nicomachean..
i don't quite see the point of linking opinion
pieces written by people that agree with you..
even if
there is 74.2 percent of the army in the u.s. does that mean
the response has been adequate? the author never says how
many people are actually responding to the hurricane...i'd
actually be interested to know.
With almost a third of New Orleans' police force missing in action, a caravan of law enforcement vehicles, emblazoned with emblems from across the nation and blue lights flashing, poured into the city to help establish order on the city's anarchic streets.
Between 400 to 500 officers on New Orleans' 1600-member force were unaccounted for. Some lost their homes. Some were looking for families. "Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe," Riley said. Officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they also would receive counseling.
At a news conference in Baton Rouge, police Superintendent Eddie Compass denied that officers deserted in droves, acknowledging some officers abandoned their jobs but saying he didn't know how many.
Two police officers killed themselves. Another was shot in the head. Compass said 150 had to be rescued from eight feet of water and others had gotten infections from walking through the murky soup of chemicals and pollutants in flooded areas.
"No police department in the history of the world was asked to do what we were asked," Compass said with a mix of anger and pride.
....You know, god bless these guys and more power to them. Take a vacation, hell yeah. After being one of only 1600 police officers in a city of almost 500,000 with a serious crime problem, and then they have to deal with this? I say put them up in Vegas for 3 months. And bill FEMA.
last thing i would want would be to go to vegas. that would be so schizo! holy shit. you'd go insane. or i would for certain. wadding waste deep literally in a stew of human waste, corpses and synthetic chemicals and next thing you know you're in the venetian or watching the water show at the bellagio...? It's just like flippin pages in Dante.
Eh, Vegas, Seattle, the wilderness of Montana....wherever. Point being, take care of them. They've been busting their ass out there, they were essentially on the front line, the first line of defense.
...but keep trying. keep your 'Bush as fascist' fantasies in mind while you study up on how state & federal governments interact. Bush isn't a king/we have states...please keep that in mind at all times.
Bush is our President, and whether we voted for him or not, he has a responsibility to his consituents just like every other elected official (and their cronies) who let the people on the Gulf Coast down.
If George W. Bush can take credit for turning around the economy (which in your view Nico was surely the work of our collective local Chambers of Commerce) surely he can share some of the blame for this collossal fuck up.
that australian columnist of nico's provides about as many facts as rush...0. instead, a lot of obscurant commentary meant to support a few opinion statements with very little evidence of any foundation. hm. is that all ya got?
George W. Bush Still Rocks!
Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.
This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and reassuring matronly tones.
And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de Ãlava. Why did BushCo fail its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and America's apparent inability to take care of its own.
But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.
He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't matter. Corporate interests über alles, baby. Protect the core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece, really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead.
So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it would be different? Just look. All major social services are being gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in Guantánamo.
The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3 billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.
Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard is stuck over there, along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.
Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help "convey a positive image" about the government's response to the victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from his former job as head of something called the International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.
Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable, right, Dubya?
And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more than a little sad.
Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.
Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.
well anza you are half-right. it is a calculated effort. but not to eradicate the helpless people of new orleans. this is the way the bush administration wanted things. they set things up to work this way. they slashed funding, and installed political appointees in positions of responsibility. anyone who questioned them was fired. katrina should serve as americas wake up call. hopefully. some of us have been yelling from the treetops that this administration is dangerous - only to be derided for a supposed blind partisan driven hatred. now more and more people are seeing the truth. bushes approval ratings are as low as nixons were during the watergate era. the question is - what else has been seriously affected by chimpies policies that we don't know about? yet.
fact #1: Its mayor, Ray Nagin, delayed calling a mandatory evacuation of his flood-prone city until just 24 hours before Katrina hit, and only after Bush rang to urge him to get cracking.
conclusion: Bush saved lives
fact #2: Nor did Nagin use the city's buses to get out around 90,000 of the poorest or sickest residents. And the 50,000 who crammed into the city's Superdome and convention centre found little food and water there, and no chemical toilets -- all Nagin's responsibility.
