When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room. Woody Allen.

A non-doer is very often a critic-that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It’s easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

Can it be that your server is infected with a virus – I get an Virus warning when I open your site with Firefox – Just for your Info.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

Start with crime. That looters ran unchecked after the hurricane isn’t surprising when you consider that criminals have had the run of the city for years.

It is a perennial contender for Murder Capital. The 264 homicides last year were a drop of only 11 from 2003 – and the first decline in five years.

New Orleans, with fewer than 500,000 people, had almost half the murders of New York, which had 570 homicides last year in a city of more than 8 million. Put another way, if New York had New Orleans’ murder rate, we would have more than 4,200 murders a year.

That the New Orleans police are hardly the Finest was proven by a shocking report yesterday: Nearly a third of New Orleans cops – some 500 of the 1,600 – are now unaccounted for. The department says some quit, but it doesn’t know where most of them are.

The top cop, Eddie Compass, has responded by offering all officers paid vacations to Las Vegas and Atlanta. Yes, that’s right – he is pulling all cops off the street, even while bodies lie in the open. Never in New York.

Then there’s Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat, who has blamed everybody but himself. Maybe he has forgotten his plans for dealing with Katrina.

Last July, his office prepared DVDs warning that, if the city ever had to be evacuated, residents were on their own. According toa July 24 article in The Times-Picayune (spotted by the Web’s Drudge Report), “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.”

“You’re responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you,” one official said of the message.

And how’s this for preparation? Cops were told not to work on the day Katrina hit, one officer told The New York Times, but “to come in the next day, to save money on their budget.”

By all means, let’s investigate what went wrong in New Orleans. Let’s start in City Hall.

In a November 2004 press release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana announced:

“A federal grand jury has returned two separate indictments charging three members of the State Military Department with offenses related to the obstruction of an audit of the use of federal funds for flood mitigation activities throughout Louisiana.
“The two emergency management officials were senior employees of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Both were charged with conspiracy to obstruct a federal audit.”

Gov. Kathleen Blanco told Louisiana’s News-Star at the time that she was disturbed by the indictments. She said the National Guard is cooperating with the investigation “as I expect them to do.”

Reports of rampant corruption among Louisiana’s state and local agencies have been cited in recent days to explain why officials were so ill-prepared to deal with the Katrina disaster.

ImpeachBush and VotetoImpeach members are organizing contingents from around the country to be at the White House on September 24 to join in the huge antiwar protest and march. We have learned that the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which is organizing the antiwar protest at the White House, has obtained permits to rally on both sides of the White House and has secured the first march permit in years to go on Pennsylvania Avenue directly in front of the White House!

If you haven’t made your transportation arrangements yet, you can go the national transportation page set up by A.N.S.W.E.R. (with whom we’re coordinating transportation) to get your bus tickets or find out about cars and vans coming from your area. You can easily buy NY to DC tickets online and if you are already organizing transportation, you can list it on the national board. Let’s make the Impeachment call resound throughout Washington. Let’s fill the streets with our yellow and black t-shirts and signs.

We are printing thousands of signs and flyers, doing impeachment outreach, reserving buses, and arranging central locations near the DC rally where ImpeachBush/VotetoImpeach.org members can pick up Impeachment placards. We need your help today, as we organize in these final five weeks for the demonstration! Click here now to make a donation, where you can also find information about how to contribute by check.

People from all around the United States are already making plans to join United for Peace and Justice for three major days of action against the war in Washington, D.C., from September 24-26.

For this mobilization to be truly massive and reflective of the solid anti-war majority in the country, we need to begin spreading the word now — in every community, large and small; at summer festivals, concerts, and gatherings; on progressive and activist listservs; and throughout the blogosphere. The political momentum in Congress is finally beginning to turn against the Iraq war — we need to converge in Washington in vast numbers this September to build on this momentum and hold Bush and Congress accountable for the death and destruction.

United for Peace and Justice has created several new resources to help you do exactly that. Visit the Fall 2005 Mobilization section of our website today at http://www.unitedforpeace.org/fallmobe, where you will find English- and Spanish-language leaflets, including a version that can be easily modified for local use, plus an assortment of website banners and buttons for posting on websites, blogs, and Indymedia sites.

