By Beauty Damned

You might want to slather some of that blame balm on Ray Nagin since he oversaw the city that got caught with it's pants down around their ankles.

There will be plenty of time to bitch slap anyone/everyone for some blame in this, but don't think that it's all one man's fault....

Kind of like not using city buses to evacuate people.

Like I said - there's LOTS of blame to go around....

What city buses, dimwit? The ones that are sitting under water? Get a clue. Bush is responsible for cutting funding that would have repaired the levee. You know? The leveee that broke that caused New Orleans to flood? It is one man's fault that there was no funding. His name is George Bush.

I don't know why you bother to comment here when you're well aware that you're not welcome.

Mik-ey,

You are one cold hearted son of a bitch. I figured the dose of reality of having to get dialsys might put somje love in you. Apparently not. Karma has a great way of dealing with dickheads like you.

I love how dickhead describes New Orleans as "the city that got caught with it's pants down around their ankles."

Funny, I thought they were the city that got wiped out by a natural disaster that was beyond their control and left for dead by the federal government for four days.

Have you not a compassionate bone in your body? Nope, it's all about defending your ever-blameless government and your little hitler.

There is plenty of shame to be had with our government right now. Fortunately, people like Mi-key are in a vast minority who find no fault with how the government has handled this (or anything else for that matter). For once, I have to agree that there are very broad strokes of just-below-the-surface racism involved here. I hope our government (both dems and gop) falls for this.
(Can't pay haliburton to hide this one)

I guess in a nutshell, Mi-key and people like him are just dried up pieces of shit.

The city buses were not under water a week ago Maria. He could have started busing these people to the shelters last Saturday. He could have provided National Gaurd re-inforcements last Saturday to assure that a repeat of last years rioting during Ivan didn't replay itself. Nagin failed last year and he repeated the same mistakes this year.

That's your opinion Pam, and you're entitled to have it, but I think it's ironic that you lay blame on Nagin, but NOT on Bush for neglecting to do his part. Though Bush had opportunities to do something about the levees over the past few years, he reduced funding to repair them, despite ernest calls for federal funding to do so. Though Bush has been well informed (and had the opportunity to witness and duly garner concern, as hurricanes have hit the south repeatedly this year), about the dangers of global warming and the prospects of hurricanes causing mass destruction in the United States, he blatantly ignores and brushes aside the arm-waving scientists who have devoted their lives to studying these things, while he is focusing all of our money and resources in other parts of the world, accomplishing next to nothing, but destroying plenty. Who does he have to blame for Hurricane Katrina? Saddaam? Nope. Osama? Nope, not him either. Miscellaneous terrorists? Nooo.... Democrats? Nope. Too bad.

Bush has no one to turn his sights on with his own weapons of mass destruction; no innocent Iraqis to punish; no foreign society to destroy and wreak vengeance upon; just himself and his own lack of action, along with everyone else's who had a say in whether or not to provide funding to fix the levees and whether or not to get Bush off of his ass out in Crawford and attending to this national crisis; just himself for sitting on his ass for four days, doing NOTHING aside from his own personally fulfilling activities, while people died and suffered in droves along the southern coast without aid from the president or the military; just himself for ignoring information from the science community in favor of a "divine plan" perspective. Anyone who thinks that lack of action was excusable ought to be ashamed of themselves as much as Bush should be ashamed of himself.

New Orleans does not have a very good public transportation system, but Nagin was using it to get people from their homes to shelters before the hurricane hit. Using them to evacuate people would have been a bad decision, too many people + not enough time = stupid idea.

"New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city's 485,000 residents. Officials acknowledged that tens of thousands of residents and tourists would be unable to leave. With the airport closed, the city organized buses to transport those left behind to 10 emergency shelters and encouraged people to bring supplies and food for a three- to five-day stay. Three nursing home patients died during the evacuation, according to an Associated Press report."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082800146.html

I place blame on Bush because he was posing for pictures holding a guitar while people were dying. A similar act was displyed after 9/11. He is not capable of leading this country and he has made that clear through these very actions.

Bush isn't capable of leading his stepford wife and two wh0re daughters out of a fucking paper bag.

Mi-key,

I have a question for you. Why do you have such a hard time accepting the fact that Bush and the rest of the government, severely fucked up on this one? Even some of the most conservative of mainstream media sources are saying it. Why can't you just admit to what is true? The government screwed up big time on this one and there will be hell to pay.

Answer me this - why did congress call an emergency session for Terri Schiavo but still won't come off of vacation until Tuesday. Don't you think the country needs our leaders now? They certainly do not.