conclusion: Bush should have changed into his cape and flown in a chemical toilet in each hand.
fact #3: Meanwhile the state's Democrat Governor refused at first to crack down on looters who were shooting at rescuers, and asked for a day to decide whether to accept Bush's offers of help. [this governor has a history of indecision]
conclusion: the state failed, and the state must fail before the federal system takes over, or we don't live in a republic.
fact #4: The American Red Cross says it tried to bring in supplies to them soon after the hurricane hit, but was blocked by state officials.
conclusion: state incompetence, Bush not to blame
nicomachean is that you...or are you really Karl Rove?
Try as you may...the article and information you are quoting as "facts" come from opinion pieces in NewsCorp-owned papers...James Taranto is an editor of an obviously unbiased source, The Wall Street Journal. You might as well start posting Sean Hannity transcripts from Fox News...and maybe people will start to really feel sorry for you.
I am sure you can find mistakes across the board that were made leading up to and in the heat of the moment, but c'mon...
How many days do YOU think the Mayor needed to get 90,000 poverty-level poor, elderly, and disabled people out of the city? Two days, three days? More? Do YOU really think that a mayor can simply pull that off alone with only city resources at hand? Where do YOU think they should have been sent to be sheltered, fed, and taken care of?
But before you conveniently shift the blame for that onto the flakey Democratic state governor (like what was erroneously reported in the Washington Post and thus echoed through all the hideously pathetic conservative blogs to no end)...on Friday August 26 Gov. Blanco did declare a state-issued State of Emergency and then the next morning requested a Federal State of Emergency to President Bush urging him, through FEMA, "to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency." That sounds quite decisive to me.
FEMA stumbled and bumbled around, during and up to, 4 days AFTER the hurricane hit because it's "Bush-appointed" head obviously had no experience with anything related to judging Arabian horses...let alone preparing for the effects of a Category 5 hurricanes targeting onto an American metropolitan city situated below sea-level. I think even you would agree that Mr. Brown is no longer in charge at FEMA as of this weekend. That alone kinda says alot about where blame should be placed, doesn't it nicomachean? Not really the mayor...not really the governor.
Try as you may to drudge up conservative dreck from Rupert Murdoch papers in Australia or some "obviously unbiased" fact checking commentary in the Wall Street Journal or "The Intellectual Activist?"...it makes you look desperate. By arguing about facts from a conservative editorial that provides supporting arguments from William F. Buckley's very own National Review and then uses of all people, Al Sharpton, to argue against the "Angry Left"...is simply absurd.
I am not pointing this out to because I am part of the "Angry Left" that Mr. Taranto writes about...just count me as one of the "Angry Americans" that thinks that Bush's tenure as president will make Richard Nixon look like a saint.
...It [the evacuation] was announced at a news conference by the Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday 28 August, less than 24 hours before the hurricane struck early the next morning.
The question has to be asked: Why was it not ordered earlier?
The Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said at the same news conference that President Bush had called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation.
The night before, National Hurricane Director Max Mayfield had called Mayor Nagin to tell him that an evacuation was needed. Why were these calls necessary?...
"...> Precautionary Evacuation Notice: 72 hours or less
> Special Needs Evacuation Order: 8-12 hours after Precautionary Evacuation Notice issued
> General Evacuation Notice: 48 hours or less..."
New Orleans and the state of Louisiana didn't follow their own hurricane disaster plan.
"...According to New Orleans' own emergency plan, those buses [seen in news photos sitting in their yards, flooded] should have rolled at least as soon as the mandatory evacuation order was given on Saturday, if not when the voluntary evac order came earlier. The city's OEP failed to carry out this crucial part of the emergency-response plan, which is why so many of the poor, infirm, and just plain stubborn citizens got stranded when the levees broke..."
...He [President Bush] called me in that office after that. And he said, "Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor." I said -- and I don't remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.
S. O'BRIEN: You're telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?
NAGIN: Yes.