Whether you belong to an anti-war group or are an individual outraged by the Bush disaster in Iraq, there’s much you can do to help publicize the fall mobilization. Download our leaflets, photocopy them, and post them in prominent locations in your city or town. Pass them out at the next public event you attend. Post our website banners on your website or blog, and distribute information about the fall mobilization by email.

You can also help build the fall anti-war mobilization by making an urgently needed donation to United for Peace and Justice — either a one-time gift or a regular pledge through our new sustainer program. Visit http://www.unitedforpeace.org/donate or http://www.unitedforpeace.org/sustainer today.

And begin making your travel plans for September now! Join us for the massive march of Saturday, September 24, or stay through the weekend. There will be an Interfaith Service against the war on Sunday, September 25, as well as an array of grassroots trainings. On Monday, September 26, we’re organizing a massive grassroots Lobby Day and a mass nonviolent civil disobedience action.

United for Peace and Justice welcomes any group that shares our goals and wishes to organize a contingent or feeder march in our massive march on Saturday, September 24. There will also be a whole host of other anti-war activities to participate in throughout the weekend. Visit http://www.unitedforpeace.org/fallmobe regularly for updates and more details.

Together we can end this immoral and illegal war! See you in September!

bush on vacation, cheney on vacation, house and senate on vacation, on and on.

So we had a country like a ship without a rudder.

Agreed 100%

This non-action by the Bush administration, because “people didn’t ask” is a bold face lie and I believe it will back fire on them big time.

Keith Olbermann just had an extraordinary exchange between himself and Al Sharpton.

The subject was the conditions in New Orleans, looting, and the question of where support is.

Olbermann remarked that he had heard Rush Limbaugh earlier today saying that those that were still in New Orleans deserved what they had gotten, as they had chosen to live there. Olbermann went so far as to call him, “that Limbaugh”. Denouncing the inherent inconsiderate nature of such a statement.

But Sharpton made the point that struck me.

The Right, as embodied by Limbaugh, Frist, Bush, Hastert, DeLay. They would move heaven and earth to save the life of one White Woman in Florida to combat the very idea of euthanasia (which technically it was not). A woman that a decade earlier had lost her ability to so much as ask for help, much less have coherent thoughts about the quality of her own life.

And they would sit on their *** and watch as tens of thousands of poor men, women, children, babies, and elderly bake in the New Orleans heat surrounded by water, sewage, gasoline and an abandoned city, now devoid of anyone with the means to have escaped ahead of the storm.

This is the culture of life. The culture of life wants to save brain dead white women and unborn children. The culture of life wants you to watch endless non-news about the disappearance of one white teenager in Aruba. The culture of life wants you to support your nation as it kills tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in its Quixotic quest against a non-threat. The culture of life wants a zero-tolerance for looters policy to sound authoritative as babies die of dehydration. The culture of life expects you to take care of yourself, and if you can’t, then it is your own fault for getting into that situation in the first place. **** off. You had your shot. Station in life, where you hang your hat, and whether you have the $40 at the end of the month to pay for the overpriced gasoline to get out of that home in time is all up to you.

Always I have argued with Republican friends–the reasonable ones–that not everyone was dealt the same cards on their original Birth Day. Not everyone has been given the same gifts by God, friends, family, or luck. Always those Republican friends believe that they deserve where they have gotten in life, and that no one, including the government, should be asking for their hard-earned cash to help the less affluent. It is always the fault of the lesser-affluent themselves. Circumstances are irrelevant in all cases and constitute class warfare if the question is raised.

********.

But that’s their thing. That’s how they see the world. They earned everything they got. Their parents might have given them a nudge, but nothing more. Get a ******* clue.

Bush came away from his mega vacation one day early…Wednesday. Hastert doesn’t know why we should rebuild. Condie Rice went to the show on Broadway (and was seen buying several thousand dollars worth of shoes the next day while thousands went without food and water in Louisianna and Mississsippi).

