Katrina

Look, the final death toll is pretty small, only barely into four digits. In George W Bush’s New America, that’s not even worth discussing, except by American-hating traitors.

Take it with a grain of salt, and end it with THEY LET PEOPLE DIE! ? This is, literally, pure and classic propaganda (not propaganda=words that I don’t like, but propaganda=intellectually dishonest emotional manipulation).

Steve

What’s dishonest about it, Steve? If the sentence that precedes it:

There were people who starved to death because they could not escape their attics, and the resources were there to help them.

is true, then it’s not dishonest. You can object on stylistic grounds; call it overwrought, if you have a strong objections to all-caps, but not dishonest. If you question the factual accuracy of that sentence, on the other hand, you should let us know why.

To move from the big topic for just a moment, I have neither patience for nor trust in anyone who lards up their little essay with things like –

“…every soccer mom will know with certainty what every soccer dad doesn’t get…”

“Soccer” is just to sound current (though it no longer is), and to distract us from the chauvinism. This carp did a survey of soccer moms and dads, right? Oh, maybe not. This is just bile, packaged as thought.

Steve, pehaps you’re too dim to have noticed that “THEY LET PEOPLE DIE” was not part of Ted’s post, but was written by the contractor, an eyewitness observer. The contractor made a factual claim. If you can refute it, go ahead. If not, you’re wasting bandwidth.

Why blame somebody a thousand miles away, when somebody not a thousand feet away could have saved the life?

Giblets is that you ?

… And, if it is, could you tell me what happened to the templar in the basement?

In the poorest neighborhoods, I dare say their were probably enough vehicles for everybody to have evacuated, using car pooling. And they let their neighbors die.

Yeah. Lots of two-car families and the like in those neighborhoods. And the people with kids all have minivans, so there was plenty of extra room.

Why blame somebody a thousand miles away, when somebody not a thousand feet away could have saved the life?

Maybe because the person a thousand miles away could have saved it, and would have saved it if he’d done his job.

I see considerable progress toward actual events. We’ve switched from the superdome to attics.

Boy, I hate to try to engage someone like Steve who apparently believes that this administration is above criticism, but let’s remind him of some of the comments made by the FEMA Director while people were dying:

“If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”

On Tuesday, August 30, the day after the hurricane struck, Mr. Brown sent this e-mail to his assistant, Tillie James: “Do you know of anyone who dog-sits? Bethany has backed out and Tamara is looking. If you know of any responsible kids, let me know. They can have the house to themselves Th-Su.”

This was around the time the president said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Just like the August 6, 2001 PDB, there’s no sense of personal responsibility in Bush-Cheney world. Shit just happens and the chips fall where they may.

Re #20: Well, the e-mail’s claim is that orderly society (as represented by an authoritative search-and-rescue) was NOT re-established in certain areas for several weeks, judging by the markings on the houses. I suppose it’s possible that there are starvation victims still among the dead who have not yet been identified and released, such that we won’t hear about those deaths until later.

Gee Brett, why didn’t the electrician who wrote the original letter distinguish between starvation, dehydration, exposure, drowning or contamination? I mean he is an electrician, he should know that stuff.

Steve,

it’s intellectually dishonest from you, or dumb, if you will, not to follow that link and Read. The. Freakin. Rest.

Here, let me make it easier for you. The next paragraph is … :

Up until the day that I left to return home, they were finding bodies on a daily basis. One day in particular they found a family of 10 dead in the attic of their home. On another occasion I ran into a camera crew from NBC. They were being escorted by two New Orleans police officers. As I talked to them I told them that they needed to come down to [the] 9th ward because no one was showing the things that we were seeing on TV. They told me that they had been trying to get into that neighborhood but were not allowed past the military checkpoints. As I talked to these people one of the police officers rudely interrupted me and as he chuckled he asked me “So, how many niggers you seen floating down there? Those people got exactly what they deserved! That place should have been leveled years ago!” I couldn’t believe what I had just heard, I just turned around and walked away. […]

Like I said, I just want to tell my stories — and I have plenty more — to as many people that will listen. […]

So what now, Steve? Will you deny it ever happened?

I think I’m getting the hang of it now.

News: “One thousand people are dead.”

Propaganda: “ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE ARE DEAD!”

How’d I do?

man sara, that’s just plain screwed up. and here i thought I was the depressive

Here’s Sebastian, being high-minded and cogent again. The best the Right has to offer!