S. O'BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?
NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the -- I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.
S. O'BRIEN: And the governor said no.
NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn't happen, and more people died.
fact#4: source: American Red Cross American Red Cross "...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...
BBC News - right wing propogandists?
City of New Orleans official documents - a faux-hurricane plan?
Mayor Nagin himself - liar?
the American Red Cross - liars?
Which is to say, if you read ALL of the facts, and not just your carefully culled sampler, you will find that even your beloved spend and no-tax, small benefits big government president shares some responsibility for this tragedy.
but no matter what the facts are, the dems will weasle a way to blame bush anyways, now they're saying he's spending TOO much on the hurricane relief...it never ends
So the Bush administration bears no responsibility? Not for putting an Arabian horse enthusiast in charge of FEMA who had to be removed do to incompetence? If anything, it is President who has yet to take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong on his watch, and has shifted blame away from himself and his cabinet and on to whomever he deems convenient.
and brown was let go because he was doing such a wonderful job? government at all levels failed including the bush administration. they all let the people down.
nico - sorry - i didn't get past fact one - in which your explaination doesn't match your original claim.
even though the state and local authorities definitely bear a large portion of the blame - that does not exonorate dumbya. he slashed funding and installed inexperienced cronies in positions of authority. you want to get rid of all of them - have at it. but start with chimpy. he is incompetent, and should no onger be allowed to govern this nation.
today he said that iraq was not hurting the recovery efforts - "We've got plenty of troops to do both," the president said. "It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren't enough troops."
but in iraq guardsmen who lost their homes are being denied leave because the forward operating bases are "tapped out" and cannot spare them.
actions speak louder than words and this guy is an incompetent liar. a congress with a back-bone would have impeached him long ago.
norm, what claim are you refering to? the conclusion that Bush saved lives? it's the responsibility of the state and local governments to issue a mandatory evacuation. the federal government sped the state & local officials up in their responsibilities...therefore Bush saved lives.
i've never claimed the federal level is blameless, all levels of government were to blame. but, those interested in practical reality, rather than symbolic grandstanding, realize that primary blame should be placed on local & state officials, who didn't even follow their own hurricane plan.
your rhetoric ('chimpy') weakens your arguments.....and some of your arguments (such as that alleged incompetence is grounds for impeachment) start out very weak.
have you gone back and looked at federal responses to hurricane disasters in the past? might help put your outrage in perspective.
nico - you are wrong. the feds didn't speed anything up. as media matters for america - a media watchdog - has noted, bush spoke to blanco and nagin just before they were going into a press conference to announce the mandatory evacuation. he sped up absolutely nothing. bushs incompetent reorganization of fema killed people.
how much do you really expect from the mayor of a town of 500,000 in the face of a huge natural disater? remember - he was in the center of this monster storm. and i don't think either he or the govenor slashed funding to maitain the levees.
I lived thru andrew. i watched fema - which did a poor job then - and it was no where near as bad as this - especially in light of the fact that clinton - and i'm no clinton booster - improved fema tremendously after andrew. bush dismantled it. he killed people.
i never said incompetence is grounds for impeachment. lying to congress is.
how many people have to die on this guys watch before you and the rest of the blind supporters figure out that something is wrong?
9.11
anthrax.
iraq.
katrina.
the list is long.
the successes are few.
cribbed from an admitedly left-leaning website...quoting the extremely right wing wall street journal....
George W. Bush made a third "Message: I care" mission to the Gulf Coast Monday, and along the way he continued to suggest that the problems with the response to Hurricane Katrina were the fault of either the news media or the complicated relationships among federal, state and local government.
Perhaps the president should read this morning's Wall Street Journal. The Journal has reviewed internal documents and e-mail messages from FEMA and other government agencies, and, in unusually blunt language for a news story, it says that they show "the extent to which the federal government bungled its response to the hurricane." And it's not just Michael Brown, the Journal says. "The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events."
