politicalpartypoop.com

Amid the chaos and confusion that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, a congressman used National Guard troops to check on his property and rescue his personal belongings — even while New Orleans residents were trying to get rescued from rooftops, ABC News has learned.

On Sept. 2 — five days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast — REP. WILLIAM JEFFERSON, DEMOCRAT LOUISIANA., who represents New Orleans and is a senior member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was allowed through the military blockades set up around the city to reach the Superdome, where thousands of evacuees had been taken.

Caviar and Camaraderie Found a Place Inside the New Orleans Convention Center
Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A 5-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson’s initial request.

Jefferson defended the expedition, saying he set out to see how residents were coping at the Superdome and in his neighborhood. He also insisted that he did not ask the National Guard to transport him.

Finally, according to the source, Jefferson emerged with a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box about the size of a small refrigerator, which the enlisted men loaded up into the truck.

“I don’t think there is any explanation for an elected official using resources for their own personal use, when those resources should be doing search and rescue, or they should be helping with law enforcement in the city,” said Jerry Hauer, a homeland security expert and ABC News consultant.

Jefferson said the trip was entirely appropriate. It took only a few minutes to retrieve his belongings, he said, and the truck stayed at his house for an hour in part to assist neighbors.
“This wasn’t about me going to my house. It was about me going to my district,” he said.

Two Heavy Trucks and Helicopter Involved

The Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News the truck became stuck as it waited for Jefferson to retrieve his belongings.
Two weeks later, the vehicle’s tire tracks were still visible on the lawn.

The soldiers signaled to helicopters in the air for aid. Military sources say a Coast Guard helicopter pilot saw the signal and flew to Jefferson’s home. The chopper was already carrying four rescued New Orleans residents at the time.
A rescue diver descended from the helicopter, but the congressman decided against going up in the helicopter, sources say. The pilot sent the diver down again, but Jefferson again declined to go up the helicopter.
After spending approximately 45 minutes with Jefferson, the helicopter went on to rescue three additional New Orleans residents before it ran low on fuel and was forced to end its mission.
“Forty-five minutes can be an eternity to somebody that is drowning, to somebody that is sitting in a roof, and it needs to be used its primary purpose during an emergency,” said Hauer.
Coast Guard Commander Brendan McPherson told ABC News, “We did have an aircraft that responded to a signal of distress where the congressman was located. The congressman did decline rescue at the time so the helicopter picked up three other people.
“I did not seek the use of military assets to help me get around my city,” Jefferson told ABC News. “There was shooting going on. There was sniping going on. They thought I should be escorted by some military guards, both to the convention center, the Superdome and uptown.”
The water reached to the third step of Jefferson’s house, a military source familiar with the incident told ABC News, and the vehicle pulled up onto Jefferson’s front lawn so he wouldn’t have to walk in the water. Jefferson went into the house alone, the source says, while the soldiers waited on the porch for about an hour.

“I can’t comment on why the congressman decided not to go in the aircraft,” McPherson said. “Did it take a little more time to send the rescue swimmer back a second time? Yes … You’d have to ask the congressman if it was a waste of time or not.”

The Louisiana National Guard then sent a second 5-ton truck to rescue the first truck, and Jefferson and his personal items were returned to the Superdome.
Schneider said he could not comment on whether the excursion was appropriate. “We’re in no position to comment on an order given to a soldier. You’re not going to get a statement from the Louisiana National Guard saying whether it was right or wrong. That was the mission we were assigned.”

Jefferson insisted the expedition did not distract from rescue efforts.
(Oh really!!!)

“They actually picked up a lot of people while we were there,” he said. “The young soldier said, ‘It’s a good thing we came up here because a lot of people would not have been rescued had we not been in the neighborhood.’”

Jefferson’s Homes Searched in Unrelated Investigation

In an unrelated matter, authorities recently searched Jefferson’s property as part of a federal investigation into the finances of a high-tech firm. Last month FBI officials raided Jefferson’s house as well as his home in Washington, D.C., his car and his accountant’s house.
Jefferson has not commented on that matter, except to say he is cooperating with the investigation. But he has emerged as a major voice in the post-Katrina political debate.
“The levee system that had protected New Orleans for hundreds of years had failed,” he said on the House floor on Sept. 7. “Our city was inundated, 80 percent of it, with deadly water. Thousands of lives were lost, many drowned, trapped in their homes. Others were lost trying to escape the fury.”
Last week, Jefferson set up a special trust fund for contributions to his legal defense in light of the FBI investigation. A senior federal law enforcement source tells ABC News that investigators are interested in learning if Jefferson moved any materials relevant to the investigation. Jefferson says he did not.

ABC News’ Sarah H. Rosenberg, Chris Isham and Ted Gerstein contributed to this report.

Farrakhan visits Charlotte, criticizes federal response
By ANNA CROWLEY / 6NEWS

Minister Louis Farrakhan was very critical of the Red Cross and FEMA response to hurricane Katrina.
Minister Louis Farrakhan was in Charlotte Monday to rally support for his Millions More March. However, he did have some choice words about the response to Hurricane Katrina victims, some of whom are staying at the Charlotte Coliseum.
Farrakhan’s been traveling across the country to visit shelters like the one that is set up at the coliseum. He said he’s not happy with the job the American Red Cross is doing.
He had harsh words for FEMA too. But that was just the warm up. Farrakhan also shared his thoughts on how the levee breached in the first place.
“I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry,” Farrakhan said.
YES FOLKS THAT TWAS THE QUOTE…MY MAN HAS LOST HIS FUCKEN MIND!!
Gilton Balanos lived in the very neighborhood Farrakhan was talking about.
“I think that’s ludicrous,” Balanos said. “When this happened we were caught by surprise. Individuals, the government and everybody were caught by surprise.”
Farrakhan also said that the Red Cross’ response to the disaster was inadequate. Red Cross Spokesperson Pam Daigle said “there was no basis for the criticism.”
As for the issue of how the Red Cross spends money and on whom, Daigle said “the Red Cross’ books are open for anyone who wants to see the audits, who wants to see how we spend money.”
“I’m sure some good is being done, but not enough to answer the cry.” Farrakhan said.
Some evacuees who spoke to 6NEWS said they support Farrakhan and his look into what happened in New Orleans and other affected areas.
President Bush said Monday that Hurricane Katrina did not discriminate and neither will recovery efforts.

“I blame BUSH for the declining moral standards in Springfield! But at least we have busses and all of our Negro residents are employed!”

