"If one person criticizes them or says one more thing - including the president of the United States - he will hear from me," she said on the ABC program. "One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."Landrieu tried to be nice to the Bush people and they screwed her and her constituents. Actually, they killed her constituents. Read More......
She burst into tears as she looked at a broken levee. "The President could have funded it," she said. "He cut it out of the budget. Is that the most pitiful sight you have ever seen in your life? One little crane."
She also referred angrily to comments Bush had made Friday at the New Orleans airport about the fun he had in her city in his younger days.
"Our infrastructure is devastated, lives have been shattered," Landrieu said. "Would the president please stop taking photo-ops?"
Things would have been even worse if a comparable domestic disaster had struck last year, when an even greater percentage of National Guard units were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some states had more than two-thirds of their Guard forces overseas. After several governors protested, the Pentagon agreed to adjust its force rotations so no state would be stripped of more than half of its guardsmen at any one time. That promise has been kept so far. But honoring it in the months ahead will be extremely difficult with active-duty forces so badly overstretched in Iraq, and prospects for any significant early withdrawals looking bleak.Read More......
One lasting lesson that has to be drawn from the Gulf Coast's misery is that from now on, the National Guard must be treated as America's most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions. America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based National Guard that's fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.
The United States has accepted an offer of UN assistance following the Hurricane Katrina disaster which has devastated New Orleans and other communities along the US Gulf coast, a UN spokesman said.I find it impossible to imagine how so many anti-UN people feel right now when the United States needs help from the UN because of the Bush administration's incompetent "government". Read More......
He said in a statement that a UN Coordination team is in Washington "consulting with government officials on how best the UN can complement the United States own emergency efforts.
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"The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the High Commissioner for Refugees are ready to provide emergency staff and a wide variety of relief supplies as and when necessary," said the statement.
But the skimping has worsened since President Bush's election, particularly after September 11. Federal spending on flood control in south-east Louisiana has been cut by almost half since 2001, from $69 million per year to $36.5 million. Funds for work at Lake Pontchartrain, the source of the flooding, have fallen by nearly two-thirds over three years, from $14.25 million to $5.7 million. As a result, work on New Orleans' east bank hurricane levees stopped last summer for the first time in 37 years.Every President since Nixon knew maintaining the levees was important, essential work. But it ground to a halt on Bush's watch because he didn't care. Nixon worked to maintain the levees. Ford worked to maintain the levees. Carter worked to maintain the levees. Reagan worked to maintain the levees. Clinton worked to maintain the levees. Even his own father worked to maintain the levees. But George Bush abandoned ship. Work on maintaining the levees had been going on for four decades and it ground to a halt on Bush's watch. Like Cheney, he had "other priorities."
A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new "hurricane proof" Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina's fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.So, either Chertoff is again a bald-faced liar, or he's an out of touch imbecile.
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the [Army Corp of Engineers] commander, conceded Friday that the government had known the New Orleans levees could never withstand a hurricane higher than a Category 3. Corps officials shuddered, he said, when they realized that Katrina was barreling down on the Gulf Coast with the vastly greater destructive force of a Category 5 — the strongest type of hurricane. Washington, he said, had rolled the dice.Read More......
Wealthy OPEC nation Kuwait is donating $500 million worth of oil products and other humanitarian aid to its ally the United States to ease the impact of Hurricane Katrina, state news agency KUNA reported on Sunday.Hey that's a nice gesture I thought. But that reference to the 1991 war to give Kuwatis back their country, just how much did that cost us?
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Sheikh Ahmad said the gesture was a duty toward a friend by the tiny Gulf Arab state which was liberated in 1991 by a U.S.-led multinational coalition from seven months of occupation by Iraq.
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Tiny Kuwait controls nearly a tenth of global petroleum reserves.
While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.Read More......
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
Captain ready, waiting
"Could we do more?" said Capt. Nora Tyson, commander of the Bataan. "Sure. I've got sailors who could be on the beach plucking through garbage or distributing water and food and stuff. But I can't force myself on people....
"I figured we would be a big help in New Orleans. We've got electricity, and the police could have charged up their radios. We've got water, toilets. We've got food."
Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.Read More......
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.
A convoy of food and supplies provided by Hyatt hotels in Atlanta and Houston arrived at Hyatt Regency New Orleans on Wednesday of this week.Read More......
BUSH: You know, as governor, one of the things you have to deal with is catastrophe. I can remember the fires that swept Parker County, Texas. I remember the floods that swept our state. I remember going down to Del Rio, Texas. I have to pay the administration a compliment. James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis. But that's the time when you're tested not only -- it's the time to test your metal, a time to test your heart when you see people whose lives have been turned upside down. It broke my heart to go to the flood scene in Del Rio where a fellow and his family got completely uprooted. The only thing I knew was to got aid as quickly as possible with state and federal help, and to put my arms around the man and his family and cry with them. That's what governors do. They are often on the front line of catastrophic situations.Read More......
We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.It was intense to watch, especially after the obfuscating by Chertoff. Wait til you read about his battles with FEMA.
Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government. The magnitude of the crisis "has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," he said. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."The second article, which John highlighted in his post below, is a must read. It explains why the White House is smearing and blaming (basically the only skills the Bush people have.) They totally screwed up and this time it's documented. "Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top" reveals just how incompetent and inept they are:
Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.They should add the fact that the President stayed on vacation and was traveling around to California and Arizona for political events while the storm was killing people. But, what makes this practically criminal is that the Bush Administration KNEW what could happen if a major hurricane struck New Orleans:
Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.And, FEMA itself says it's their job to protect us from these kinds of events.
"No coordination with how many people will be coming in the door 10 minutes later," he told The Associated Press. "That's sort of the most disappointing thing. It's probably the greatest failure."Read More......
"Given the escalation of catastrophe that occurred over the first three days, absolutely I would have liked to see the federal government respond quicker, more rapidly, with better command and control centers and much improved communication," Frist said.
"They are not refugees. They are citizens of the United States. They are citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi, tax-paying citizens," he said. "They are not refugees wandering somewhere looking for charity. They are victims of neglect and a situation they should have never been put in in the first place."Read More......
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