Among the paper's discoveries:
The Department of Homeland Security didn't call in federal environmental health specialists until this Sunday -- 12 days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said its crews were ready to move in. "Even now, " the Journal says, "with mounting evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort."
FEMA didn't ask the Department of Transportation to help it find buses to evacuate the Superdome until Aug. 31, and even then it asked for only 455 buses to evacuate more than 20,000 people.
When officials at the National Institutes for Health tried to reach out to FEMA to provide help, they were unable to get through to the agency because its e-mail server apparently couldn't handle the traffic it was getting.
The Journal says officials within the Department of Homeland Security are beginning to acknowledge that the department's National Response Plan didn't exactly work. Lee Holcomb, the department's chief technology officer, said last week: "We at the department are not well prepared, and unfortunately, recent history has shown that that's the case."
norm, you're right about Bush calling Blanco after she made her decision, but the National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield called Mayor Nagin the day before to tell him that a mandatory evacuation was needed. he also called Blanco to inform her of the strength of the hurricane and its potential damage. make sure you read that carefully, 'national' hurricane center. Bush's later actions & reorganization of FEMA may have not saved as many people as they could have, but the federal government, led by Bush, did save many lives by their early contact with Nagin & Blanco, two politicians far more incompetent than Bush.
natural disasters kill people, not the politicians who cut back funding. but, according to your logic, why didn't Blanco kill people? it was her state, New Orleans was a unique state problem. are you asking now for a total federal takeover of states' responsibilities? big government 'failed', so you want more big government?
i've heard (correct me if i'm wrong) that, to renovate or build new levees capable of withstanding a cat 4 or 5 hurricane, construction would have taken 10 years, that takes us back at the earliest to the Clinton admininstration. why did Clinton premeditate this killing of New Orleaners by not acting in his term? (according to your logic)
you know you never can provide the 'lie' that you keep talking about, so i wonder why you keep referencing it.
a friend of a friend of mine died in a car wreck, according to your logic this happened under Bush's watch, therefore Bush killed him.
by your logic, any politician that cuts funding in a particular area is now guilty of murder for all the ensuing deaths in that area? very simplistic.
capital punishment seems to be the only area where politicans' cuts or increases in spending directly kill or do not kill. anything else is just political posturing by either side.
nico -
again - nagin and blanco did kill people. send them to jail for all i care. i don't live in new orleans, or in louisiana for that matter.
i live in the usa and bush is supposed to be a leader - a leader who was re-elected almost solely on his alleged ability to protect the citizens of this country. he has proven himself incapable of that. therefore - BY HIS OWN STATED GOALS - he is incompetent. the failure of fema TO REACT TO THE NATURAL DISASTER killed people. bush reorganized fema, slashed it's funding, and installed cronies in positions of responsibility.
as for the cole - i don't know enough about the intelligence leading up to that instance to form a real opinion of the "cause". i do know there had been threats on american interests in the area and that certain standard safety precautions were not taken by the ships personel. in addition it was an al-queda operation that took 17 lives just a couple months before the transfer of power between the two administrations - and the clinton administration emphatically warned the incoming bush administration that al queda posed the worst security threat facing the nation. i also know that the bush administartion essentially ignored those warnings, and a myriad of other warnings, and that nearly 2000 people died on 9.11. despite the bluster and chest thumping about bringing back bin laden dead or alive, and smoking him out of his cave - that has not happened. again - another failure to reach HIS STATED GOALS. in other words incompetence.
c'mon nico - this is an amazing country - and bush is not fit to govern it.
Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 13, 2005
Filed at 12:13 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Tuesday that ''I take responsibility'' for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.
''Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,'' Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.
''To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility,'' Bush said.
The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government's ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in responding to Katrina.
''Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That's a very important question and it's in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond,'' Bush replied.
He said he wanted to know both what went wrong and what went right.
As for blunders in the federal response, ''I'm not going to defend the process going in,'' Bush said. ''I am going to defend the people saving lives.''
He praised relief workers at all levels. ''I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there,'' he said.