Los Angeles lost its electrical power the other day, and within minutes Jesse Jackson said President Bush’s racism was at fault. Maureen Dowd got off some cutesy one-liners about limited government limiting civilization. Michael Moore likewise worried that starving the government had enfeebled it. And, Democrats called for an investigation.
Yes, this particular blame barrage came to me in a dream, but although it’s not real, it’s hard to imagine Jackson missing any opportunity to call an official a racist _ that being his role in life, his profession, his calling. Still, people of normal sensibilities might be surprised that he said racism kept the federal government from coming to the rescue as quickly as it should have in New Orleans. After all, he had no evidence. But little things like evidence _ or the fact that some well-off whites were among the hurricane’s victims _ have never stopped him.
Now, the Rev. Jackson is actually saying it’s racist to call those blacks who left Louisiana seeking refuge in other states “refugees,” and I agree: Stop using that ugly epithet this minute. Once you get started down that road, the next thing you know you will be calling them people in need of help, or something like that, and pretty soon all kinds of other ugly things might ensue. Right?
Dowd, sassy as ever and beaming with joy over her derision of Bush as someone who did not send enough funds to keep New Orleans’ levees in shape, said _ or surely contemplated saying _ that she was far from “shocked” that Bush did not have enough “juice” to keep the lights on in Los Angeles, because after all, he was always “in the dark.”
She might have gone further except that someone may have tapped her on the shoulder to tell her the facts about the money for the levee. Bush proposed spending as much over the past five years as President Bill Clinton had in his last five years, reporters have noted.
The New York Times columnist may have wanted to say that more money for California energy would have saved the day, but that the war in Iraq had impeded domestic spending. In a piece on New Orleans, she said emergency money had been “depleted” by that “folly,” overlooking the fact that domestic spending has soared under Bush.

Michael Moore of moviemaking fame would naturally want to jump into the question about LA losing power because LA is a place where he is a hero, widely appreciated by celebrities for his Bush bashing. In a hurricane-related piece on his Web site, he gave an example of that sport, sounding a Dowd-like note in expressing concern about politicians “whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government,” pointing to the Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example of what could be good for America if it had more money.
FEMA’s problem _ besides having a now-resigned boss who was unqualified for the position _ was not that it was too lean a fighting machine, but that it had been stuffed inside an overly large, super-fat bureaucracy where it’s hard for anything to get done.
That’s the sort of thing a bipartisan investigation might disclose after New Orleans has been put back together, but it’s questionable that the Democrats seeking such an inquiry are nearly as interested in getting to the truth as in making the hurricane a continuing embarrassment for Bush. From the mouths of people like Jackson, Dowd and Moore, we have a taste of the kinds of bloated claims that actually get in the way of facts that appear to be bad enough without exaggeration or ideological contortion.
If leftists were really pouncing on Bush for the LA blackout, you can bet they would shut their eyes to its real cause, the accidental slicing of a cable, just as they are now refusing to identify the chief culprits in the muffed response to the hurricane: the New Orleans mayor and the Louisiana governor. Not just their careers, but the lives of those two public figures will now be defined by a horrid reality that they had a difficult time accepting. The left would like to have the New Orleans disaster define the Bush administration, too, but while the administration covered itself with faults more than glory, the tale the left is trying to convey is largely false.

Pittsburgh Tribune

Air America, the liberals’ answer to conservative talk radio, received “loans” from the Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, a social services agency funded largely with public money.
New York authorities are investigating the $875,000 transfer as possibly an illegal conveyance.
Al Franken, Air America’s franchise performer, claims ignorance of the loans until late July. Oh, really?
On the air, Mr. Franken, between nervous giggles, called the man who arranged the loans, former Air America Chairman Evan Montvel Cohen, a “crook.” Mr. Cohen also was a fundraiser for the club.
Cohen indicated to The New York Sun that club officials knew where the money was going — to Air America.
Depending on the version, however, sources claimed Cohen said he needed the money for his and the ongoing health problems of his father.
Oh, yeah. Dad died in 1991.
As for Franken’s latter-day discovery, his signature appears on a notarized document dated Nov. 22, 2004, in which the network promises to repay the money. The money had not been repaid.
Confronted by the document’s contents, Franken said he did not “see this thing,” referring to the listing of the loans, and penned his name on legal advice only to erase money claims he had against others, The Sun also reported.
Sure, Al.
Isn’t it clear? Everyone is fair game to suffer for liberal elites, such as poor children and Alzheimer’s patients whom the club was supposed to help.

Here is the start of these MAD liberals and their attempt to impeach the prez.
I know this is pure lunacy, but I find it amusing. People who amuse Snoop get special consideration. So I will post updates on their progress I may even add my link to the cause just for fun. Playing with liberals is fun TRY IT!

From On the Left Tip: Impeachment 101– Past and Present
I.B.C. member and contributor RenaRF from the blog On the Left Tip prepared this excellent summary (It is also posted over on The Daily Kos, please go comment there too.):

Impeachment 101 — Past and Present

A few things before we start. I am going to assume that IBC members really do want to impeach Bush. Let’s face it - the vast majority (if not all) of us have wanted him gone since an instance of Judicial activism put him in office in 2000… But just wanting him gone and actually building a credible case for his removal are two different things.

I’m not a lawyer. I have no exceptional knowledge….(HEY, you got that right Einstein, maybe you need to get laid and release some sexual tension………………………….. of the Constitution of the law outside of what I can glean from reading other blogs and from doing some research on the internet. My opinions and reasons may lack legal rigor - but they need to be put out there as a jumping-off point for serious vetting. Great journeys begin with a single step and this is mine, offered with the hopes that bright people will mold and change and add and grow this into something entirely possible.

What’s the Point, You Ask?
A lot of people — especially those on the Right — have asked, in one way or another: What’s the point of the IBC?

Consider Bullwinkle’s remarks:

How do you intend to impeach Bush if you aren’t rounding up congressmen to pass an impeachment bill to the senate? Do any of you have the slightest idea how to do this?

I liked the Bulldog’s and Tom Harper’s responses, and I have one of my own.

Bulldog’s answer:

We create discussion. Popular discussion creates political pressure. Political pressure causes politicians to act. Pressured politicians find a way to make things happen. The legal groundwork for impeaching Bush has already been laid. That’s not what we are here for.

Tom Harper’s answer:

Bush needs to be impeached, regardless of who will succeed him in office. Whatever Bush turns out to be guilty of, Cheney is probably up to his eyeballs in it too. We might be able to just get them all out, one by one.

President Hastert? President DeLay? It doesn’t matter. We have to demonstrate that we’re a nation of laws; that illegal behavior in the White House won’t be tolerated.

My answer?

Whatever happens, we win.

“Just what the fuck do you win!?”

If Bush is impeached, we win.

If Bush is not impeached, we still win. Why? Because with all of this discussion, we will probably win the mid-term elections and the 2008 Presidential election.

Creating discussion is what blogging is all about. IMPEACH BUSH has now been in the top 3 searched phrases on Technorati for 3 days in a row. That tells you something.

The more discussion, the more mainstream media will pay attention.

The more mainstream media pays attention, the more the American public pays attention.

The more the American public pays attention, the more pressure will be brought to bear on our politicians.

And we either will get that impeachment, or we’ll win the next elections.

In fact, with the President now at a 38% approval rating, wining the next 2 elections seems likely already. We just have to keep the momentum.

