, the Prez, and the hurricane disaster.For the past week the blogosphere has been filled with every scrap of information available. Pundits have thrown together timelines of events to support their own personal ideas of who should have done what and when it did or did not take place. Certain commenters on this blog have pointed to these timelines as "proof" that some of my assertions have been "wrong." The problem is that there are people on the left who have compiled their own timelines, and those "prove" that Bush is mostly to blame. The information we have right now is often completely contradictory. As soon as one news outlet publishes a story, five minutes later another publishes a different story that makes the opposite claim. Both sides then latch on to each of these contradictory stories as incontrovertible evidence that the other side is wrong. The point here is that until there is some kind of open, bipartisan, Congressional investigation into the Katrina disaster, none of us are ever going to have an accurate timeline of anything. We're trying to make broad assumptions based upon the tiniest shreds of anecdotal evidence, given by ass-covering politicians and biased media outlets, and this is not a good idea. So rather that point to specific news reports as "proof" that what I believe is real, I'm going to speak more in broad terms, about the larger issues and concepts. The proof will come during the investigation, and that might take years. For now, I want to try and look at the big picture, rather than try and build some kind of evidentiary case based upon rumor, speculation, and innuendo.
Read the rest of this post...
Blame After 9/11, I read a comment on another blog (I forget which one) which covered the issue of who to blame for the attacks. It said something to the effect of, “When it comes to the issue of who to blame for 9/11, the issue of blame is so widespread that trying to actually assign blame is in itself an exercise in futility.” I feel much the same about New Orleans. We can quibble all we like about who did what and when, but the one thing that is obvious to anyone is that our system failed, and failed miserably. When I refer to the system I don’t just mean FEMA, I mean everyone, from the local first response units to the mayor to the governor to FEMA to Bush. Nobody comes out of this smelling like guest room soap.
Since the hurricane first hit, the left has been going apoplectic trying to find any way it can to blame Bush for the disaster even taking place at all. “If only the evil fascist Bush hadn’t diverted crucial funds away from levee projects to finance his illegal war for oil against the peace-loving citizens of Iraq!” The problem here, as I stated in a post a few days ago, is that no matter what Bush did, the left will always look at the opposite and claim that it was what he should have done. For example, after 9/11 the focus was on response to terrorism, and in that respect money for disaster relief was indeed given with more of a terrorism interest attached to it. In hindsight, this might not have been the most appropriate thing to do. However, the last time I checked it was still the Congress who controlled the purse strings, and if money was diverted to the wrong area then it is their hands who have blood on them, not Bush. But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that Bush had made levee reinforcement a top priority, and then a terrorist had released a biological agent on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. The next day, Michael Moore and MoveOn and the rest of the left wing would have been wailing that Bush didn’t do enough to protect us from terrorism, choosing instead to focus on levee reinforcement, which undoubtedly was done to enrich his big-time donors in the construction and shipping industries. Right now our government spends a miniscule amount of money searching the sky for dangerous asteroids. If a massive asteroid were found tomorrow to be on a collision course with Earth, Michael Moore would claim that it was Bush’s war on terrorism that caused the government to lose focus on interplanetary debris. Conversely, if Bush made asteroid protection a priority, then his detractors would show that he was wasting money on something that had a relatively low chance of actually occurring.
In a system like ours, where we have scarce resources which have alternative uses, you have to make your best guess as to where those resources will be needed, and then legislatively disburse them accordingly. Our focus on terrorism was probably misguided, but we only say that now because we’re dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane and not a low-yield nuclear detonation. If our focus on terrorism had prevented or mitigated a terrorist attack, then Bush and the Congress would be getting praise for their foresight (from everyone except the left, of course). So as far as blame for the flooding goes, trying to lay this entirely at Bush’s feet is totally irresponsible and nothing more than rank partisan idiocy.
Local Government The first response for a disaster is, and should continue to be, the local government: the city emergency organizations, the police, the first department, the medical system, and so on. Every city can and should have a solid, cohesive disaster response plan. It seems at this point that while New Orleans undoubtedly had some kind of plan, its implementation when it counted was sorely inept. One of the main examples of this is the behavior of so many of the New Orleans police. Not to smear the entire organization, which undoubtedly has many heroes and truly selfless individuals, but with images of some police looting a Wal-Mart, and reports of others abandoning their posts, the failure of the police to maintain order is a huge factor which contributed to turning New Orleans into the island from Lord of the Flies.