Maria, this has nothing to do with global warming this is a cyclical occurance. This is according to the scientists that you claim Bush brushes off. Bush also declared the entire region a state of emergency on Saturday. Prior to the storm hitting. Nagin went through this same thing last year with IVAN. The area was for the most part spared. He was criticised for not evacuating then, and he said afterward, he would not change a thing. I guess he didn't.

geekgirl you posted an article from Monday, not Saturday. In the article Nagin also said this "Nagin said Katrina's predicted storm surge would probably overwhelm New Orleans's levees. And the city's pumps -- capable of removing only an inch of water every hour under normal conditions -- require electricity, often the first casualty in any hurricane. If Katrina does slam into New Orleans, experts say the city could be underwater for weeks or months, creating a toxic soup of chemicals, rodents, poisons and snakes."

I also fail to see how moving as many as possible would have been bad in hindsight.

Pam, go pop Geoff and Gor-don's balls back in your mouth already, because you aren't making any sense here.

Why does it matter when the artcile was published? It states what Nagin was doing prior to the storm with the city buses, and that is what everyone is arguing about.

Moving as many possible out of the area rather than moving as many as possible to shelters would have been bad, especially in hindsight, because the people in the shelters lived (prior to not getting food, water or any sign of hope for 4 days). If it took 30 minutes to bus 50 people with 50 buses in 24 hours, 120,000 people were saved. If you try to get them out of town and it took 5 hours to sit in traffic to get 60 miles and then the buses had to turn around and come back to get more people, with the same buses in the same time frame, 6,250 people would have been saved.

In hindsight it is clear, what they were doing with the buses was the best possible thing to do. To save the most lives.

Pam, I don't know what you've been reading, but it is quite clear that Bush has ignored calls from scientists to acknowledge global warning and that he refuses to sign the kyoto agreement that almost every single other country has been willing to sign in order to reduce chemical and gaseous emissions. You can continue to bury your head in the sand as you've been doing - what looks to be - your entire life, but it doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. Of course it is impossible for us to pinpoint Hurricane Katrina or any other hurricane as a result of global warming, but there has been an irregular increase in hurricanes and GLOBAL WARMING. Bush chooses to ignore it, and as far as I'm concerned, as long as he and his administration continue to ignore it, the United States is going to be largely responsible when our planet becomes our enemy rather than our friend. I never said that Katrina was a direct result of global warming, but I did say that if we continue to ignore global warming, we will have a lot more fantastic natural disasters to look forward to.

people fail to realize that our planet, in and of itself, is a living organism. And like any living organism, it has a an immune system. Instead of us being good stewards of the planet, it is now fighting back. And our governments have been trying to find new ways to heal the planet, but Bush refuses to sign into a treaty "in the interest of his corporate friends." As far as I am concerned either you are for healing this planet, or you are a scumbag.

One of the things that this whole thing has shown us is what an utter joke and huge waste of money the Department of Homeland Security is. Chasing phantoms and people who may harm corporations, is about all they are good for. DHS has got to be the biggest mistake the government has ever undertaken besides putting Bush in charge.

Well Maria, I beg to differ. I started with this article http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30cycle.html?ei=5065&en=9e0e24b0c5ee1d90&ex=1125979200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
and then I researched further. There is no increase with regards to these hurricaines. In fact, when you look at historical data, you will see that these past few years have been tame compared to previous times.

According to this article in National Geographic, they have increased in number:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0719_hurricanes.html

And their ferocity and capacity to do severe damage has increased, most likely due to global warning:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/dispatches/050901.html

In the article YOU posted, the very first sentence is this:

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

So have they or have they not increased in number and ferocity, Pam?

And I can't remember another tsunami in my lifetime that did this:

http://bybeautydamned.net/mt/archives/000780.html

If you want to deny that global warming exists, that's your prerogative to do so and it doesn't so much matter what you think, but our president needs to do what's best for the American people, the world, and the environment, rather than what's always good for his rich friends.

So what was your excuse for Bush's four day delay in getting help for New Orleans again? We seem to have gotten sidetracked by your cluelessness.

We are Republicans. My husband was watching what was going on and his words were, "I don't know if it's more that Bush is that dumb or just doesn't care. Clinton would have been down there the whole time, shoveling the shit with his sleeves rolled up." You KNOW you're dealing with a disaster of a federal response when MY husband says those words.