WHERE IS MY CHECK DAMMIT!!!!

Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), Tuesday denounced Lehman Brothers for apologizing for its alleged links to slavery, warning that such apologies, without legal or moral merit, will only embolden slave reparations activists to advance their unjust agenda.

The bank, responding to a Chicago ordinance that requires companies to disclose slave-related business dealings, issued the apology after discovering that the brothers who founded the firm’s predecessor in 1850 owned slaves.

Joe Polizzotto, general counsel of Lehman Brothers, said, “This is a sad part of our heritage…We’re deeply apologetic.”

Flaherty called the company’s decision an act of moral cowardice. “Lehman Brothers should have made the case against group guilt. Whatever ties the company or its officials may have had with slavery 150 years ago is irrelevant.”

Flaherty added that, “Lehman Brothers should have stood up to the activists whose goal is to force companies and individuals to compensate the descendants of slaves. This is morally indefensible as it forces innocents to pay money to non-victims.”

By apologizing, Flaherty said that Lehman Brothers gives the reparations movement a legitimacy it does not deserve. Lehman Brothers is the fourth bank this year to disclose ties to slavery.

Predictably, Lehman Brothers’ act of contrition did not mollify reparations activists. Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman refused to accept the apology and demanded that the company be removed from a $1.5 billion bond issue.

Flaherty said the negative reaction shows that corporate appeasement does not work, and will only lead to greater demands.

“Reparations activists only care about money. They aren’t interested in apologies,” said Flaherty.

NLPC recently published a 35-page monograph titled, “The Case Against Slave Reparations,” co-authored by Peter Flaherty and NLPC policy director John Carlisle.

Simply do a google search and type in the word (FAILURE)

Yes Snoop is right leaning but I DO have a sense of humor!

Senility rears its ugly head.

By Nathan Burchfiel
CNSNews.com Correspondent

(CNSNews.com) - Several black civil rights leaders are accusing the federal government of conspiring against poor African Americans in the aftermath of the flooding in New Orleans. But one of those hurling the charges, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory, on Friday refused to say what, if anything, he has personally contributed to the relief effort.

Gregory, who had just visited evacuees at the Houston Astrodome and the city’s convention center, said he was able offer the flood victims something else besides money and food.

“I’m a hero in America, so just to go there and touch them, means a lot to them. [That] means more than taking them to the Red Cross and giving them food,” Gregory told Cybercast News Service. Gregory did not reply to the question about whether he had made a personal donation.

Earlier, Gregory participated in a rally in front of the White House with leaders of the National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN) and Black Voices for Peace. They charged that the Bush administration delayed rescue efforts of the flood victims because of racism and class-ism.

The Network’s co-chair Donele Edwards laid the specific blame at the doorstep of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps, she charged, “deliberately designed the floodwaters to go into the 9th Ward,” of New Orleans.

Damu Smith, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network, added that “whether they (the federal government) got in a room and conspired or not, what they did is they ignored us, they forgot about us … because we look like we look.” As he was speaking, Smith held out his arm to show his skin color.

New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin, who is African American, should bear little responsibility for the city’s flooding, Smith said. “I think Mayor Nagin has done everything he could. He’s cried out, but I really think the governor, and Bush especially, they really dropped the ball on this,” according to Smith. Louisiana Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco is white.

“There’s been some mistakes made by folks in the mayor’s office, too,” Smith said. “But the most of the blame must be laid at the doorstep of Bush and Governor Blanco.”

Smith said he had personally contributed “a lot” to aid in the recovery efforts. “I have friends who lost their homes and lost everything and they’ve been displaced so this is very personal to me to help out so we gotta do it.”

He encouraged people to donate to small organizations instead of the American Red Cross. “You see, the Red Cross is getting all the money - about $500 million - but there are groups in Houston and other places that are struggling, that are helping people,” Smith said. “They don’t get the money, so we’re gonna make sure the money gets channeled to them as well.”

Gregory intensified Edwards’ conspiracy charges, accusing the government of orchestrating the evacuation to access oil under the city.

“It (Hurricane Katrina) didn’t hit, it went down the Gulf,” Gregory said. “And nobody is asking, if it missed, where’s this damn water coming from? Who shut them pumps off and who’s going to investigate those two barges with dynamite on them that hit that levee,” he said in reference to the failure of the city’s levees and water pumps, which were intended to protect the city from flooding.

Gregory said the government has no plans to let residents back into New Orleans or to rebuild the city. “They will have no problem declaring that whole city a disaster area because of the mold,” he said.

“Last Friday he (U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert) said there’s no need to rebuild it, plow it under,” Gregory said, exaggerating the comments Hastert made immediately after the city was flooded. “Well that’s what they’re planning on doing,” Gregory added.

If his accusations are correct, Gregory told Cybercast News Service, it will create a backlash beyond just the black community. “If they found oil under there and they’re going to turn it into an oil well,” Gregory said, “that’s black and white folks.”

In time, as people stop reacting based on emotion, Gregory concluded, “It’s gonna come out. There’s been too many mistakes.”

The suggestion, that the news media do not tilt to the left, is just not serious thinking. Or, if it’s coming from those who would consider themselves serious thinkers, it’s just not intellectually honest.
After posting a response on a blog we got into liberal media bias.
Some comments made:

Kitty said…
“What Ditto would call the Rush O’Hannity factor - liberals say what liberal media? That’s why sites like DailyKos are so popular. Did you know they get 16 million hits a month? We seek solace in those that feel the same, and their audience and contributors, as well as those of JABBS, recognize the importance of spreading the word. Thats why we like blogs, we appreciate the debate.
We can’t understand why everyone isn’t screaming what went wrong? Do all conservatives think the deaths of thousands is acceptable? Or is it just that they were poor and black and didn’t have the money to get out of town.”
DEATH TOLL AS OF TODAY IN LOUISIANA 197

Snoop, the conservative media =

1) Conservative talk radio (more than 90% of all talk radio hours are hosted by conservatives or religious types).

Because conservatives do it better, what a shock, a sorry ass former Saturday Night Live hack Al Franken is your best bet, no wonder you are pissed

2) Fox News Channel

3) More than half of MSNBC

Now, a lot of people get their news from these sources. Check the combined ratings of the top radio hosts (Rush, Sean, Savage, etc.) and then add in the ratings of the conservative shows on cable (Sean, Cavuto, Scarborough, Carlson, etc.) and the religious and conservative shows (EWTN, 700 Club, etc.) and you wind up with a very similar number to the total of CBS, NBC and ABC evening news shows, plus any given hour of CNN.

So the problem is not how many news sources, but the percentage of right thinking folks who specifically get their news from these sources. So liberals are hacked off at the fact that we don’t get our news from the “proven” left wing sources.