Then there is Mayor Nagin. Of all the people involved, I truly feel the sorriest for him. Politically inexperienced, I think he was thrown head-first into the kind of catastrophic situation that he, like most residents, never thought would ever actually arrive. They called Katrina the “doomsday scenario” with good reason. While a direct hit from a Katrina-like storm was a statistical inevitability, nobody truly anticipated, even just a few months ago, that doomsday was about to take place. Then, when it did appear as if it might happen, I think there was a large degree of reticence on his part to honestly recognize and deal with it. Why? For exactly the same reasons I described above with Bush, criticism with the benefit of hindsight. If Nagin had evacuated the city days before the hurricane was due to arrive, and then the hurricane had subsequently taken a turn and made landfall in Texas, his political detractors would then claim that he made the wrong decision. By waiting until the last minute, when an evacuation was really too late, he took a gamble that turned out wrong. If he waited until the last minute, then the hurricane totally missed New Orleans, he would be being praised for his calm demeanor and for not throwing the citizens of New Orleans into a panic with an unnecessary evacuation. It’s all hindsight.
State Government Of all the people involved, the main share of the blame, I feel, should be directed towards Gov. Blanco. It appears that her main concern in the days leading up to the hurricane’s arrival was her perception of being “in charge.” She wanted to be able to take the credit for her leadership, which explains her refusal to relinquish control of the rescue efforts to the federal government until it was largely too late. After the devastation began, her leadership was totally incompetent. Compare the amount of devastation and destruction in Louisiana with that in Mississippi. The leadership of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour stands in stark contrast to that of Blanco. Barbour was prepared, with a plan ready to go, and it shows. While Mississippi took more damage than Louisiana, they didn’t have a fraction of Louisiana’s problems, and I attribute this entirely to leadership at the state level.
The President Recently my detractors have accused me, repeatedly, of trying to “get” the president, despite my repeated—and consistent—statements to the contrary. JimK made the observation that since the majority of my posts lately have concerned Bush, this was the impression people were getting, whether or not it had any factual basis. I think that might be a fair assumption on his part. My focus on Bush the past few days has been primarily a response to the immediate circle-the-wagons mentality of so many people on the right, trying to immediately insulate the president from any and all liability. This in itself was a reaction to the immediate let’s-blame-Bush attitude of the radical left. (Clearing up this misperception is one of the main reasons for this post.)
My main criticisms of Bush in this instance are simple. First off, I think the record has shown that both FEMA head Michael Brown and DHS head Michael Chertoff are totally incompetent, and should have been immediately removed from their positions and replaced by someone with experience in managing disasters and/or coordinating massive, complicated efforts. Putting as the head of FEMA someone like Giuliani or Tommy Franks would have inspired confidence in the people that Bush was on top of the game. He did none of these things, instead relying on his same tired old good old boy Texas charm, referring to Michael Brown as “Brownie” and telling the world that he’s doing a “heck of a job,” despite all evidence being to the contrary.
Some have suggested that there might be a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes with “Brownie” that we don’t know a lot about, and I think that might indeed be the case. But one of the jobs of a leader is to project leadership. After 9/11 Bush did this admirably. As far as I’m concerned, Bush’s ground zero bullhorn admonition that “the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear all of us soon” ranks up there with FDR’s post-Pearl Harbor pledge to bring the Empire of Japan “to its knees.” In return, Bush was rewarded with the highest sustained approval ratings of any president in American history. Leadership counts, and the public projection of leadership is vitally important. In recent months or years, Bush has failed miserably at maintaining the public projection of leadership, and for it he has been rewarded with some of the lowest approval ratings ever. As the storm barreled towards the Gulf Coast the president went to a fundraiser in San Diego. Now, as a practical matter, who cares? What else could he have done as far as the storm went? But as a point of leadership it was an asinine thing to do, because it implies that he doesn’t care, and his critics subsequently use this against him.