Bush spoke after R. David Paulison, the new acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors now in shelters.
this is what i've been waiting for...not that it's all the administration's fault, because it's not, but i've been waiting for some glimmer of 'the buck stops here'. bravo for mr. bush.
with roberts saying that roe v. wade is entitled to respect as a settled precedent and bush taking responsibility for inadequacies in the katrina response, i'd say this administration is showing some symptoms of becoming reasonable. 'course there's always tomorrow. maybe they're just having an off day.
the sad thing is that this is political he is saying he is taking responsability to get all of us off his back, it dont mean nothing. it is a political calculation, no heads will roll.
At least he is proving to be a better politician than I thought of.
Some things that we've forgotten:
1. What Happened to the Rove leak investigation?
2. Those anthrax attacks, how come nothing new ever came of that?
3. An "activist" judge just said that Bush can hold any American citizen without charging him/her with a crime, where's the outrage?
well, bush said he takes responsibility "to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right."
a head has rolled >> the director of FEMA, a friend of bush's who bush put in charge of FEMA. i think that shows that the president made a miscalculation about brown and he has taken steps to fix that problem. although i'm not sure why bush put him there in the first place.
''Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical,'' Bahamonde wrote.
Less than three hours later, however, Brown's press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. ''He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes,'' wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.
''We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.''
this is the sheer genius of the bush machine...you create a bumper sticker that says "...i take full responsibility...". but the truth is they don't have the balls it takes to own up to responsibility. unfortunately the typical american citizen is only interested in bumper stickers, so they continue to support him only because they don't know any better, and it seems they don't want to know any better.
until the opposition...be it democrats, or as i would prefer, independents...figure out a way to counter this, the country will continue on it's steep downward spiral.
for instance...the current white house bumper sticker is "...protect you from terrorists or protect your rights..." of course free-thinkers realize that the truth is the government should be, and certainly can do both. in other words "...a smart guy could protect you AND your rights..."
Do you think it is the governments responsibility to pay for this? If they do, then they wouldn't be able to give as much money to the roads, or the schools, or the trains, or the police, or organizations like the red cross?
Maybe, as architects, we can get on more city planning commisions and require that big business and the developers pay for this stuff up front? It sure would suck for the guys who are just starting out, but if the laws and regulation required this, then who knows what good we could create? We would have to set up some kind of break for the little guy. But perhaps we could regulate things in relation to how much development a developer does in one area in let's say a 10 year period. The developer could in turn require that his tenants pay more, if necessary to purchase the property. Yet we are in a day in age when speculation alone sells properties before they are even built. So why can't we just work it in?
I know the developers would be pissed I am saying this. After all, a lot of my good friends are developers. However if the people aren't willing to pay more in taxes, perhaps this could be a way to get the super wealthy to pay for a little bit more. This is just a thought, I am very young and I may be very wrong. I am just posing an idea.
In turn these developers could get set backs from the government i.e. tax break. How can you get upset about not getting money before you even know you are getting it? I don't know, this is just a thought....
Hmmm.. but what architect would want to do this? Wouldn't you lose commisions this way? Who is going to do it? Are you? Why don't I blame the person next to me?
Hey, I am going to stay friends with both sides, that way no one gets angry. Before I make decisions, I'll make sure no one gets upset and ask both sides. Maybe I can even put this in the marketing campaign when I am getting the developer to sell the property I am designing for them. How does that sound?
well it seems bush's own party is going to slam him for his administration's short comings on katrina as well as every level of government below him, but the harsest criticisms are laid on the bush administration. of course the white house has no interest in focusing on the past.
when the levee breaks...
.touchdown in Astrodome.
nicomachean..
i don't quite see the point of linking opinion
pieces written by people that agree with you..
even if
there is 74.2 percent of the army in the u.s. does that mean
the response has been adequate? the author never says how
many people are actually responding to the hurricane...i'd
actually be interested to know.