I’d be perfectly willing to throw the local Democrats into the pot, because they’re right-wing and famous for corruption. No skin off my ass. But their guilt doesn’t in any way make the Bush administration less culpable; this really isn’t a game of Old Maid where only one side can lose.

According to my theory of government, national disasters are declared when the problem is big enough to overwhelm local authorities, as in this case. And government has an obligation to help people out during emergencies and disasters — even black people and people who show bad judgement. This theory of government is not new and untried. It’s been standard practice in most of the developed world for over a century.

But there are people among us who want to introduce a new, entirely different theory of government, accoridng to which central government plays little role in emergencies except to maintain order (with the help of the Gretna police) and assign blame to the victims.

#23 and #24. Well, actually, the starvation issue does make a difference. Dehydration can kill in a day or two (in a crowded attic), as can exposure, contamination and drowning (well, faster as well).

People who died of these things might (note might) have died on the 30th, 1st, or 2nd.

People would not have died of starvation on those dates (unless they were already so malnourished as to be near death already).

So the claim of starvation as to the cause of death is important, because it would directly show that these live people had died as a result of the near month delay. Other causes might mean the delay killed them, might just mean it delayed the finding of their bodies.

No, this isn’t an attempt to defend Bush, Brownie, Nagin or anyone else. It’s just that the very specific claim of starvation, given the length of time lack of food takes to kill someone, points to even more astounding incompetence than even I would believe of governmental action while the not finding of bodies that had been dead several weeks would not.

The condition of the corpses would answer the question of course. Anyone know if they’re doing autopsies?

If indeed some deaths were as a result of starvation then even I would join the Delong call for impeachment, if not for a few salutary executions.

Yep, the spambots are new. Figuring out how to delete them. Of course, that takes second priority to figuring out how to update CT’s linked post so I can offer visitors links to my favorite posts, in case they have more time to burn.

And, um, updating the site which I haven’t done since 9/05. Due to, um, the coma I was in. Yep, a coma. That’s why I didn’t publish!

Sounds like our libertarian friend Jet is advocating “Not My Department” bureaucratic thinking.

Without necessarily accepting all his premises, when a jurisdiction’s emergency plan has clearly broken, down, the federal government should do what it can to take up the slack. Jet apparently would have them stand there doing nothing (after having issued press releases explaining who was to blame).

I met a Katrinian about a week ago. She was, of course, very distraught about the whole thing. Being curious, I did ask her about something that has bothered me about some of those who could have left but decided to stay behind, which is that they were afraid to leave their pets. Telling her story on the verge of tears, she told me she had considered bunkering down for that very same reason. That is until her eldest son called and used profanity and his justified anger to shock her back to reality. Only after she had been reoriented to what was really at stake did she pack her bags and leave town.

By the way, it’s nifty that i can see what i type as i type it. Would be nifty too if i had a filter gizmo, to avoid the usual bozos’ comments.

Not that hard, maybe? Calling all Geekier than I?

(Theme of the week : ” the resistible usenetification of blogs”.)

“Sounds like our libertarian friend Jet is advocating “Not My Department” bureaucratic thinking.”

No, the issue is that you should try to give responsibility to those who A) have easiest access to the specialized knowledge necessary, and B) have lots invested in having a positive outcome.

Because FEMA theoretically deals with lots of disasters, it is well positioned to give good general guidelines. The details which take into account local specifics ought to be placed in the hands of locals whenever possible because they know most about the specific local problems. In other words it makes sense for FEMA to say things like “You need to provide lodging for on average X% of the people when engaging in a full evacuation because the hotels will be filled and not everyone will have totally left the area”. It makes more sense for the locals to decide that those people will go to locations A, B, C and D via roads R, S and T. After the disaster, it makes sense for the logistics of getting things to a city like New Orleans (which they did to varying degrees of success, and which could form a proper criticism of FEMA) while it makes more sense for locals, who know where people are likely to be and how to get there, to deal with things on a neighborhood to neighborhood level.

Yeah, for the Feds to intrusively help save lives in NOLA would have been a violation of the constitution on a par with illegal surveillance of American citizens. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Certainly during a state of emergency no one should ever do more than they have been assigned to do.

Try again, jet.

The loathesome thing about this is that all along Bush has been using a 9/11 “state of emergency” to bully Congress and override all constitutional protections.

But we still have bots here willing to argue that an actual state of emergency, in New Orleans, should NOT be treated as a state of emergency, but should be handled according to assigned routine.

Jesus fuck, aren’t libertarians fun?

(Theme of the week : ” the resistible usenetification of blogs”.)