A strong projection of leadership and concern would mitigate so many of the president’s problems. For example, rather than go to San Diego, what if Bush had gone to Houston, and set up a mobile command center of some kind, so he could be close to the storm and monitor things? And what if Bush had held a press conference before the storm, stating that the areas about to be hit contained some of the poorest people in the country, and that he wanted to make sure that the federal government was on hand and ready to meet their emergency needs? In real terms, this isn’t substantively different from what Bush did. Air Force One is a mobile command center in and of itself, so it’s not like he was actually out of the loop. But he didn’t project anything resembling an image of caring or compassion or leadership. (Think Giuliani in the days after 9/11.) Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a master at the projection of leadership. Whether he had the leadership or not it always appeared as if he did, that he truly cared, and like it or not, this is what people want to see from their leaders. Bush, I am sure, cares deeply, and has no idea how to express it.
Allow me to illustrate my point. Say you are trying to get a girl to marry you. In order to woo her you buy her little gifts, tell her you love her, pay attention to her, and so on. Once she is convinced that you truly care about her, she accepts your proposal. Now, in truth you might not care about her at all and seek only to marry her for her money, but your outward projection of caring is all she has to go on, and she bases her decision entirely on how you act and appear. Conversely, say you truly did love and care for this woman, but were so uncomfortable and bumbling at expressing yourself that she found you distant and aloof, and thus chose not to marry you. The fact that you truly did care about her mattered less because she did not get the outward expression of love and affection she craved.
Appearances count, often times much more than reality. It’s a sad fact but it’s a fact nonetheless, and Bush simply does not realize it. Clinton was a master. Being seen as a leader is just as important as actually being one, and Bush’s lack of any real type of leadership skills caused him to totally drop the ball and lose any momentum whatsoever. By firing Brown he would have shown that, in the face of an emergency, he wasn’t afraid to take the tough steps necessary to get the job done. Instead we get told that Brownie is doing a heck of a job.
This is why I am so disgusted with Bush. He had a chance to rally the country behind him, to be the face of everything that is great about America, and he was an abject failure at it to all but his most staunchly partisan supporters.
The Federal Government What can I say about the federal government, by which I include FEMA, that I haven’t already said? Rather than focus on the specifics of how the federal government failed, I want to discuss what I think its role should be.
The federal government cannot and should not be the first responder in times of emergency. That responsibility should fall on the local and state governments. That being said, there are certain times when only a body like the federal government has the power and ability to coordinate a massive relief effort. This was one of those times.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I am a staunch federalist, a believer in the true separation of powers and the sovereign rights of states. That notwithstanding, there are times when the federal government can and should step in and supersede this sovereignty. This is well established in law. The concept of martial law has been around since the beginning of government. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Indeed, in New Orleans right now there is a standing shoot-to-kill order for looters. In the legal sense looters are really only committing petty larceny or burglary, and would be subject only to a short prison sentence if arrested, tried, and convicted. Right now they run the risk of an immediate death sentence carried out Judge Dredd-style. “I am the law.” In a non-emergency situation I think the vast majority of us would have been horrified at the thought of empowering the state to immediately execute suspected petty criminals, but you’ll hear very few complaints of the shoot-to-kill order under these circumstances.
My point is that while laws are essential to order, and for maintaining protection from an all-too-powerful state, they should not be a death sentence. This is the impression that I get from the Katrina disaster. There were no clear lines delineating who was in control of what, or who had the responsibility for performing specific rescue tasks, and so on. And while we can all quote various legal decisions and umpteen laws governing this sort of thing, it absolutely cannot be denied that the system, for the most part, failed. And when the system fails, I expect the leadership to step in and get the job done, which in this case was saving lives and maintaining order. When it became apparent that Blaco and Nagin were not up to the task, the federal government should have stepped in, assumed control, and began giving orders.
Which would you rather have, a president called before Congress to explain why he broke the law to save lives, or why he sat idly by while people died because he did not have the statutory power to do certain things? As I’ve said many times over the past few days, George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on the planet. Saying, “Well, I couldn’t do anything because the so-and-so act of 1964 did not give me the power to do anything” is a flaccid, pathetic excuse.
Going Forward We obviously cannot have a system were the president, at the drop of a hat, can assume these sorts of dictatorial powers. This is exactly how Hitler came to power; he created an emergency, assumed emergency powers, then refused to relinquish them. So I am not for a second in favor of simply granting the federal government the power to do as they please. That notwithstanding, we need a major reform of the system that recently failed us so.