But what about PBS and NPR, you ask? Check out the “news rosters,” and you’ll see that, thanks to Bush appointees, the coverage is roughly 50/50 left and right (I say roughly, because there are some shows that I might consider apolitical, and you’d consider liberal, and other shows that you’d consider apolitical, and I’d consider conservative).
But what about newspapers, you ask? I’ll admit the NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times and SF Chronicle lean left in their news coverage — although I can also point to individual reporters at each paper that lean right, as well as the plethora of conservative editorial page writers and syndicated columnists they feature.

Classic liberal rhetoric. To find liberal idiot media tendencies you need only to look at NBC, and the Today Show.
This morning I found it amusing that the NBC journalists covering New Orleans found them a particularly “well spoken” (according to perky Katie) little Negro boy.
This little Negro boy was able to give our liberal journalists friends some insight on the conditions suffered by he and his family while marooned at the New Orleans Convention Center.
I bet Katie is thinking; wow, this little Negro boy surrounded by so much poverty, suffering, drug abuse and crime how could he possible learn to speak so well. Also lets not forget he was raised by his grandmother who herself is ailing.
I’m sick of hearing these perverted media types gawking at and using these poor black folks as political capital.
AND ANOTHER THING….
Tim Russert can’t get off mentioning every fucken day how low Bush’s poll numbers are, I’m still trying to figure out what fucken difference does it make.
HE CAN’T RUN FOR PRESIDENT AGAIN YOU JACKASS!
You liberals who are filled with glee over his falling numbers I don’t get how you think this will benefit you.
Because when it is all said and done, whatever candidate you put up in 2008 still has to be able to forward ideas that this country can get behind and support.
You still must be able to convince the American people why we should vote for your crazy asses.
You have several idiot bloggers calling for Bush’s impeachment, which is beyond stupidity. In addition liberal bloggers and the media still distorting what went on in NOLA. Keep praying for poll numbers to decrease if that makes you feel better.
Also what are you gonna do after the Prez throws billions of dollars at NOLA in an attempt to change his perception of the American people. How will you demonize him then?

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

“Mr. Bush’s performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘Star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

“The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

“You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

“No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above.”

“You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question — which few journalists ask — is why weren’t the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio

Sunday, September 11, 2005

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

“Mr. Bush’s performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘Star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

“The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

“You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

“No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above.”

“You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question — which few journalists ask — is why weren’t the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio

Sunday, September 11, 2005

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

“Mr. Bush’s performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘Star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

“The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

“You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

“No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above.”

“You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question — which few journalists ask — is why weren’t the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio

BY GEORGE WILL
Earth, that living, seething, often inhospitable and not altogether intelligently designed thing, has again shrugged, and tens of thousands of Pakistanis are dead. That earthquake struck 10 months after an undersea quake caused the December 2004 tsunami that killed 285,000 in Asia. Americans reeling from Hurricane Katrina, and warned of scores of millions of potential deaths from avian flu, have a vague feeling — never mind the disturbing rest of the news — of pervasive menace from things out of control. Too vague, according to Simon Winchester.
His timely new book, “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906,” teaches — reminds, really — that we should have quite precise worries about the incurably unstable ground on which scores of millions of Americans live. This almost certainly will result in a huge calamity, probably in the lifetime of most people now living.
Before the study of plate tectonics revolutionized geology just 40 years ago, that science, Winchester writes, was concerned with “rocks, fossils, faults and minerals that were scattered around simply and solely on the surface of the earth.” But the surface consists of between — depending how they are defined — six and 36 floating plates, which Winchester calls “rafts of solid rock.” The plates’ slow movements are powered by Earth’s molten innards, the boiling and bubbling radioactive residue of the planet’s formation.
The plates grind against — and slide up on, or plunge below — one another. But not smoothly, which is the lethal problem. When friction freezes them for a while, stupendous energy builds up until, suddenly, plates unlock and the energy is released, sometimes in ways that seem to involve related spasms around the world.
On the last day of January 1906, that seismically dangerous year, an earthquake in Ecuador and Colombia of perhaps 8.8 magnitude on the Richter scale killed about 2,000. Sixteen days later there was a large Caribbean quake, followed five days later by one in the Caucasus, and on March 17 by one that killed 1,228 on the island of Formosa. On April 6 a 10-day eruption of the volcano Vesuvius began with rocks blown 40,000 feet into the air over Naples. Two days after Vesuvius subsided, San Francisco was knocked down, and 2,600 acres of it were then devoured by three days of fires. About 3,000 San Franciscans died then, four months before a Chilean quake killed 20,000.
San Francisco’s quake was smaller than the series of shocks around New Madrid, Mo., over a few winter weeks in 1811-12. They were strong enough to ring the bells in a Charleston, S.C., church that was later destroyed in that city’s 1886 quake. Scores of millions of Americans now live on the unstable faults that shook mid-America in 1811-12.

For San Francisco, the bad news is that the quake that killed 63 in 1989 (6.9 magnitude, compared with 8.3 in 1906) was caused not by the San Andreas fault but by a neighboring one. So the big menace, the San Andreas, has not recently lurched, as it surely will because it is moving, sporadically, in grinding concert with the Pacific Plate. Since 1906 there have been only five major earthquakes along the 750 miles of the San Andreas, and none in Northern California. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a 62 percent probability of a quake in that area of at least 6.7 magnitude before 2032. Pondering the prosperous town of Portola Valley, south of San Francisco, exactly astride two of the most active strands of the San Andreas, Winchester, like many geologists who have warned the town, is fascinated by “humankind’s insistent folly in living in places where they shouldn’t.”
After Earth’s heavings subside, they reverberate in people’s minds. Winchester says that after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed 60,000, “priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who in turn had ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot.”
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia fueled the growth of an extremist strain of Islam, bent on purging society of impurities displeasing to God. That strain has twice recently been heard from in Bali.
San Francisco’s 1906 disaster prompted the explosive growth of a Pentecostal movement based in Los Angeles, a movement then embryonic but now mighty. Yet when A.P. Hotaling’s whiskey warehouse survived San Francisco’s post-quake inferno, a wit wondered:

If, as some say, G-d spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling’s whiskey?

Good question.

By George Lakoff,

Katrina’s tragic consequences were not just due to incompetence, natural disaster, or Bush policies (though he is accountable). This is a failure of moral and political philosophy.
It is impossible for me, as it is for most Americans, to watch the horror and suffering from Hurricane Katrina and not feel physically sore, pained, bereft, empty, heartbroken. And angry.
The Katrina tragedy should become a watershed in American politics. This was when the usually invisible people suddenly appeared in all the anguish of their lives — the impoverished, the old, the infirm, the kids and the low-wage workers with no cars, TVs or credit cards. They showed up on America’s doorsteps, entered the living rooms and stayed. Katrina will not go away soon, and she has the power to change America.
The moral of Katrina is mostly being missed. It is not just a failure of execution (William Kristol), or that bad things just happen (Laura Bush). It was not just indifference by the President, or a lack of accountability, or a failure of federal-state communication, or corrupt appointments in FEMA, or the cutting of budgets for fixing levees, or the inexcusable absence of the National Guard off in Iraq. It was all of these and more, but they are the effects, not the cause.
The cause was political through and through — a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America’s values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common good is the central role of government.