Crews Plug Levee Break a Week After Storm
By DOUG SIMPSON, Associated Press Writer
From the article:
With almost a third of New Orleans' police force missing in action, a caravan of law enforcement vehicles, emblazoned with emblems from across the nation and blue lights flashing, poured into the city to help establish order on the city's anarchic streets.
Between 400 to 500 officers on New Orleans' 1600-member force were unaccounted for. Some lost their homes. Some were looking for families. "Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe," Riley said. Officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they also would receive counseling.
At a news conference in Baton Rouge, police Superintendent Eddie Compass denied that officers deserted in droves, acknowledging some officers abandoned their jobs but saying he didn't know how many.
Two police officers killed themselves. Another was shot in the head. Compass said 150 had to be rescued from eight feet of water and others had gotten infections from walking through the murky soup of chemicals and pollutants in flooded areas.
"No police department in the history of the world was asked to do what we were asked," Compass said with a mix of anger and pride.
....You know, god bless these guys and more power to them. Take a vacation, hell yeah. After being one of only 1600 police officers in a city of almost 500,000 with a serious crime problem, and then they have to deal with this? I say put them up in Vegas for 3 months. And bill FEMA.
last thing i would want would be to go to vegas. that would be so schizo! holy shit. you'd go insane. or i would for certain. wadding waste deep literally in a stew of human waste, corpses and synthetic chemicals and next thing you know you're in the venetian or watching the water show at the bellagio...? It's just like flippin pages in Dante.
or this time hoover dam busts loose. and you catch 'Folies Bergere' girls looting pepsi.
Eh, Vegas, Seattle, the wilderness of Montana....wherever. Point being, take care of them. They've been busting their ass out there, they were essentially on the front line, the first line of defense.
A beach in costa rica, perhaps?
...but keep trying. keep your 'Bush as fascist' fantasies in mind while you study up on how state & federal governments interact. Bush isn't a king/we have states...please keep that in mind at all times.
Bush is our President, and whether we voted for him or not, he has a responsibility to his consituents just like every other elected official (and their cronies) who let the people on the Gulf Coast down.
If George W. Bush can take credit for turning around the economy (which in your view Nico was surely the work of our collective local Chambers of Commerce) surely he can share some of the blame for this collossal fuck up.
There is a lesson in here somewhere . . .
that australian columnist of nico's provides about as many facts as rush...0. instead, a lot of obscurant commentary meant to support a few opinion statements with very little evidence of any foundation. hm. is that all ya got?
Read this yet?
http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-2/556/556_04_RealHeroes.shtml
I couldn't have said it any better myself.
George W. Bush Still Rocks!
Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.
This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and reassuring matronly tones.
And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de Ãlava. Why did BushCo fail its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and America's apparent inability to take care of its own.
But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.
He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't matter. Corporate interests über alles, baby. Protect the core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece, really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead.
So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it would be different? Just look. All major social services are being gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in Guantánamo.
The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3 billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.
Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard is stuck over there, along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.
Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help "convey a positive image" about the government's response to the victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from his former job as head of something called the International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.
Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable, right, Dubya?
And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more than a little sad.
Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.
Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.
doesn't everyone get it?
1. the people of this country did not vote for the elected officials, the votes were stolen.
2. there were no mistakes in handling the post-katrina new orleans, this has been a calculated effort to eradicate the helpless people of new orleans.
well anza you are half-right. it is a calculated effort. but not to eradicate the helpless people of new orleans. this is the way the bush administration wanted things. they set things up to work this way. they slashed funding, and installed political appointees in positions of responsibility. anyone who questioned them was fired. katrina should serve as americas wake up call. hopefully. some of us have been yelling from the treetops that this administration is dangerous - only to be derided for a supposed blind partisan driven hatred. now more and more people are seeing the truth. bushes approval ratings are as low as nixons were during the watergate era. the question is - what else has been seriously affected by chimpies policies that we don't know about? yet.
you'll only find out if there's an emergency norm and you find yourself fending off marauding packs of dogs with a broom.