First off, we need to start from scratch. There needs to be a clear, concise, easily-understood chain of command for dire emergency situations. It needs to be exactly the same for all states, so that the procedure is exactly the same whether you’re dealing with a Louisiana hurricane or a California earthquake or a low-yield nuclear detonation in a major American city. For example, we could implement a system by which disasters are assigned one of three ascending levels of severity. At the lowest level, say a flooding or localized earthquake, the local government would be in control, with FEMA providing assistance as needed. The middle level would be for a standard hurricane, like the kind that usually hit our shores. In these instances FEMA and the state would be roughly parallel in their contributions. The top level would be reserved for severe emergencies, like a major catastrophic earthquake or a terrorist strike or a Katrina-level hurricane. In these the federal government would step in and use any and all powers at its disposal to get the job done.
This, I feel, should be implemented via a constitutional amendment. This way there are no lawsuits or legal wrangling that can impede the process, as there would be if a law were simply passed by Congress. The very process by which an amendment has to go through would show that there was broad support among both the federal and state legislatures. Nobody can complain like they do now about the PATRIOT Act that a fascist cabal rammed the legislation through to enact some kind of hidden agenda to take over the country.
This type of reform is necessary, vital to national security, and should be pursued at the earliest opportunity. Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere watching CNN and laughing his evil ass off. Because, as Newt Gingrich said, if this is the best the United States can do when we had over a week to prepare, just how well are we going to react when something unexpected happens?
Thoughts on Katrina
Okay, I've decided to put up one big post that covers a lot of ground, just so everyone knows where I stand in the issues surrounding FEMA, the Prez, and the hurricane disaster.For the past week the blogosphere has been filled with every scrap of information available. Pundits have thrown together timelines of events to support their own personal ideas of who should have done what and when it did or did not take place. Certain commenters on this blog have pointed to these timelines as "proof" that some of my assertions have been "wrong." The problem is that there are people on the left who have compiled their own timelines, and those "prove" that Bush is mostly to blame. The information we have right now is often completely contradictory. As soon as one news outlet publishes a story, five minutes later another publishes a different story that makes the opposite claim. Both sides then latch on to each of these contradictory stories as incontrovertible evidence that the other side is wrong. The point here is that until there is some kind of open, bipartisan, Congressional investigation into the Katrina disaster, none of us are ever going to have an accurate timeline of anything. We're trying to make broad assumptions based upon the tiniest shreds of anecdotal evidence, given by ass-covering politicians and biased media outlets, and this is not a good idea. So rather that point to specific news reports as "proof" that what I believe is real, I'm going to speak more in broad terms, about the larger issues and concepts. The proof will come during the investigation, and that might take years. For now, I want to try and look at the big picture, rather than try and build some kind of evidentiary case based upon rumor, speculation, and innuendo.
Read the rest of this post...
Blame After 9/11, I read a comment on another blog (I forget which one) which covered the issue of who to blame for the attacks. It said something to the effect of, “When it comes to the issue of who to blame for 9/11, the issue of blame is so widespread that trying to actually assign blame is in itself an exercise in futility.” I feel much the same about New Orleans. We can quibble all we like about who did what and when, but the one thing that is obvious to anyone is that our system failed, and failed miserably. When I refer to the system I don’t just mean FEMA, I mean everyone, from the local first response units to the mayor to the governor to FEMA to Bush. Nobody comes out of this smelling like guest room soap.
Since the hurricane first hit, the left has been going apoplectic trying to find any way it can to blame Bush for the disaster even taking place at all. “If only the evil fascist Bush hadn’t diverted crucial funds away from levee projects to finance his illegal war for oil against the peace-loving citizens of Iraq!” The problem here, as I stated in a post a few days ago, is that no matter what Bush did, the left will always look at the opposite and claim that it was what he should have done. For example, after 9/11 the focus was on response to terrorism, and in that respect money for disaster relief was indeed given with more of a terrorism interest attached to it. In hindsight, this might not have been the most appropriate thing to do. However, the last time I checked it was still the Congress who controlled the purse strings, and if money was diverted to the wrong area then it is their hands who have blood on them, not Bush. But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that Bush had made levee reinforcement a top priority, and then a terrorist had released a biological agent on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. The next day, Michael Moore and MoveOn and the rest of the left wing would have been wailing that Bush didn’t do enough to protect us from terrorism, choosing instead to focus on levee reinforcement, which undoubtedly was done to enrich his big-time donors in the construction and shipping industries. Right now our government spends a miniscule amount of money searching the sky for dangerous asteroids. If a massive asteroid were found tomorrow to be on a collision course with Earth, Michael Moore would claim that it was Bush’s war on terrorism that caused the government to lose focus on interplanetary debris. Conversely, if Bush made asteroid protection a priority, then his detractors would show that he was wasting money on something that had a relatively low chance of actually occurring.
