It has made me sick to hear all the blame being pass around about the Katrina and the flooding in New Orleans last week. In the end, we are all losers and the nation is suffering. It is so sad. It seems that “winning for your side” in more important than the country at a whole.  I heard once that the only people that profit from running down people are elevator operators. It seems that we get a belief and then we get facts to support it. How true.

It has always blow my mind that people with very little knowledge of a subject can tell people that are experts in a field that they are wrong. We all know that hindsight is 20/20 and Monday morning quarterbacking get all the right results. No matter how good a job is done, it can be done better. We can never do our best.

It is so easy to sit in front of a computer and write an article, or talk into a microphone on the radio or sit in NY or Atlanta if front of a TV camera and tell people what is wrong and what should have been done.  I wish some of these people could be put in charge and see what kind of job they could do.

Can’t we just wait until the disaster is under control before we looking into how we can improve our response to our next disaster. Use our energy help the situation at hand now.

Instead of blaming everybody else for the problems, maybe we can look into the mirror for some answers.

Will admit I have been thinking how the blame game would be different if New Orleans would have a white mayor and/or he or she was from a different party. What if the governor of Louisiana was a Republican?

From my understanding the way the USA was set up by our founding fathers it is NOT one nation with states, but states that make up one nation. In my opinion, that makes a big different when looking at the questions and answers to this disaster.

Here are some misc. things that I have seen on the internet with there links:

Hurricanes, hatred and hypocrisy

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ollienorth/on20050902.shtml


Greens vs. Levees

…The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.
The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.”
But a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.”…
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/berlau200509080824.asp


U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade

The 1940 had the most major (3, 4 or 5)  hurricanes in the past century at 10. 30’s and 50’s were the second most at 8 major hurricanes.  The last three decades were below the average of six per decades.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml


Article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune from July 24, 2005 Sunday paper.

City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own.

In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation.

"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you.

"But we don't have the transportation."
....

yes the animals and plants are important, but if the areas cannot withstand a hurricane without the protection of the levees...wouldn't protecting the animals and plants be a moot point if they are all dead from a hurricane?? Wonder how the exotic birds and lowlands fared.....hmmmm

The ones screaming the loudest about "playing the blame game" are usually the ones to blame.

And it wouldn't have mattered if New Orleans had a Martian mayor and the governor was David Duke...the federal (non-)response should send a chill down the spine of anyone who thinks we are prepared for a widescale catastrophe, be it natural or man-made.

Those same 'greens' you castigate tried to stop development of the wetlands, which turned out to be a necessary buffer to protect NOLA and the levee system from the tidal surge that broke those levees.

-- Modified on 9/12/2005 4:31:44 PM

Jack Kelly: No shame
The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed
Sunday, September 11, 2005

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio ([email protected], 412-263-1476).    

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 1992. 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?

a laundry list of lies:

Claim #1: Federal government couldn't have had "preposition[ed] assets" near New Orleans ready to immediately assist relief effort

Kelly sought to defend the federal government's much-criticized response to the hurricane by citing an anonymous "former Air Force logistics officer" who claimed on the weblog Molten Thought that "[y]ou 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." Kelly then adopted the point, declaring that "Navy ships sailing from Norfolk [Naval Shipyard in Virginia] can't be on the scene immediately."

In fact, a Navy ship -- the USS Bataan -- was "preposition[ed]" off the Louisiana coast ready to aid Katrina victims but was deprived of needed guidance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as the Chicago Tribune reported on September 4.

Moreover, the Bush administration did not send a hospital ship to New Orleans from Baltimore until four days after the levees were breached. Kelly wrote that the Army Corps of Engineers had by September 10 "begun pumping water out of New Orleans." But James Lee Witt, FEMA director in the Clinton administration, said that both efforts should have happened much sooner: "[I]n the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby."

Claim #2: Federal government "pretty much met standard time lines" in initial response to Katrina; responded with "unprecedented" speed in following days

Kelly cited a whitewash of the federal government's delayed response by Florida Army National Guardsman Jason van Steenwyk, who claimed that the "federal government pretty much met its standard time lines" in responding to the crisis.

According to the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) December 2004 National Response Plan (NRP), when responding to a catastrophic incident, the federal government should immediately begin emergency operations, even in the absence of a clear assessment of the situation. Because a "detailed and credible common operating picture may not be achievable for 24 to 48 hours (or longer) after the incident," the NRP's "Catastrophic Annex" states that "response activities must begin without the benefit of a detailed or complete situation and critical needs assessment."

In fact, it wasn't until August 31, two days after the hurricane struck, that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared Katrina an "Incident of National Significance," "triggering for the first time a coordinated federal response to states and localities overwhelmed by disaster," according to the Associated Press.

Kelly also cited Steenwyk's claim that the federal response to Katrina "during the 72-96 hour" period was "unprecedented" and "faster" than all other recent storms, including Hurricane Andrew. But, as CJR Daily has noted, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., whose house was damaged by Andrew, had a different recollection in a September 9 Herald op-ed:

The day after I crawled from the wreckage of my home in 1992, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was there with water. Shortly thereafter came low-interest loans and other forms of help.