Hey, don’t diss USENET. No blog can beat rmmgj yet for knowledge and being interesting to follow. (And no public p2p service is as fast, if you’ve got half a decent ISP)

And yes, blogs could use a killfile standard. And a resurrection of Emily Postnews –

(From the early 1990’s)

Q: They just announced on the radio that the United States has invaded Iraq. Should I post?

A: Of course. […]

No better predictor of the blogosphere as Emily.

Jet, all of the blame has not been shifted to Bush, except in your paranoid mind. The hurricane has almost been forgotten. A few people who weren’t already Bush-haters blamed Bush for it, and this was one of the very large number of nonfeasances and malfeasances in various areas which have caused his popularity to drop, but basically nothing happened and nothing will happen. Even the hapless Brownie has not suffered significantly for his incompetence; he’s just changed jobs.

Because it is an article of faith deep in your heart that government is just plain no damn good, you will never, ever, be able to distinguish between better government and worse government, nor will you ever try to, and you will actually cheerlead “anti-government” governmental leaders like Bush or Schwarzenegger who deliberately sabotage government in order to increase the mindless anti-government cynicism of the blind, ignorant masses of little jets out there.

Everything that was not done, or that was done badly in NOLA, has been done well elsewhere in the world. Most of Holland is below sea level, for example. Grand Forks was destroyed by a wintertime flood a few years back, but that was under Clinton, not Bush, and it was white people, so the government reponse was adequate. Downstream in Winnipeg damage was slight, because the jackbooted, parasitical thugs of Canadian Communism had used the tax dollars of the poor, helpless Manitobans to force them to prepare for a big flood which no one could prove was even going to come at all.

The Army Corp of Engineers had responsibilities in NOLA which it did not meet.

I’m not going to argue whichever point you’ve decided is the main one here. There were multiple ways in which the Bush administration’s pre-Katrina efforts were defective by any standard. You’ve chosen to highlight one case where you think the locals were worse and the Feds had no constitutional responsibility.

But along the way you made a number of excessively general, dogmatic, ideological statements in 38, 43, and 49 which led me to believe that we weren’t talking about anything specific, and that I was just dealing with version 1001 of the same old libertarian rant. I responded accordingly.

Katrina was win-win for you, of course.

You are a disgusting ass and I’m done with you.

jet,

Pay no attention to John. He is a retired courtesy clerk (i.e. cashier) who never achieved anything what-so-ever in his life. He failed out of college, is divorced, and his only kid is a nutcase failure who thinks strumming a guitar while he drools is the height of artistic style. He lives in poverty and whiles away his days getting into intense internet arguments with people who are actually productive and sane.

lol. Ad hominem, the first refuge of scoundrels.

I don’t care if you think the federal government is no good. Whether you like it or not, this is the only level of government that can respond to a crisis of these proportions. Think for a second about what happened in New Orleans–massive physical damage to buildings and roads, loss of the entire energy infrastucture, followed by massive flooding. A catastrophic hurricane releases the same energy as 10-15 atom bombs. There’s a reason people compared Katrina’s path to a war zone.

I’m sorry, but it’s downright nuts to pretend that the appropriate policy approach is for a city mayor to MacGyver his way out of this situation. At the end of the day, he’s got 1500 cops and, what, 1,000 firemen? Sure, in this crisis the mayor made mistakes, but a parking lot full of school buses weren’t ever going to get the job done.

A plan that relies on locals to protect our nation’s largest port city during a crisis of this magnitude is as obviously inadequate as a plan that relies on a little boy sticking his finger in the levees to keep the water back.

This was a crisis we’ve known for years was coming. Putting unqualified cronies in charge of the agency responsible for dealing with this crisis suggests that one is not serious about fulfilling one’s responsibilities during the coming crisis. Staying on vacation for three days while these cronies fail to realize this is a catstrophe and respond accordingly suggests that one is not serious. And allowing your administration to focus its energy on siezing powers you do not need and failing to execute a response using powers you have been given to respond to precisely this situation demonstrates that your administration is mindbogglingly incompetent.

The fact of the matter is that under other presidents, the federal government has responded well to crises like this one. Saying “federal government bad” really does not excuse this incompetence, especially under a President who has campaigned by saying that because of him, you’re safer now than you were 4 years ago.

Katrina is EXACTLY the kind of crisis where Presidential leadership matters–before, during, and after the crisis. And we saw in this President that his idea of leadership isn’t about getting results, it’s political–it’s about passing the buck and spinning the press. Neither was possible in Katrina.