In a system like ours, where we have scarce resources which have alternative uses, you have to make your best guess as to where those resources will be needed, and then legislatively disburse them accordingly. Our focus on terrorism was probably misguided, but we only say that now because we’re dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane and not a low-yield nuclear detonation. If our focus on terrorism had prevented or mitigated a terrorist attack, then Bush and the Congress would be getting praise for their foresight (from everyone except the left, of course). So as far as blame for the flooding goes, trying to lay this entirely at Bush’s feet is totally irresponsible and nothing more than rank partisan idiocy.
Local Government The first response for a disaster is, and should continue to be, the local government: the city emergency organizations, the police, the first department, the medical system, and so on. Every city can and should have a solid, cohesive disaster response plan. It seems at this point that while New Orleans undoubtedly had some kind of plan, its implementation when it counted was sorely inept. One of the main examples of this is the behavior of so many of the New Orleans police. Not to smear the entire organization, which undoubtedly has many heroes and truly selfless individuals, but with images of some police looting a Wal-Mart, and reports of others abandoning their posts, the failure of the police to maintain order is a huge factor which contributed to turning New Orleans into the island from Lord of the Flies.
Then there is Mayor Nagin. Of all the people involved, I truly feel the sorriest for him. Politically inexperienced, I think he was thrown head-first into the kind of catastrophic situation that he, like most residents, never thought would ever actually arrive. They called Katrina the “doomsday scenario” with good reason. While a direct hit from a Katrina-like storm was a statistical inevitability, nobody truly anticipated, even just a few months ago, that doomsday was about to take place. Then, when it did appear as if it might happen, I think there was a large degree of reticence on his part to honestly recognize and deal with it. Why? For exactly the same reasons I described above with Bush, criticism with the benefit of hindsight. If Nagin had evacuated the city days before the hurricane was due to arrive, and then the hurricane had subsequently taken a turn and made landfall in Texas, his political detractors would then claim that he made the wrong decision. By waiting until the last minute, when an evacuation was really too late, he took a gamble that turned out wrong. If he waited until the last minute, then the hurricane totally missed New Orleans, he would be being praised for his calm demeanor and for not throwing the citizens of New Orleans into a panic with an unnecessary evacuation. It’s all hindsight.
State Government Of all the people involved, the main share of the blame, I feel, should be directed towards Gov. Blanco. It appears that her main concern in the days leading up to the hurricane’s arrival was her perception of being “in charge.” She wanted to be able to take the credit for her leadership, which explains her refusal to relinquish control of the rescue efforts to the federal government until it was largely too late. After the devastation began, her leadership was totally incompetent. Compare the amount of devastation and destruction in Louisiana with that in Mississippi. The leadership of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour stands in stark contrast to that of Blanco. Barbour was prepared, with a plan ready to go, and it shows. While Mississippi took more damage than Louisiana, they didn’t have a fraction of Louisiana’s problems, and I attribute this entirely to leadership at the state level.
The President Recently my detractors have accused me, repeatedly, of trying to “get” the president, despite my repeated—and consistent—statements to the contrary. JimK made the observation that since the majority of my posts lately have concerned Bush, this was the impression people were getting, whether or not it had any factual basis. I think that might be a fair assumption on his part. My focus on Bush the past few days has been primarily a response to the immediate circle-the-wagons mentality of so many people on the right, trying to immediately insulate the president from any and all liability. This in itself was a reaction to the immediate let’s-blame-Bush attitude of the radical left. (Clearing up this misperception is one of the main reasons for this post.)