By contrast, a woman who saw me conducting interviews in Bogalusa, La., seven days after Katrina struck marched up and demanded to know if I was, finally, the man from FEMA because her house was split in two and she and her husband and children and grandchildren were sleeping on the porch.

Claim #3: "The levee broke Tuesday morning"

Kelly falsely claimed that flooding first began in New Orleans on August 30, writing that "[t]he levee broke Tuesday morning." While it is unclear exactly which levee Kelly was referring to, "major levee breaks" first occurred on "the morning of Monday, Aug. 29," as The Wall Street Journal noted (subscription required) on September 12. The New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 8:14 a.m. Monday, saying 'a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal at Tennessee Street,'" according to the Journal.

As Media Matters for America has documented, a weblog of the New Orleans Times-Picayune -- dated August 29, 2 p.m. CT -- noted that "City Hall confirmed a breach of the levee along the 17th Street Canal at Bellaire Drive, allowing water to spill into Lakeview." This initial report on the Times-Picayune weblog was followed throughout the afternoon and evening of August 29 by reports of other levee breaks and massive flooding.

Claim #4: There were "roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans" when Katrina hit

In claiming that there were "roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses" that New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin could have used to evacuate his city before Hurricane Katrina hit, Kelly repeated a falsehood that apparently originated in a September 6 column by Washington Times editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden. In fact, there were far fewer buses in New Orleans at the time of the hurricane than Kelly claimed.

According to a September 5, 2003, article in the Times-Picayune, "The [Orleans Parish school] district owns 324 buses but 70 are broken down." In addition, a Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development profile of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA), last updated May 5, notes that RTA owned 364 public buses, bringing the total of the city's public transit and school buses to fewer than 700 (assuming the fleet of school buses has not been dramatically increased since 2003) -- far fewer than the 2,000 Kelly claimed.

A recent report by The New York Times suggests that the number of school buses in New Orleans has not dramatically increased. The Times reported on September 4 that Louisiana emergency planners believed it would take as many as 2,000 buses to evacuate the elderly and disabled residents of New Orleans in the event of a catastrophic hurricane like Katrina but that this was "far more than New Orleans possessed."

Claim #5: National Guardsmen took time to arrive because governors of afflicted states didn't request them fast enough

Kelly erroneously suggested that another reason the federal relief effort was delayed was because "[National] Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states."

In fact, as Media Matters has noted, according to Department of Defense officials, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour had requested additional Guard personnel before the storm hit. And, as the Associated Press reported on September 3, Blanco accepted an offer for additional troops from New Mexico the day before the hurricane hit, but that help was delayed by paperwork needed from Washington.

Here's an analysis of the article you posted.

that plus the debunking I found to the Buses and posted to respond to Billkile SHOULD shut that arguement down, the city didn't have WORKING buses and/or DRIVERS {National Guard troops in Iraq, instead of at home to save AMERICANS, like they are CONTRACTED to do} that could evacuate any more people out than they already did.

Rebutal Mr. Kile ?

"The Blame Game:  Shrub

Shrub Shrub Bo Brub Banana-Fanna Fo Frub Fee Fi Mo Mrub...Shrub!!!

The Blame Game..."

Parodied song title and lyric are from the song "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis.  Now where's my K-Tel "Goofy Greats" album?

-- Modified on 9/14/2005 9:28:28 AM

Rove et al are singing your song - or more accurately, you got it from them. They fucked up - all of them. Their Imperial hubris brought about the pathetic response to Katrina - they've gutted the departments responsible for services to the people - correct me if I'm wrong, but those services are the raison d'être for government.
You illustrate the major problem in government perfectly - that it's a game, and getting elected (or re-elected) is the only measure of success.
They still use quiant terms like 'public service' to describe what they do - but the reality of what they do could not be farther from the truth. The only thing BushCo is concerned with is damage control - to their image, not to the people of America. What I and other patriots are trying to do in our 'incessant hounding' of the President is to try to effect a change in government to get them to do the right thing for the people of the United States. If they did that in good faith, they wouldn't have any image problems to worry about.
Ronald Reagan understood that. Like his policies or not, you understood that they were his beliefs, and you knew what to expect from him. The neocons have perverted what he started and have spent his political capital on enriching themselves to the detriment of the rest of us.
I'm from Chicago originally and grew up under hizzoner, the real Mayor Daley. Legend has it that each election cycle he would have a meeting of all the new Aldermen starting their first term, and his message to them was always the same. You can steal, but don't steal too much. And when you steal, like selling the contract for street mainenance or trash collection, make sure the people get something back for what you stole. God help you if there are potholes in the street or uncollected trash. The city worked, the politicians got fat, and most everybody was happy. Bush could take a lesson from him.
You play your games - this is deadly serious to some of us.