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The exhausted and desperate black mayor of New Orleans begged for help in an interview late last week. "They're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here," Mayor Ray Nagin said, talking about the feds. "It's politics, man, and they are playing games. ... They're out there spinning for the cameras. ... I don't want to see anybody do any more goddamned press conferences. ... Excuse my French, everybody in America, but I am pissed. ...

"Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They're not here! It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamned crisis in the history of this country. People are dying."

The mayor was in tears. I heard two nice, white American "ladies" deploring this interview. "Well! He should remember there might be children listening!" Children still without food and water. What happens to people when they talk about race? Of course, most of us don't actually talk about race any more, we refer to it only indirectly, we talk "those people."

Watch carefully, listen carefully -- minority groups have always been blamed after natural disasters, since the days when the Hungarians were supposed to have cut the fingers off bodies to get the gold rings in the wake of the Johnstown Flood. Dirty Bohunks.

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But Pruden dramatically overstated the number of New Orleans school buses. As of 2003, the most recent year for which data appears to be available, the Orleans Parish school district, which operates New Orleans' public schools, owned only 324 school buses. In addition, a Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development profile of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA), last updated May 5, notes that RTA owned 364 public buses, bringing the total of the city's public transit and school buses to fewer than 700 (assuming the fleet of school buses has not been dramatically increased since 2003), far fewer than the 2,000 Pruden claimed. Even so, Pruden's claim was repeated that evening on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes by co-host Sean Hannity, who insisted, "Two thousand buses sat; 2,000 school buses." The falsehood was echoed the next day by Fox news political analyst and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who baselessly suggested that the city owned more than enough buses to help every poor person leave the city. And In a September 11 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column, national security writer Jack Kelly asked, "[W]hy weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?"

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In fact, The New York Times reported on September 4 that Louisiana emergency planners believed it would take as many as 2,000 buses "to evacuate an estimated 100,000 elderly and disabled people" in the event of a catastrophic hurricane like Katrina. But, The New York Times wrote, this was "far more than New Orleans possessed."

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Back on September 7th, Rep. John Conyers wrote to the Congressional Research Service (one of the few parts of the government that can legitimately  
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  be called non-partisan) and asked them to review the record to see whether Gov. Blanco of Louisiana took the necessary steps in a timely fashion to secure federal assistance in the face of hurricane Katrina.

The report came back yesterday. Yes, she did. Read it yourself.

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Not convinced that this lets her off the hook except legally, but maybe this will stop the lying about her failure to declare a state of emergency?

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and because it was printed in the NYT's and reported on NPR it has to be the truth.

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but I will wait until facts are known

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Fact is, the Feds did just about everything they could without breaking Federal and State law.

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Bush, who toured the region yesterday, noted that 4,000 active troops already are involved in the hurricane response, primarily working directly on search-and-rescue operations and providing logistical and medical support.

The new forces will include 2,500 troops from the Army's 82nd Airborne and 2,700 from the 1st Cavalry Division and about 2,000 from the Marines' 1st and 2nd Expeditionary forces, military officials said.

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Bush IS the Commander in Chief, the President, and he certainly was in a position to do more than he did once it was obviously beyond the abilities of state and local government alone to respond. I think most citizens EXPECT the Feds to be there almost immediately when the stuff hits the fan.

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I guess I wasn't the only one who decided to skip watching the president live last night. Across the blogosphere, it seems as if many others decided to catch it later, or on the web, or just read the transcript. Why? Because I knew what was coming: an attempt at spiritual uplift, greased by billions and billions that we don't have, organized by a federal government that, under Bush, cannot seem to organize anything competently. I'm not saying we don't need to spend money on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I'm saying I don't want to hear it from this guy. As a friend of mine commented last night over a drink, I don't hate this president and never have. I'm just sick of him. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective; sick of the glib arrogance and excuses for failure that dot the landscape from Biloxi to Basra. I'm not the only one. See here, here, here, here, here, and more generally here.

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You ought to give President Bush some slack. He has had to face more in his presidency than arguably any other in the last 100 years. He inherited a recession, 9/11 happened, the Iraq war and this hurricane. He is only human and I think he is doing better than most.
I don't like the big spending nor the illegal immigration crisis. But I do believe the President is a man of integrity facing outstanding and overwhelming problems in his office.

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On Tuesday, the day after Brown resigned, President Bush adjusted the damage-control weaseling. "Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," he said at the White House, "and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."