This is only part of the article, but it illustrates how liberals seek to frame this mess in NOLA to further their agenda. The name Katrina will be given saintly status in the months to come as liberals try to promote wacked liberal ideas using the poor and particularly blacks as poster people.
If you have not read, do so the story:Dancing on the Graves of Black People. Paints a clear picture of how liberals were jumping for joy as the Bush administration was the central focus on the supposed failures of the Feds.

1. You think Ted Koppel’s Hair is real!

2. You like to give to charities - with other people’s money.

3. You think free love is sheik and still wonder why your third marriage just went down the toilet.

4. Whenever an intern disappears in Washington, you say it’s all about sex.

5. Your father wore flowers and your mother wore army boots in the sixties.

6. You think Al Gore won the election in 2000.

7. You fondly recall Stalin as “Uncle Joe”.

8. You think the second amendment is the right to keep and bear a white flag.

9. Whenever you hear Rush Limbaugh’s name mentioned you foam at the mouth and your knee jerks.

10. When hooligans throw rocks at police, you call it civil disobedience, when Republicans protest a fixed election you call it a riot.

11. If you nod your head and genuflect when Ted Kennedy speaks (or belches) then you might be a liberal.

12. If you went to prep school, got your bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate; you teach in a university, and still imagine that you know all about the real world, then you might be a liberal.

13. If you think evangelical is a dirty word you might be a liberal.

14. If you make sure to invite a lone conservative to your chic (not sheik) party because you want to show people how open-minded you are then you might be a liberal.

15. If you think alcoholics are disabled and deserve Social Security (or should be elected to be the senior senator from Massachussettes) then you might be a liberal.

16. If you eat granola bars for breakfast, salad greens for lunch, quiche for supper and then wake up hungry in the middle of the night and eat a whole quart of ice cream…and still think you are eating healthy, then you might be a liberal.

17. If you think rats, mice and houseflies are people, too, then you might be a liberal.

18. If you burried your dead goldfish in the compost bin because you thought it would be good for the environment then you might be a liberal.

19. If you think the government can solve your personal problems then you might be a liberal.

20. And our favorite: You might be a liberal if your FIVE-YEAR-OLD tells YOU what to do!

21. “You might be a liberal if you give money to the homeless man on the corner of the freeway, but you turn up your nose every time you see a boy scout.”

NO SHOCK TO ME
FROM THE NY POST: THANKS M.

Profiteering ghouls have been using debit cards distributed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - intended to buy essentials for evacuated families - in luxury-goods stores as far away as Atlanta.

“We’ve seen three of the cards,” said a senior employee of the Louis Vuitton store at the Lenox Square Mall in affluent Buckhead, who asked not to be named. “Two I’m certain have purchased; one actually asked if she could use it in the store. This has been since Saturday.”

The distinctive white cards were distributed by the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and carry a value of up to $2,000.

“It doesn’t say anything on the card other than alcohol, tobacco and firearms cannot be purchased with it,” the store employee told me. “There’s nothing legally that prevents us from taking it, unfortunately. Other than morally, it’s wrong.”

The source told me that the two women who had made purchases with the card each bought a signature monogrammed Louis Vuitton handbag in the $800 range.

“They didn’t look destitute by any stretch. You would never have said, ‘They must be one of the evacuees.’ … The one that I dealt with yesterday was 20. She’ll be 21 next month.” The source described the reaction of other store-keepers in the mall - which includes luxury brands Ferragamo, Burberry, Judith Leiber and Neiman Marcus - as “outrage.”

“It doesn’t say anywhere on there, but it would have to be a good amount to be shopping in here,” the source said with a dark chuckle.

By KATHLEEN PARKER

IT feels like O.J. all over again. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we are reminded that black America and white America see things differently.

We saw this vividly during O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial. When his not-guilty verdict was delivered, black Americans cheered while whites — dumbfounded and nearly unanimous in their belief that Simpson was guilty — scratched their heads.

How could we see things so differently?

Now we see this racial schism again in the aftermath of Katrina. Blacks — again not all, but many if not most — see the federal government’s slow response to the hurricane’s ravages as evidence of President George W. Bush’s racism.

Rapper Kanye West became suddenly more famous, especially among whites who had never heard of him, when he said during a hurricane relief concert: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

That message has been amplified by some nonblacks, notably Michael Moore and Howard Dean, while some blacks — notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — have refuted the racism charge. As Rice said during a visit to her home state of Alabama: “Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race.”

I believe that’s true. Most (not all) Americans take pride in practicing racial neutrality in their lives. Moreover, no one intentionally left people unattended, either in New Orleans or elsewhere in Katrina’s some 91,000-square-mile path. More likely, “incompetence” — especially locally — will be the finding of whatever commissions evolve to investigate what went wrong.

In the meantime, the race message has trickled down and polluted the mainstream: Bush doesn’t care about blacks.

I bumped into this perception in a restaurant a few days ago when a mixed-race table had a small meltdown while debating Bush’s response. I happened to be seated nearby and, because I know the people, was invited to participate.

One member of the party, an African-American woman, looked at me with what I think I can report accurately as pain. “Bush doesn’t care about people who look like me,” she said matter-of-factly. This from an elegant professional woman clearly not of the Al Sharpton school of reactionary politics.

I have been critical of Bush’s performance the past several days because I think he missed an opportunity to lead “big-time,” as his vice president would say. He missed a chance to save lives, to save national pride, and to create a Teflon legacy of compassionate conservatism to bestir the hearts of his worst critics.

He missed the boat at the point when he could have made a difference — after the floods and while people were held hostage in the Superdome — and I think he knows it.

Nevertheless, I don’t think Bush has a racist bone in his body. More likely — and more to the point here — he suffers an affliction common to many of us. That is, an unfamiliarity and discomfort with poverty.

For most of us, especially whites, New Orleans was a big, fun town where you get offered a drink as soon as you’re off the plane — a noisy, hot, humid, sexy, sensual dreamscape where adults walk down the French Quarter’s narrow streets drinking “Hurricanes,” gazing at beautiful women who turn out to be men, marveling at the music and the mirrored miracle that is Galatoire’s, and waking up to chicory coffee and beignets.

We don’t see the poverty on the periphery because, to be blunt, it spoils our movie. Poverty, especially when we’re on vacation, becomes invisible. If we do happen to catch an accidental glimpse, we avert our eyes. Katrina put an end to that denial by exposing what we didn’t want to see — the other New Orleans that is poor and, like the city, mostly black.