All of these people support the Cultere of Life. But none seem to support American Culture. New Orleans, as much as any city, represents distinctly American Culture. A melting-pot of language, music and revelry unlike any other. But it is desperately poor. Over 50% of the children in the state live below the poverty level. But no matter. Mostly black folk down there. They shouldn’t have lived there in the first place. They should have gotten out while they had the chance. It’s their own fault.

Michael Chertoff was interviewed on NPR this afternoon. He was asked if he had heard of thousands of people at the Convention Center in New Orleans, without water or food or sanitation. Elderly dying. Little girls being raped. Mr. Chertoff was eloquent in his cluelessness. Completely unaware of what had been on the television all day long on both MSNBC and CNN. Unaware that he, at the top of the agency charged with bringing relief to the affected areas, had not been informed of something every American with a remote already knew. That the situation there was desperate. That people needed help. And that noone seemed to be providing it. The man in charge was not in charge at all, folks. It took the Bush Administration 4 years since 9/11… 4 years of chasing ghosts and old demons in Iraq to not do a ******* thing about stateside preparedness. To gut the national guard’s responsiveness by sending so many of them overseas. To cut funding for the levee system that allowed Lake Ponchartrain to roll into the city. To put someone in charge of Homeland Security and FEMA that is eloquent, but so impossibly incompetent that he is incapable of establishing a staff capable of letting him know the worst of a situation so large.

Mr. Chertoff said, that he had not heard of such things. That you couldn’t believe every rumor from the streets of the area. That he wasn’t in a position to argue about what the NPR Reporters had witnessed.

Get the people to our staging areas, he stated, and they can get water there.

Thanks, *******.

I almost cried last night. A little girl was with her grandfather, their late model sedan stalled in hip deep water. She was standing on what I think was the highway divider next to the car. Soaked. Crying. Her grandfather, dismayed and dazed behind her. Both of them looked at the car, but it was the begging of the young girl that got me. She couldn’t have been more than 2 years older than my daughter. And there she was, in the middle of a lake that wasn’t there the day before, in the middle of a city that had been destroyed, begging and pleading for the people filming her, and those they were with, to help them. They just needed a push. To higher ground.

And there she stayed, as the vehicle the camera rode in pulled away.

mcolley
I’m not liberal, I’m just paying attention

Barbara Bush: Things Working Out “Very Well” for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans

By E&P Staff

Published: September 05, 2005 7:25 PM ET updated 10:00 PM

NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them.”

The former First Lady’s remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” program.

She was part of a group in Houston today at the Astrodome that included her husband and former President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son, the current president, to head fundraising efforts for the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama were also present.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: “Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.”

Then she added: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

——————————————————————————–
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

“Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.”

——This is from Red Cross Website

AND THE EXCUSE IS THAT THEY WEREN’T ALLOWED IN BECAUSE PEOPLE MIGHT NOT WANT TO BE EVACUATED?? EXCUSE ME! THERE WEREN’T ANY EVACUATIONS TAKING PLACE. SO THEY ALLOWED THE PEOPLE TO SUFFER – TO GO HUNGRY AND THIRSTY FOR DAYS!!! As Kathy Malloy so eloquently pointed out “They were afraid people would flock down there to have a free peanut butter sandwich amongst the floating corpses?”

Governor Blanco requested $9,000,000 and a federal state of emergency declared Saturday. She sent the following letter to President Bush:

Dear Mr. President:

Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing…

In response to the situation I have taken appropriate action under State law and directed the execution of the State Emergency Plan on August 26, 2005 in accordance with Section 501 (a) of the Stafford Act. A State of Emergency has been issued for the State in order to support the evacuations of the coastal areas in accordance with our State Evacuation Plan and the remainder of the state to support the State Special Needs and Sheltering Plan.

Pursuant to 44 CFR § 206.35, I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster. I am specifically requesting emergency protective measures, direct Federal Assistance, Individual and Household Program (IHP) assistance, Special Needs Program assistance, and debris removal.” (and the letter continues with much more specifics).

etc… signed by Gov. Blanco TWO DAYS BEFORE THE STORM HIT