It was a classic hollow statement, meant to sound important and meaningless at the same time. On Wednesday, more than a dozen paragraphs into its story headlined "President Says He's Responsible in Storm Lapses," the New York Times reported: "In saying he took responsibility for any failures of the federal response to the storm, Mr. Bush stopped short of acknowledging that he or anyone else had made mistakes."

So, according to the Times headline, Bush said that "he's responsible" for "storm lapses" -- but, according to the article, Bush did not say "that he or anyone else had made mistakes." Got that?

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Under pressure from President Bush and other top federal officials, the mayor Monday suspended the reopening of large portions of the city over the next few days because of the threat of a new round of flooding from a tropical storm.

¡°I am concerned about this hurricane getting in the gulf. ... If we are off, I¡¯d rather err on the side of conservatism to make sure we have everyone out,¡± Mayor Ray Nagin said.

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Governor Kathleen Blanco, D-La., testifying before Senate Finance Committee on Capital Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005 in Washington. Blanco asked Congress for help in rebuilding her devastated state, saying Hurricanes Katrina and Rita 'knocked us down but they did not knock us out.' Blanco in her opening statement did not mention former FEMA director Michael Brown, who on Tuesday had blamed state and local officials in Louisiana for not responding appropriately to the storm. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

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people believe what they want to believe, and yes LR, I would rather rely on osmosis than a large number of sources many people are more than willing to believe...

and I still say it is the best policy in a crisis situation to wait until the truth emerges

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Rape crisis centres have been "deluged" with people needing help, the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault says, but many victims have been unable to reach police to report the crimes.

"They are more concerned right now with 'where are we going to sleep, how are we going to eat, where are we going to get money?'," executive director Judy Benitez said.

"We are really trying to stress to police that just because a rape hasn't been reported, doesn't mean it didn't happen."

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Ane Daniels, a 48-year-old hotel cleaner, told the BBC she was warned by a young boy not to take refuge in the Superdome.

"He said, 'don't go up there ma'am - they are killing people and they are raping people'. And if a 12 -year-old boy is saying that, you know something is up."

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"I think the US media are just covering up what really happened because this city lives on tourism," said Mike Maver, an Illinois firefighter who has been assisting the relief effort.

"And if the tourists are frightened and don't come back, this city will never survive."

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The rapes and needless deaths that took place there are his [Nagin's] responsibility as well. As late as Sunday, 80 armed policemen were too cowardly to enter the Convention Center after reports of the savagery inside. Troops finally searching the Convention Center on Monday found an elderly man and a young girl, battered to death, among the corpses.

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Some stories have a basis only in fiction.

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At the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center, we saw the failure of 40 years of the Great Society.

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No sooner had Katrina passed by and the 17th Street levee broke than hundreds of young men who should have taken charge in helping the aged, the sick and the women with babies to safety took to the streets to shoot, loot and rape.

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The New Orleans police, their numbers cut by deserters who left their posts to look after their families, engaged in running gun battles all day long to stay alive and protect people.

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The confidential report, which has been seen by The Independent, details how funds for flood control were diverted to other projects, desperately needed National Guards were stuck in Iraq and how military personnel had to "sneak off post" to help with relief efforts because their commander had refused permission.

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This article claims that we have gone from a society of responsibility assuming people to a society of take care of me and I mean now people.

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... today, when the police vanish, the community disappears and men take to the streets to prey on women and the weak.

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As far as morality having nothing to do with income levels, you obviously don't feel that family situations has anything to do with how a child is raised. I happen to feel it is very important.

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Take away a man's need to work and you take away his pride and self-respect.

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Take that away and you have him running down the street with a 56" flat screen color tv while people are dying around him.

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15. Louisiana: Over 400 killed by storm, flooding and crime.

      Texas: 24 killed in bus accident on highway during evacuation, no storm related deaths.

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Preparing for and running from Hurricane Rita proved far more deadly in Texas than the storm itself, as the death toll in Texas rose to about 100 in early counts.

Rita's aftermath also claimed the lives of people who tried to run generators inside their homes and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The storm, a Category 3 hurricane that made landfall early Saturday at Sabine Pass, actually killed very few, according to preliminary measures.

Getting an official tally of deaths related directly or indirectly to Rita may take weeks, said Robert Black, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry.

"At some point there will be a lot of totals on a lot of the things that we've done," Black said. "A lot of the areas that are still without power, water, they're keeping notes on napkins."

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Why on God's green earth would you go after a bus accident. If they hadn't tried to evacuate they might still be alive, is that it? Your logic is always a sight to behold...

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