[from the 'factless' Australian columnist]
fact #1: Its mayor, Ray Nagin, delayed calling a mandatory evacuation of his flood-prone city until just 24 hours before Katrina hit, and only after Bush rang to urge him to get cracking.
conclusion: Bush saved lives
fact #2: Nor did Nagin use the city's buses to get out around 90,000 of the poorest or sickest residents. And the 50,000 who crammed into the city's Superdome and convention centre found little food and water there, and no chemical toilets -- all Nagin's responsibility.
conclusion: Bush should have changed into his cape and flown in a chemical toilet in each hand.
fact #3: Meanwhile the state's Democrat Governor refused at first to crack down on looters who were shooting at rescuers, and asked for a day to decide whether to accept Bush's offers of help. [this governor has a history of indecision]
conclusion: the state failed, and the state must fail before the federal system takes over, or we don't live in a republic.
fact #4: The American Red Cross says it tried to bring in supplies to them soon after the hurricane hit, but was blocked by state officials.
conclusion: state incompetence, Bush not to blame
where are the complaints of federal negligence from Mississippi and Alabama? seems like New Orleans state officials f-ed it up for everybody.
the mayors of biloxi, slidell louisiana and some other mississippi town all said fema was m.i.a. and the locals had to do it all themselves.
nicomachean is that you...or are you really Karl Rove?
Try as you may...the article and information you are quoting as "facts" come from opinion pieces in NewsCorp-owned papers...James Taranto is an editor of an obviously unbiased source, The Wall Street Journal. You might as well start posting Sean Hannity transcripts from Fox News...and maybe people will start to really feel sorry for you.
I am sure you can find mistakes across the board that were made leading up to and in the heat of the moment, but c'mon...
How many days do YOU think the Mayor needed to get 90,000 poverty-level poor, elderly, and disabled people out of the city? Two days, three days? More? Do YOU really think that a mayor can simply pull that off alone with only city resources at hand? Where do YOU think they should have been sent to be sheltered, fed, and taken care of?
But before you conveniently shift the blame for that onto the flakey Democratic state governor (like what was erroneously reported in the Washington Post and thus echoed through all the hideously pathetic conservative blogs to no end)...on Friday August 26 Gov. Blanco did declare a state-issued State of Emergency and then the next morning requested a Federal State of Emergency to President Bush urging him, through FEMA, "to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency." That sounds quite decisive to me.
FEMA stumbled and bumbled around, during and up to, 4 days AFTER the hurricane hit because it's "Bush-appointed" head obviously had no experience with anything related to judging Arabian horses...let alone preparing for the effects of a Category 5 hurricanes targeting onto an American metropolitan city situated below sea-level. I think even you would agree that Mr. Brown is no longer in charge at FEMA as of this weekend. That alone kinda says alot about where blame should be placed, doesn't it nicomachean? Not really the mayor...not really the governor.
Try as you may to drudge up conservative dreck from Rupert Murdoch papers in Australia or some "obviously unbiased" fact checking commentary in the Wall Street Journal or "The Intellectual Activist?"...it makes you look desperate. By arguing about facts from a conservative editorial that provides supporting arguments from William F. Buckley's very own National Review and then uses of all people, Al Sharpton, to argue against the "Angry Left"...is simply absurd.
I am not pointing this out to because I am part of the "Angry Left" that Mr. Taranto writes about...just count me as one of the "Angry Americans" that thinks that Bush's tenure as president will make Richard Nixon look like a saint.
nico - everyone of your facts are wrong. every single one. stop watching the republican propoganda and think for yourself.
fact#1a:
source: BBC News
BBC - Multiple failures caused relief crisis
...It [the evacuation] was announced at a news conference by the Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday 28 August, less than 24 hours before the hurricane struck early the next morning.
The question has to be asked: Why was it not ordered earlier?
The Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said at the same news conference that President Bush had called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation.