My main criticisms of Bush in this instance are simple. First off, I think the record has shown that both FEMA head Michael Brown and DHS head Michael Chertoff are totally incompetent, and should have been immediately removed from their positions and replaced by someone with experience in managing disasters and/or coordinating massive, complicated efforts. Putting as the head of FEMA someone like Giuliani or Tommy Franks would have inspired confidence in the people that Bush was on top of the game. He did none of these things, instead relying on his same tired old good old boy Texas charm, referring to Michael Brown as “Brownie” and telling the world that he’s doing a “heck of a job,” despite all evidence being to the contrary.
Some have suggested that there might be a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes with “Brownie” that we don’t know a lot about, and I think that might indeed be the case. But one of the jobs of a leader is to project leadership. After 9/11 Bush did this admirably. As far as I’m concerned, Bush’s ground zero bullhorn admonition that “the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear all of us soon” ranks up there with FDR’s post-Pearl Harbor pledge to bring the Empire of Japan “to its knees.” In return, Bush was rewarded with the highest sustained approval ratings of any president in American history. Leadership counts, and the public projection of leadership is vitally important. In recent months or years, Bush has failed miserably at maintaining the public projection of leadership, and for it he has been rewarded with some of the lowest approval ratings ever. As the storm barreled towards the Gulf Coast the president went to a fundraiser in San Diego. Now, as a practical matter, who cares? What else could he have done as far as the storm went? But as a point of leadership it was an asinine thing to do, because it implies that he doesn’t care, and his critics subsequently use this against him.
A strong projection of leadership and concern would mitigate so many of the president’s problems. For example, rather than go to San Diego, what if Bush had gone to Houston, and set up a mobile command center of some kind, so he could be close to the storm and monitor things? And what if Bush had held a press conference before the storm, stating that the areas about to be hit contained some of the poorest people in the country, and that he wanted to make sure that the federal government was on hand and ready to meet their emergency needs? In real terms, this isn’t substantively different from what Bush did. Air Force One is a mobile command center in and of itself, so it’s not like he was actually out of the loop. But he didn’t project anything resembling an image of caring or compassion or leadership. (Think Giuliani in the days after 9/11.) Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a master at the projection of leadership. Whether he had the leadership or not it always appeared as if he did, that he truly cared, and like it or not, this is what people want to see from their leaders. Bush, I am sure, cares deeply, and has no idea how to express it.
Allow me to illustrate my point. Say you are trying to get a girl to marry you. In order to woo her you buy her little gifts, tell her you love her, pay attention to her, and so on. Once she is convinced that you truly care about her, she accepts your proposal. Now, in truth you might not care about her at all and seek only to marry her for her money, but your outward projection of caring is all she has to go on, and she bases her decision entirely on how you act and appear. Conversely, say you truly did love and care for this woman, but were so uncomfortable and bumbling at expressing yourself that she found you distant and aloof, and thus chose not to marry you. The fact that you truly did care about her mattered less because she did not get the outward expression of love and affection she craved.
Appearances count, often times much more than reality. It’s a sad fact but it’s a fact nonetheless, and Bush simply does not realize it. Clinton was a master. Being seen as a leader is just as important as actually being one, and Bush’s lack of any real type of leadership skills caused him to totally drop the ball and lose any momentum whatsoever. By firing Brown he would have shown that, in the face of an emergency, he wasn’t afraid to take the tough steps necessary to get the job done. Instead we get told that Brownie is doing a heck of a job.
This is why I am so disgusted with Bush. He had a chance to rally the country behind him, to be the face of everything that is great about America, and he was an abject failure at it to all but his most staunchly partisan supporters.
The Federal Government What can I say about the federal government, by which I include FEMA, that I haven’t already said? Rather than focus on the specifics of how the federal government failed, I want to discuss what I think its role should be.
The federal government cannot and should not be the first responder in times of emergency. That responsibility should fall on the local and state governments. That being said, there are certain times when only a body like the federal government has the power and ability to coordinate a massive relief effort. This was one of those times.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I am a staunch federalist, a believer in the true separation of powers and the sovereign rights of states. That notwithstanding, there are times when the federal government can and should step in and supersede this sovereignty. This is well established in law. The concept of martial law has been around since the beginning of government. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Indeed, in New Orleans right now there is a standing shoot-to-kill order for looters. In the legal sense looters are really only committing petty larceny or burglary, and would be subject only to a short prison sentence if arrested, tried, and convicted. Right now they run the risk of an immediate death sentence carried out Judge Dredd-style. “I am the law.” In a non-emergency situation I think the vast majority of us would have been horrified at the thought of empowering the state to immediately execute suspected petty criminals, but you’ll hear very few complaints of the shoot-to-kill order under these circumstances.