Not just a little bit poor, but embarrassingly poor in Earth’s richest nation. Too poor to leave in many cases, though some were also stubborn, we’re learning. Too poor to own or rent a car, or to buy the gas that was hitting $3.50 a gallon in the hours shortly after the storm. Way too poor to buy a plane ticket or rent a motel room.

Too poor to be noticed? That’s a question for all hearts to answer.

The stories out of New Orleans will continue to break all but the hardest hearts in the next several weeks and months, but the one that needs to die soonest is that America turned her back on blacks. America, starting with the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, turned her back on the poor.

Parker is a syndicated columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.

Laurence A. Elder

In the case of Hurricane Katrina, government failed to do its most essential job – protecting people and property. Yes, state, local and federal officials failed to appreciate the severity and gravity of this storm and its aftermath, and failed to properly evacuate the citizens from New Orleans.

But how does this add up to racism?

CNN’s Jack Cafferty said, “Despite the many angles of this tragedy, and Lord knows there’ve been a lot of ‘em in New Orleans, there is a great big elephant in the living room that the media seems content to ignore – that would be, until now … [We] in the media are ignoring the fact that almost all of the victims in New Orleans are black and poor.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer replied, “… You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black, and this is gonna raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.”

Fox’s Shepard Smith described citizens of New Orleans stranded on an Interstate as possessing the face of an African-American man, woman, child or baby.

News anchors, once again, demonstrate their willingness, indeed eagerness, to find racism. A few years ago, a Time-CNN poll found that 89 percent of black teens experienced little or no racism in their own lives. White teens, however, believed racism against minorities a bigger problem than black teens did.

The so-called “black leaders,” of course, led the race-card parade. The Congressional Black Caucus’s Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., described those suffering as “sons and daughters of slaves.” NAACP attorney Damon Hewitt said, “If the majority of the folks left behind were white individuals, and most of the folks who were able to escape on their own were African Americans, then I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. This is a racial story.” Rapper Kanye West, at an NBC relief concert, screamed, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

CNN’s Cafferty and so-called black leaders refuse to ask basic questions. Since 1978, for example, black mayors controlled the city of New Orleans, with many of the city’s top officials also black. What about their responsibility? What about the damage done by the modern welfare state, helping to create poverty by financially rewarding irresponsible behavior? What about the damage to the black psyche by so-called civil-rights leaders who demand not just equal rights, but equal results, helping to create a victicrat-entitlement mentality?

Maybe someday one of the news anchors will ask one of the so-called civil-rights leaders the following question: Doesn’t the demand for race-based preferences, set-asides, private-sector anti-discrimination laws, social-welfare programs, and social “safety net” programs all conspire to say one thing – “You are not responsible”?

City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas, a onetime New Orleans resident, said:

[T]he city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?

She also notes, “The city’s government has long suffered from incompetence and corruption,” and that the crime rate in New Orleans – during normal times – exceeds the national average by a factor of 10!

News anchors and so-called black leaders ignore a far bigger factor than race or class – culture.

Consider the mid-1800s, and the plight of New York City’s Irish underclass. According to William J. Stern, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

One hundred fifty years ago, Manhattan’s tens of thousands of Irish seemed mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence crime and illegitimacy … An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes worked the city in 1850 … Illegitimacy soared, tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed the city’s streets. Violent Irish gangs fought each other … but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses. More than half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish …”

Disgusted by government “charity,” Bishop John Joseph Hughes led movements to form non-government-aided Catholic schools and numerous self-help programs. He promoted abstinence and the belief that sex outside of marriage was a sin. His diocese’s nuns served as an employment agency for Irish domestics and encouraged women to run boarding houses. What happened? Within two generations, “the Irish proportion of arrests for violent crime had dropped to less than 10 percent from 60 percent. Irish children were entering … the professions, politics, show business and commerce. In 1890, some 30 percent of the city’s teachers were Irish women, and the Irish literacy rate exceeded 90 percent.”

Some demand a commission to investigate the failures and breakdowns in Hurricane Katrina. Fine. Let’s hope they put together a commission to investigate another hurricane – that wrought by the welfare state and the irresponsible use of the race card.

Jeremy Suggs, 21, was arrested in Las Vegas in August and charged with robbing a Wells Fargo bank, done in by the familiar lapse of having accidentally left behind his wallet and a name-imprinted deposit slip. Also, according to police, he had fired two shots in the bank out of frustration at noncompliance with his demands, with one narrowly missing his own head, and had to re-count down a threat to shoot (”5, 4, 3, 2, 1″) when no one gave him money the first time. His alleged partner and getaway driver, known as “Jap,” had supposedly talked him into the crime by assuring him that there were no surveillance cameras, but of course there were. [Las Vegas Review Journal, 8-5-05]

A Doctor was addressing a large audience:
“The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long- term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have, or will, eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?” After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, “Wedding Cake.”

By Carl Limbacher Jr, NewsMax.com

The U.S. Secret Service won’t say whether it’s investigating Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu after she threatened to “punch” President Bush earlier this week during a fit of anger over Hurricane Katrina.
“She might have been joking,” Secret Service spokeswoman Lorie Lewis told NewsMax on Wednesday, after being told of Landrieu’s comments on ABC’s “This Week.”
“If one person criticizes [Louisiana officials], or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me - one more word about it after this show airs and I - I might likely have to punch him - literally,” Landrieu railed to host George Stephanopoulos.
The Secret Service was provided with a full transcript of the ABC broadcast, including Landrieu’s incendiary remarks. Spokeswoman Lewis promised to find out whether the agency intended to launch an investigation after reviewing the transcript.
In the two days since, the Secret Service has declined to return two phone calls or respond to an email inquiring about the disposition of a possible Landrieu probe.
The agency took a tougher stance on Senatorial threats in 1994, when then-North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms joked that President Clinton “had better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.”
After a media firestorm erupted - with some pundits complaining that Helms had committed treason - the Secret Service swung into action, launching a full blown investigation into whether Helms’ statement indicated that someone in North Carolina planned to assassinate the president.
“We have followed up on the comments and [have] spoken with the senator’s staff,” a Secret Service spokesman said at the time.
Ms. Landrieu’s much more explicit threat to “punch” Bush, on the other hand, has prompted no such reaction from the agency.
And the press, which rushed to condemn Helms, has pretended not to notice that Landrieu’s outburst is part of a rising tide of hostility towards the Bush White House where normal boundaries of criticism have fallen by the wayside.
In recent days, Democrats have complained that the Bush administration response to Katrina was “criminal.” On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the president himself was “dangerous” for the nation.
Surveying the storm damage on Thursday, Vice President Cheney was interrupted twice during an outdoor television interview by a man who shouted: “Go f - - k yourself, Mr. Vice President.”
If the Landrieu case is any indication, however, apparently threats against the executive branch aren’t taken as seriously as they once were.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker
Rick Moran is proprietor of the blog Right Wing Nuthouse

For the left, the aftermath of Katrina has proven to be a godsend. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen them this happy since Hugo Chavez hornswaggled Jimmy Carter into certifying his victory in a recall vote last year. There’s just something about communist thugs that brings a smile to the face of an American lefty and makes their hearts go pitter patter.

