Category: Issues of the Day

Photo op

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — deserve far better from their national government.

Excerpt from Press Release — Senator Mary Landrieu

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?

Powerful, powerful tribute to her native city from Anne Rice.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Sums it up

Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Whoa! Lunch time!

From TBogg, who has lots of righteous indignation.

In good hands

Given the Administration’s, and particularly Homeland Security’s response to Katrina, NewMexiKen just can’t help but feeling that we are at the terrorists’ mercy. Other than making sure we don’t have anything dangerous in our shoes at airports, does anyone seriously think they’re on top of anything?

Some reporters at least start to grow cojones

ANDERSON COOPER: Excuse me, Senator [Mary Landrieu], I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap — you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there’s not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here?

When [Secretary Chertoff] cautioned [NPR’s Robert] Siegel about the danger of relying on “anecdotal” “rumors” of people in dire straits, Siegel said, no—these are facts presented by reporters who have covered war zones. There are 2,000 people at the convention center in need, he said. Having finally broken through the steel plate that is Chertoff’s skull, the secretary confessed he hadn’t heard those reports—reports that the television networks were documenting, live, with their cameras. Chertoff promised he’d look into the matter.

CNN ANCHOR SOLEDAD O’BRIEN [to FEMA Director Brown]: How is it possible that we’re getting better intel than you’re getting? …

FEMA has been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no massive airdrop of food and water? In Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got food dropped two days after the tsunami struck. …

It’s five days that FEMA has been on the ground. The head of police says it’s been five days that FEMA has been there. The mayor, the former mayor, putting out SOS’s on Tuesday morning, crying on national television, saying please send in some troops. So the idea that, yes, I understand that you’re feeding people and trying to get in there now, but it’s Friday. It’s Friday. …

Above from Slate, “The Rebellion of the Talking Heads – Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.” By Jack Shafer

Louisiana 1927 Lyrics

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through cleard down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tyrin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame
What the river has done
To this poor crackers land.”

CHORUS

Randy Newman – Louisiana 1927 Lyrics

The hack’s hack

So, just to recap, [FEMA Director Michael] Brown had no experience whatsoever in emergency management. He was fired from his last job for incompetence. He was hired because he was the new director’s college roommate. And after the director — who himself got the job because he was a political fixer for the president — left, he became top dog. And President Bush said yesterday that he thinks Brown is “doing a helluva job”.

Talking Points Memo

It’s all how you look at it

Walking across a bridge, I saw a man on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: “Stop. Don’t do it.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well, there’s so much to live for!”

“Like what?”

“Are you religious?”

He said: “Yes.”

I said: “Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

“Christian.”

“Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Protestant.”

“Me, too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

“Baptist.”

“Me, too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Church of the Lord?”

“Baptist Church of God.”

“Me, too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or Reformed Baptist Church of God?”

“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“Me, too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”

He said: “Reformation of 1915.”

I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

Our elected representatives and their priorities

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times

Outrage at Response

From a report in The New York Times:

There was shock at the slow response: Joseph P. Riley Jr., the 29-year Democratic mayor of Charleston, S.C., and a veteran of Hurricane Hugo’s wrath, said: “I knew in Charleston, looking at the Weather Channel, that Gulfport was going to be destroyed. I’m the mayor of Charleston, but I knew that!”

But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world’s sole remaining superpower could not – or at least had not – responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government’s worst-case possibilities for years.

“It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad,” said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. “I’m 84 years old. I’ve been around a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Delta Is at Risk, Geologist Warns

From Thursday’s Los Angeles Times:

When UC Davis geology professor Jeffrey Mount looks at the images of broken levees and surging floodwaters in New Orleans, he sees the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“There is a natural tendency of Californians to look at what is going on in the Gulf Coast as as foreign to us as the tsunami in Indonesia — ‘That’s not something that could ever happen to us.’ — Oh, they couldn’t be more wrong,” Mount said Wednesday.

In a study published in a Bay Area scientific journal last March, Mount and another scientist concluded that over the next 50 years, there is a 2-in-3 chance that a major storm or earthquake will cause widespread levee failure in the Northern California delta, part of the West Coast’s largest estuary and the source of drinking water for more than 22 million Californians. Such a catastrophe would flood reclaimed marshlands that are sprouting housing developments and send seawater rushing into the delta, forcing a shutdown of the enormous pumps that send water south to Central Valley agriculture and Southern California cities.

A Can’t-Do Government

Paul Krugman begins his Friday column:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario,” The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, “may be the deadliest of all.” It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared?

Beats Per Minute

Beats Per Minute blogging from New Orleans.

(Actually, he’s in Birmingham for now, but lives in New Orleans.)

He begins Thursday’s entry:

For me, yesterday was the lowest point during this whole ordeal. I had such high hopes after hearing some news on Monday afternoon, after the hurricane had passed, that our part of town might have done really well. I imagined eventually going back, having to clean up, putting things back on shelves and on the walls, letting the dogs run around in the back yard, hearing them bark, watching them jump and play. In other words, moving back into our home. Then when I woke up yesterday morning and I heard about the breach in the levee, it was as though the ground ripped opened at my feet creating a wide chasm, and I spent all day trying to balance on a narrow ledge, trying to keep from falling in.