My opinion is there is no defending FEMA on this one. Brown as much as admitted on several interviews last week that the handling of this situation was bungled; perhaps not in those words but certainly in the way he responded. There was no denying it. I expected to be respected for my beliefs but when those politics are clearly mishandled and fouled up, I see no point in continuing to play politics just for the sake of politics. There was more than just a natural disaster in the making here.

Vickie,
That i a very tough quetion to answer (Bush dumb or doesn't care). But I am going to say the former. I think he genuine is his concern for people. Many times, when his eyes well up with tears, I do not think that is an act. But I think the man is a genuine idiot too. All of his life he has been given specific instructions on what to do and how to do it. Put him in a situation where he needs to think on his feet, and he cannot. This is why he is kept from doing too many press conferences. Unless he is being told what to say, he makes a fool of himself, and even then he manages to bungle it.
This is the foundation of what I have been saying all along - he is a piss poor leader because of his lack of any kind of intelligence. A leader should be able to think quickly and effectively. Neither of which Bush can do. And people died because of this. People are suffering because of this.
The richest, most powrful nation in the face of the planet, whose phsyical resources are almost unlimited, should not have sat there with their thumbs up into their asses while people drowned, got sick, floundered around in a stadium, etc. This was more than Browns fault. He takes directive from the DHS, who in turn takes directive from Bush. They are all to blame, on many levels, for many reasons. They all failed miserably. And this should be a wakeup call to those Departments and to the American people - 4 years after 9-11 we are no better prepared for any kind of crisis than we were on 9-10-2001. This was the argument all along to keep Bush from a 2nd term. Would Kerry have done better? Who knows? But I do know that he could not have done any worse than Bush.
So when that inevitable next big terror strike happens, what will be the response? If thsi Hurricane was any indication of that, than we may as well fold up your flags and put away our magetic yel-low ribbons, because all we will have left is our "patriotism" and nothing else.

Think about that next time you put a republican into high office.

First of all Maria, you are only in your 20's so no you probably haven't seen anything like this. Again, I refer to historical data. In that, I looked to 1890 to 1960.
You did point something out though that I think is important. The leading scientists in the world are not in agreement on "Global Warming". Do I think it exists? Yes, that is a given. Do I think it is the cause of all of this? No. Again, research.

As to defending Bush. I am not defending Bush. You posted about Nagin being the man. You see him one way and I see him another. I see him as failing his city not just this year, but last year as well. There was no plan to evacuate those people. The state has a responsibility to the people. The first responders are the local/state agencies. There was no organzation what so ever.
The National Gaurd that was deployed Sunday was there for rescue purposes. They are not there to police the situation. It became apparent that they needed to take control from the state as they had no control over anything. The thugs in the street did not help the situation. Shooting at helicopters and rescue teams did what? FEMA has made many mistakes to say the least. But the mistakes made start at the bottom and work their way to the top.

Which brings us back to the question: What should Nagin have done different?

Well for starters, maybe he should have loaded the buses on Friday or Saturday. He should have had guard units or police set up in the shelters prior to any people being admitted. He should have had an evacution plan in place 1 year ago. Instead, as of July 2005, the local paper ran an article with Nagin included that told the people that they were on their own.
This didn't just become a city with 24% poverty.

Thank you Vickie, for confirming to me once again why I DO respect you: because you don't argue for the sake of defending Bush from every last accusation, many of which are well founded, you argue based on your true opinions. Not just fighting to maintain resolve in your support of Bush, regardless of his actions.

"In that, I looked to 1890 to 1960."

Pam, I just about fell out of my seat laughing. Is that where you've been stuck? 45 years in the past? Over the past SIX years, hurricane occurrences have DOUBLED. Let's get with the times Pam.

As for your "the blame starts at the bottom" theory, that's one you Bush supporters use often. That way, the top never has to take any responsibility or be held accountable for anything. Just like Abu Ghraib right? The blame starts at the bottom. Funny thing is, it never fucking makes it to the top, where the blame truly belongs.

Additionally, you are wrong. Our president is the NUMBER ONE person responsible for responding in a crisis like this. This was a NATIONAL crises no different from 9/11 which should have been handled with the same urgency. He left those people to die because he was too busy doing other things. There is no excuse and no defense for his lack of action. Keep trying sister. Let me know if you need help with that shovel. You should be ashamed of yourself for defending him.

He convened an emergency hearing for Terry Schiavo IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. But it took him four days to respond to a disaster like this?

And this is a man who supposedly makes republicans feel safer???

I love how Pam is intent on blaming Nagin. She can scrimp together all the things she thinks he did wrong, but when blame gets anywhere near the president, she yells FIRE! As usual, in the mind of a die-hard Bush supporter who has firmly donned her blinders, Bush is ALWAYS absolved of responsibility for everything. Pathetic.