My point is that while laws are essential to order, and for maintaining protection from an all-too-powerful state, they should not be a death sentence. This is the impression that I get from the Katrina disaster. There were no clear lines delineating who was in control of what, or who had the responsibility for performing specific rescue tasks, and so on. And while we can all quote various legal decisions and umpteen laws governing this sort of thing, it absolutely cannot be denied that the system, for the most part, failed. And when the system fails, I expect the leadership to step in and get the job done, which in this case was saving lives and maintaining order. When it became apparent that Blaco and Nagin were not up to the task, the federal government should have stepped in, assumed control, and began giving orders.
Which would you rather have, a president called before Congress to explain why he broke the law to save lives, or why he sat idly by while people died because he did not have the statutory power to do certain things? As I’ve said many times over the past few days, George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on the planet. Saying, “Well, I couldn’t do anything because the so-and-so act of 1964 did not give me the power to do anything” is a flaccid, pathetic excuse.
Going Forward We obviously cannot have a system were the president, at the drop of a hat, can assume these sorts of dictatorial powers. This is exactly how Hitler came to power; he created an emergency, assumed emergency powers, then refused to relinquish them. So I am not for a second in favor of simply granting the federal government the power to do as they please. That notwithstanding, we need a major reform of the system that recently failed us so.
First off, we need to start from scratch. There needs to be a clear, concise, easily-understood chain of command for dire emergency situations. It needs to be exactly the same for all states, so that the procedure is exactly the same whether you’re dealing with a Louisiana hurricane or a California earthquake or a low-yield nuclear detonation in a major American city. For example, we could implement a system by which disasters are assigned one of three ascending levels of severity. At the lowest level, say a flooding or localized earthquake, the local government would be in control, with FEMA providing assistance as needed. The middle level would be for a standard hurricane, like the kind that usually hit our shores. In these instances FEMA and the state would be roughly parallel in their contributions. The top level would be reserved for severe emergencies, like a major catastrophic earthquake or a terrorist strike or a Katrina-level hurricane. In these the federal government would step in and use any and all powers at its disposal to get the job done.
This, I feel, should be implemented via a constitutional amendment. This way there are no lawsuits or legal wrangling that can impede the process, as there would be if a law were simply passed by Congress. The very process by which an amendment has to go through would show that there was broad support among both the federal and state legislatures. Nobody can complain like they do now about the PATRIOT Act that a fascist cabal rammed the legislation through to enact some kind of hidden agenda to take over the country.
This type of reform is necessary, vital to national security, and should be pursued at the earliest opportunity. Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere watching CNN and laughing his evil ass off. Because, as Newt Gingrich said, if this is the best the United States can do when we had over a week to prepare, just how well are we going to react when something unexpected happens?
Monday, September 05, 2005
New Orleans: It's Their Fault
I was sent the following by email. Look at it objectively, and it makes complete sense.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Kanye West
Anybody see Kanye West's little rant? Not that I really know or give a shit who Kanye West is, of him I can say this: What a shithead.
Friday, September 02, 2005
You have got to be kidding me! Typical cries of racism.
Now, there are blacks who are screaming that the slow response to New Orleans is because most of the victims are poor and black. Are you kidding? Wynton Marsalis (sp?) and members of government are complaining that the government isn't doing enough because the victims are mostly black. If it had happened in Charleston, aid would have been sent right in.
Let's analyze this. The black population is very large in New Orleans. Therefore, the black population most likely have been electing black officials for local, state, and federal positions. Now, it is the responsibility of the local and state agencies to have a plan in place for disasters. I'm sure Charleston has a plan in place. My county has a great plan in place, and aid would quickly respond, and that is with a large black and Hispanic population. So, one could say that the lack of preparedness and slow response afterwards is the fault of the black population, since they are the ones who elected their officials.
There are black people complaining that the media is being racist, since they keep showing black people doing the looting. The talking heads who stoke the fires of racism say that they aren't looting, but are trying to survive. When I saw the videos of black people stealing boxes of sneakers and electronic items, I'm sure that it wasn't because they were trying to survive. I did see videos of white people stealing, but since the population is mostly black, it would stand to reason that most of the stealing is being done by blacks!