But even a victory by “The Laughing Goat” ( La Cabra que Ríe) couldn’t possibly gladden the hearts and warm the cockles of liberals like the prospect of celebrating…what? Well, there’s that drop in the President’s poll numbers. And then there’s…let’s see. Oh! Did I mention the drop in the President’s poll numbers?

Yes, these are heady days for our left wing friends. The fact that their celebrations are taking place as a direct result of the distress, suffering, anguish and death of tens of thousands of their fellow citizens seems to not be of much concern to our morally superior betters. In fact, it has emboldened them to advance every crack pot theory on race and class that has poisoned American politics for going on forty years. One could say the left is dancing on the graves of black people, celebrating the exploitation of a political opening brought about by the incompetence of relief efforts in the largely black neighborhoods of New Orleans except for one thing; most of those graves are empty at the moment because the future les habitants haven’t even been plucked from the floodwaters yet.

But why let a small detail like common decency spoil a good party? It’s Mardi Gras in September in the Big Easy and liberals are dancing the Cajun Reel with the thousands of grinning skeletons who very soon now will start filling up the temporary mortuaries set up to receive them. The fact that we will be denied the edifying spectactle of watching the gruesome task of retrieving these corpses has now led to charges of a “cover-up” – as if focusing a camera on the bloated, blackened remains of our fellow citizens should be made into some kind of reality TV show. Kind of a Survivor meets The Great Race high concept production. Why, the syndication possibilities are staggering.

Consider the hue and cry that went up in the hours and days following September 11, 2001 about how we shouldn’t be showing images of the tortured souls as they jumped to their deaths from those doomed towers.Or the unbearable, constant replaying of the horrific scenes of destruction as the towers fell. The rational at the time was that such appalling images would breed anger and hate. But the anger and hate that would be bred by showing the maggoty corpses left behind by a man-made disaster are perfectly alright – as long as that anger and hate is directed at George Bush. After all, from the left’s perspective, if you can’t use images of a rotting cadaver for the ultimate good of making George Bush look bad, why bother?

That’s all they have to live for, of course. That and the possibility that the American people will become so outraged at the President’s choice of Michael Brown to head up the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that they will rise up in their righteous anger and smite the Republicans a mortal blow at the polls next year. The elevation of horse show impressario Brown to the lofty perch of FEMA Director may have been an unconscionable and unfathomable act of stupidity on the part of the President. But so was having Ron Brown’s Commerce Department give technology transfer waivers to American companies so that the Chinese army could improve the accuracy of thier ICBMs (Clinton). Or selling arms for hostages (Reagan). Or putting price controls on crude oil (Carter). Or putting wage and price controls into place when inflation was at the “astronomical” rate of 4.7% (Nixon). Or supporting Cuban ex-pats in a doomed-from-the-start effort to take back their country from Castro (Kennedy).

All President’s make huge mistakes. Some lead to economic distress. Others actually cost lives. At this moment, despite the left’s charges that Bush is insensitive, I doubt whether the President is getting much restful sleep these past few nights. If there is anything at all that the American people have sensed about this man on a personal level, it is a sense of a simple, faith-based compassion for his fellow citizens. Does he recognize personal responsibility in his disasterous choice of Michael Brown as FEMA Director? Firing the incompetent fool would be a good indication one way or another.

But giving Master Brown the heave-ho won’t satisfy the baying hounds at the President’s doorstep. The ghosts of New Orleans may indeed haunt Mr. Bush’s Presidency from here on out if he doesn’t act soon to counter the impression that the Federal government isn’t on top of this relief effort. It isn’t enough to promise money and support for the half million displaced people whose lives have been shattered by the storm. This is a given in America. It’s doing what’s expected.

What the President needs to do is the unexpected. Americans will back a President after he makes a mistake only when he admits the error in public and asks for forgiveness. Reagan and Clinton both made monumental errors in their second terms and yet finished their times in office with the strong support and even affection of the American people because they recognized their mistakes, apologized for them, and moved on to bigger and better things.

Following Iran-Contra, Reagan negotiated the first real reductions in a class of nuclear weapons when he signed a treaty with the Soviets eliminating medium range missiles from Europe. And following Clinton’s apology for lying to the American people about “that woman,” and his subsequent impeachment, he seemed to gather new energies which allowed him to finish his term with approval ratings over 60%.

Clearly, this is a mea culpa moment for Bush. But whether his political enemies, who now have the upper hand, allow him the luxury of such a course of action is problematic. The left’s continued glee at having the President on the run will last only as long as the President stubbornly refuses to make things right with the American people.

Things went horribly wrong in New Orleans. And while the inexplicable gaffes of the disaster tag team of Blanc-o-Nagin will ultimately come to be seen as at least equally responsible for the tragedy, the American people want an acknowledgement of what they’ve seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears; the people that the President dispatched to deal with the relief efforts failed miserably. They want the President to take ultimate responsibility for this and they want it done soon. Any delay will be seen as playing politics and that’s something the American people have no patience for right now.

Do the right thing, Mr. Bush. And do it now.

Question for those of you who read the zone…..Have I since the disaster said that I don’t support an independent commission? NO!
Have I said that the federal government is not at fault AT ALL, NO.
I have yet to read on a single liberal blog (I HAVE THEM ON MY SIDEBAR I READ THEM ALL EVERYDAY) NOT ONE LIBERAL BLOG mention the state or local governments’ responsibility in this mess.

NOT ONE has mentioned the money that went to Louisiana prior to the disaster.

NOT ONE talked about the incompetence of the Mayor.

NOT ONE, mentioned the governor “needing” 24 more hours to make her decision on bringing in the guard.

NOT ONE has talked about the lawlessness that went on after the storm.

NOT ONE mentioned the evacuation plan that was not implemented.

NOT ONE, talked about the devastation that took place in Mississippi as if NO blacks lived there.

NOT ONE has even mentioned the 60 BILLION plus the president has and will throw into fixing and rebuilding NOLA.

ITS ALL ABOUT BUSH!

AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION IS ALL ABOUT POLITICS, PERIOD.
These people don’t give a shit about what really happened or the “so-called” truth.
Lets see just who would be on this commission, take a guess. FORMER POLITICIANS!
This is a blog war folks yes its politically motivated. Snoop has his opinions and I post accordingly. But I don’t run nor hide from insight, information, or being educated on something. I keep saying, liberals you have the stage, refute what I’m posting. I don’t delete comments, I don’t run from your supposed truth. This is about “sides” my side is not perfect, my views are not perfect, I’m not always right, but I’m pretty damm close.
But regardless of what you liberals say your views destroy this country. Is Snoop saying liberals must go away NO! I have enough commonsense to know that this world functions on BALANCE. You have wacko on the right and left. But liberals views to me as a black man are corrosive. Liberalism is what put those people in a helpless situation.
Read the “poverty pimp” poem. You liberals are as predictable as the Kansas wind.
Just admit you hate BUSH and nothing else matters.
You wonder why liberals LEAN RIGHT to get elected and GOVERN LEFT once they are elected? Because liberals can’t show their true colors. IGNORANCE is your greatest weapon. PROPAGANDA, the native tongue.