Interesting thread continuing here; this is the MOTHER of our President speaking today:

"Former first lady Barbara Bush, shown on the right (cut and pasted from a picture) during a visit Monday with evacuees in Houston, said this: 'So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them'."

Dear God. What an incredibly foolish thing to say. YES they were underprivileged, and YES these circumstances are probably no better than what many of them were used to, but do you go around as a public figure and SAY it in such a callous way??

Kind of like, "Well, these athletes are all handicapped anyway, so the Special Olympics works very well for them."

Apparently Bush takes his speaking lessons from Mom.

Maria- I suggest you take the education seriously. You are in definite need of it.

Actually Pam, it was not I that was turning out inaccurate "facts." It's too bad that once you've been corrected by someone much younger than you, you sputter out a pathetic insult that only betrays your inability to respond intelligently to the valid points that have been made. Who needs an education now Pam? I think, the person who doesn't have a clue. And in this case, that would be you.

It wasn't an insult it was a sincere suggestion. The only thing you pointed out to me is how valuable an education is.

Actually I pointed out to you that hurricanes have increased in number and force. You tried to dispute this, but failed miserably. I also pointed out to you that the responsibility for the failure to provide aid starts right at the top, rather than the bottom (as you Bush supporters are always quick to blame those lowest on the totem pole.) You can argue that Nagin is to blame, but you refuse to acknowledge that Bush cut funding to fix the levees and failed to get up off his ass to respond to this emergency in a timely manner.

I assume from your comments that you went to college. It obviously wasn't valuable enough, as you appear to have wasted your money. If a formal education only leaves a person as smart as you are, the system truly has failed. Your analytical skills are non-existent and your ability to effectively debate is right behind that.

I wash my hands. Make a valid point (one that you didn't pull out of your ass), or move along.

Maria - it is pointless to argue with "Pam" on this. But more importantly, it is a waste of time. Looking around, many of Bush's supporters are starting to regret and admitt they made a huge mistake in re-electing this fool. Even some of the most right wing religious people I know. It seems the only ones left who think he is still doing a bang up job are the truly dumb. Looking around the blogosphere, you can get an idea of who they are. I am not surprised by it one bit. Given a little time, the GOP shows its ineffectiveness in leading this country. Some may argue so does the Dem party, but if I recall, the federal response to Hurricane Andrew in '92 was pretty damn good and pretty damn quick.
So don't worry about fucking morons like "Pam" or AssholeMi-key. They are just looking to lash out at folks because they are sad for their own lives.

And as I sit here and read more and more personal stories of desperation and anguish, the more angry I become at how cold hearted and callus people like Pam, Mi-Key, geoff, gor-don, etc. can be. One story tells of a 6 year old boy seenw ondering around leading a group 5 toddlers and holding a 5 month old, all seperated from their families. Anothjer story tells of a boy seperated from his dog at the superdome in such anguish that he cried for days and days and has made himself sick over it - the only thing left in his life that he loved, his dog, gone. Another story of a couple of babies lying next to a dead body on a portion I-10, apparently their caretaker, cuddled up next to that person sucking on dry bottles.
You hear stories like this and expect to see large refugee camps somehwere out in the middle of a barren waste land in Africa. But no, this happens in our own country in a major metropolitian area - the busiest sea port in gulf region.
And this has no effect in pieces of shit like Pam, Mi-key and the rest of them. Go on over to dogshit diaries and see what goeff talks about - he needs a bigger gun rack for his bigger guns. Go on off to M-kies blog madm-key.mu.nu and watch him talk about Rehnquist and talk crap about people trying to help out in the relief efforts - sure, he mentions donating to the red corss but there of course are gotchas involved. Look at what Pam is contributing to the discussions - nothing but hate and everything to defend her beloved president. Next time she is in a jam, I would love to see how he comes to her rescue.
These heart wrenching, tear jerking stories just overwhlem, and anyone who cannot feel terrible for these people, I pity. From the bottom of my heart, you people are truly pathetic and if you do not think our government failed and do not feel embarrased or ashamed at how our elected offcials from the top on down handled this, then I hope you people rot the fuck hell.
If feeling this way makes me a b;eeding heart liberal, than I am proud to say it - I am a bleeding heart liberal.

Vickie, you were the first to inform me of that quote by Barbara Bush. I don't know whether to thank you! It just about sent me over the edge. I can't believe how crude the comments have been from the administration and everyone surrounding it, over the course of this tragedy.