I have not seen them, but I would guess that the roving gangs of armed thugs are black. I'm confident when I say that most of the rapes were committed by blacks (on blacks).
Then, there is the derision some have shown over the word refugee. One talking head proclaimed, "They are not refugees. They are American citizens." Hey, dumbass, look up the word. Refugee: One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, environmental destruction, or religious persecution.
I am not a racist person, but my life experiences have led me to the conclusion that some of the most racist people I've ever met are, in fact, black. I work in a profession where I see many lazy people who abuse and manipulate the system. When a white person is caught, or is denied some form of social service, he/she goes about their business. Many a black person will cry racism. To those screaming that racist governments aren't taking care of them (another social handout), I ask them: Are black people not capable of evacuating? Are black people not capable of preparing for a disaster?
I am ready, willing, and able to contribute money for hurricane relief. But every time I hear an accusation of racial bias, it just makes me hang onto my money even longer.
Let's analyze this. The black population is very large in New Orleans. Therefore, the black population most likely have been electing black officials for local, state, and federal positions. Now, it is the responsibility of the local and state agencies to have a plan in place for disasters. I'm sure Charleston has a plan in place. My county has a great plan in place, and aid would quickly respond, and that is with a large black and Hispanic population. So, one could say that the lack of preparedness and slow response afterwards is the fault of the black population, since they are the ones who elected their officials.
There are black people complaining that the media is being racist, since they keep showing black people doing the looting. The talking heads who stoke the fires of racism say that they aren't looting, but are trying to survive. When I saw the videos of black people stealing boxes of sneakers and electronic items, I'm sure that it wasn't because they were trying to survive. I did see videos of white people stealing, but since the population is mostly black, it would stand to reason that most of the stealing is being done by blacks!
I have not seen them, but I would guess that the roving gangs of armed thugs are black. I'm confident when I say that most of the rapes were committed by blacks (on blacks).
Then, there is the derision some have shown over the word refugee. One talking head proclaimed, "They are not refugees. They are American citizens." Hey, dumbass, look up the word. Refugee: One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, environmental destruction, or religious persecution.
I am not a racist person, but my life experiences have led me to the conclusion that some of the most racist people I've ever met are, in fact, black. I work in a profession where I see many lazy people who abuse and manipulate the system. When a white person is caught, or is denied some form of social service, he/she goes about their business. Many a black person will cry racism. To those screaming that racist governments aren't taking care of them (another social handout), I ask them: Are black people not capable of evacuating? Are black people not capable of preparing for a disaster?
I am ready, willing, and able to contribute money for hurricane relief. But every time I hear an accusation of racial bias, it just makes me hang onto my money even longer.
New Orleans
The events that are currently happening in New Orleans are definitely terrible. What is even worse are those individuals who are screaming that the federal goverment is not doing enough to help them. Some are saying that if they die it is because the government ignored them.
Now, let's look at this objectively. Local, state, and federal officials gave notice for over two days that people needed to leave the area. IT WAS A MANDATORY EVACUATION! The whiners chose to stay. New Orleans is a city BELOW sea level, NEAR the sea, next to a large lake that sits HIGHER than the freakin' city! What do you think would eventually happen if you lived there? It is not the federal government's problem. Blame should be put on the local and state governments. The local and state governments allowed people to develop and live in this flood prone area. Computer models in the 90's showed what would happen if a Category 4 hit the area. So, the local and state governments should have had the resources available and on standby for this event.
Now, the federal government should help, but they should not shoulder the blame. Blame the people who chose not to leave.
Now, let's look at this objectively. Local, state, and federal officials gave notice for over two days that people needed to leave the area. IT WAS A MANDATORY EVACUATION! The whiners chose to stay. New Orleans is a city BELOW sea level, NEAR the sea, next to a large lake that sits HIGHER than the freakin' city! What do you think would eventually happen if you lived there? It is not the federal government's problem. Blame should be put on the local and state governments. The local and state governments allowed people to develop and live in this flood prone area. Computer models in the 90's showed what would happen if a Category 4 hit the area. So, the local and state governments should have had the resources available and on standby for this event.
Now, the federal government should help, but they should not shoulder the blame. Blame the people who chose not to leave.
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