The Lost City of New Orleans? FULL ARTICLE
Risk & Insurance, Dec, 2000 by Lori Widmer

Louisiana’s marshlands, the only buffer for hurricanes that come out of the Gulf, are slipping into the ocean at an alarming rate. New search indicates that just one major hurricane could put New Orleans under water.

The Big Easy is in big trouble. New Orleans is sinking. And fast. But what’s the big deal? Local businesses and residents have heard it all before. They’ve built levees to control the raging Mississippi. They’ve developed pumping systems to deal with rain and flooding. They’ve dug canals to move the water out of the city. And still they survive, wearing the battle scars earned from each hurricane and each flood as badges of honor.

New research by the U.S. Geological Survey, however, indicates that New Orleans is sinking faster than many realize and could be under water within 50 years. The city is facing a series of issues–disappearing wetlands that protect from hurricanes, levees that are too low to hold back flood waters, rising water tables, to name a few–that if not addressed soon could have New Orleans suffering the same fate as Atlantis.

YELLOW BUSSES OR YOUR ASS IS GONNA DROWN, HMMMMM

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin garnered a ton of publicity with a profanity-laced interview he gave to WWL radio last Thursday, where he blasted President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco for not coming to rescue his city in time.
However, Nagin’s most newsworthy comments - where he explained why he didn’t use hundreds of city school buses to evacuate his city’s flood victims - went almost unnoticed.
Turns out, Nagin turned his nose up at the yellow buses, demanding more comfortable Greyhound coaches instead.
“I need 500 buses, man,” he told WWL. “One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here.”
Nagin described his response:
“I’m like - you’ve got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.”
While Nagin was waiting for his Greyhound fleet, Katrina’s floodwaters swamped his school buses, rendering them unusable.

By DENISE KALETTE
Associated Press Writer

Race was a factor in the death toll from Hurricane Katrina, Howard Dean told members of the National Baptist Convention of America on Wednesday at the group’s annual meeting.

Dean, chairman of the Democratic party, made the comments to the Baptists’ Political and Social Justice Commission. The Baptist Convention, with an estimated 3.5 million members, is one of the largest black religious groups in the country.

“We must … come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not,” Dean said.

Dean said Americans have a moral responsibility to not ignore the devastating damage caused by Hurricane Katrina when it struck the Gulf Coast.

The former presidential candidate said the government will be judged by how it treats the old, the young and the poor.

“People are poor in different parts of the country. They are not refugees. They are Americans,” he said.

Dean said that instead of considering proposed estate tax breaks, the Senate should channel the money into disaster relief.

“Shall we give that to the wealthiest people in the country, or should we rebuild New Orleans?” Dean said.

Dean also urged the government to exempt victims of Hurricane Katrina from a stricter new bankruptcy law for one year.

Ken Mehlman, Dean’s counterpart at the Republican National Committee, said he hoped Dean “will match his rhetoric with his support for reforms that replace bureaucracy and entitlement with hope and opportunity.”

Stephen J. Thurston, president of the Baptist Convention, said there was a lack of response and sensitivity by the government following the Gulf Coast disaster.

By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer

(CNSNews.com) - The Bush administration is being widely criticized for the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina and the allegedly inadequate protection for “the big one” that residents had long feared would hit New Orleans. But research into more than ten years of reporting on hurricane and flood damage mitigation efforts in and around New Orleans indicates that local and state officials did not use federal money that was available for levee improvements or coastal reinforcement and often did not secure local matching funds that would have generated even more federal funding.

In December of 1995, the Orleans Levee Board, the local government entity that oversees the levees and floodgates designed to protect New Orleans and the surrounding areas from rising waters, bragged in a supplement to the Times-Picayune newspaper about federal money received to protect the region from hurricanes.

“In the past four years, the Orleans Levee Board has built up its arsenal. The additional defenses are so critical that Levee Commissioners marched into Congress and brought back almost $60 million to help pay for protection,” the pamphlet declared. “The most ambitious flood-fighting plan in generations was drafted. An unprecedented $140 million building campaign launched 41 projects.”

The levee board promised Times-Picayune readers that the “few manageable gaps” in the walls protecting the city from Mother Nature’s waters “will be sealed within four years (1999) completing our circle of protection.”

But less than a year later, that same levee board was denied the authority to refinance its debts. Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle “repeatedly faulted the Levee Board for the way it awards contracts, spends money and ignores public bid laws,” according to the Times-Picayune. The newspaper quoted Kyle as saying that the board was near bankruptcy and should not be allowed to refinance any bonds, or issue new ones, until it submitted an acceptable plan to achieve solvency.

Blocked from financing the local portion of the flood fighting efforts, the levee board was unable to spend the federal matching funds that had been designated for the project.

By 1998, Louisiana’s state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one tenth of one percent of that — $1.98 million — was dedicated to levee improvements in the New Orleans area. State appropriators were able to find $22 million that year to renovate a new home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and $35 million for one phase of an expansion to the New Orleans convention center.

The following year, the state legislature did appropriate $49.5 million for levee improvements, but the proposed spending had to be allocated by the State Bond Commission before the projects could receive financing. The commission placed the levee improvements in the “Priority 5″ category, among the projects least likely to receive full or immediate funding.

The Orleans Levee Board was also forced to defer $3.7 million in capital improvement projects in its 2001 budget after residents of the area rejected a proposed tax increase to fund its expanding operations. Long term deferments to nearly 60 projects, based on the revenue shortfall, totaled $47 million worth of work, including projects to shore up the floodwalls.

No new state money had been allocated to the area’s hurricane protection projects as of October of 2002, leaving the available 65 percent federal matching funds for such construction untouched.

“The problem is money is real tight in Baton Rouge right now,” state Sen. Francis Heitmeier (D-Algiers) told the Times-Picayune. “We have to do with what we can get.”

Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennen told local officials that, if they reduced their requests for state funding in other, less critical areas, they would have a better chance of getting the requested funds for levee improvements. The newspaper reported that in 2000 and 2001, “the Bond Commission has approved or pledged millions of dollars for projects in Jefferson Parish, including construction of the Tournament Players Club golf course near Westwego, the relocation of Hickory Avenue in Jefferson (Parish) and historic district development in Westwego.”

There is no record of such discretionary funding requests being reduced or withdrawn, but in October of 2003, nearby St. Charles Parish did receive a federal grant for $475,000 to build bike paths on top of its levees.

Earlier this year, the levee board did complete a $2.5 million restoration project. After months of delays, officials rolled away fencing to reveal the res