The night before, National Hurricane Director Max Mayfield had called Mayor Nagin to tell him that an evacuation was needed. Why were these calls necessary?...
fact#1b:
source: www.cityofno.com[/b]
New Orleans comprehensive hurricane disaster plan
"...> Precautionary Evacuation Notice: 72 hours or less
> Special Needs Evacuation Order: 8-12 hours after Precautionary Evacuation Notice issued
> General Evacuation Notice: 48 hours or less..."
fact#2:
source: www.cityofno.com[/b]
New Orleans comprehensive hurricane disaster plan
New Orleans and the state of Louisiana didn't follow their own hurricane disaster plan.
"...According to New Orleans' own emergency plan, those buses [seen in news photos sitting in their yards, flooded] should have rolled at least as soon as the mandatory evacuation order was given on Saturday, if not when the voluntary evac order came earlier. The city's OEP failed to carry out this crucial part of the emergency-response plan, which is why so many of the poor, infirm, and just plain stubborn citizens got stranded when the levees broke..."
fact#3:
source: Mayor Nagin
CNN transcripts
...He [President Bush] called me in that office after that. And he said, "Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor." I said -- and I don't remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.
S. O'BRIEN: You're telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?
NAGIN: Yes.
S. O'BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?
NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the -- I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.
S. O'BRIEN: And the governor said no.
NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn't happen, and more people died.
fact#4:
source: American Red Cross
American Red Cross
"...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...
BBC News - right wing propogandists?
City of New Orleans official documents - a faux-hurricane plan?
Mayor Nagin himself - liar?
the American Red Cross - liars?
are you happy now with the facts?
apologies for the broken tags
You forgot these:
President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050830/480/capm10208301856
Which went down about the same time as this one:
Crisis Grows as Flooded New Orleans Looted
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050831/ap_on_re_us/katrina_new_orleans
Which is to say, if you read ALL of the facts, and not just your carefully culled sampler, you will find that even your beloved spend and no-tax, small benefits big government president shares some responsibility for this tragedy.
the facts are clearly showing that bush wasn't at fault on this one. fema was slow, yes, but because of the governor.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/content/state/epaper/2005/09/10/m1a_response_0910.html#
..the governor who is now backpeddling on her anti-bush retoric in an attempt to save her butt.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/11/D8CIE1T80.html
but no matter what the facts are, the dems will weasle a way to blame bush anyways, now they're saying he's spending TOO much on the hurricane relief...it never ends
So the Bush administration bears no responsibility? Not for putting an Arabian horse enthusiast in charge of FEMA who had to be removed do to incompetence? If anything, it is President who has yet to take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong on his watch, and has shifted blame away from himself and his cabinet and on to whomever he deems convenient.
and brown was let go because he was doing such a wonderful job? government at all levels failed including the bush administration. they all let the people down.
nico - sorry - i didn't get past fact one - in which your explaination doesn't match your original claim.
even though the state and local authorities definitely bear a large portion of the blame - that does not exonorate dumbya. he slashed funding and installed inexperienced cronies in positions of authority. you want to get rid of all of them - have at it. but start with chimpy. he is incompetent, and should no onger be allowed to govern this nation.
today he said that iraq was not hurting the recovery efforts - "We've got plenty of troops to do both," the president said. "It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren't enough troops."
but in iraq guardsmen who lost their homes are being denied leave because the forward operating bases are "tapped out" and cannot spare them.
actions speak louder than words and this guy is an incompetent liar. a congress with a back-bone would have impeached him long ago.
norm, what claim are you refering to? the conclusion that Bush saved lives? it's the responsibility of the state and local governments to issue a mandatory evacuation. the federal government sped the state & local officials up in their responsibilities...therefore Bush saved lives.
i've never claimed the federal level is blameless, all levels of government were to blame. but, those interested in practical reality, rather than symbolic grandstanding, realize that primary blame should be placed on local & state officials, who didn't even follow their own hurricane plan.
your rhetoric ('chimpy') weakens your arguments.....and some of your arguments (such as that alleged incompetence is grounds for impeachment) start out very weak.
have you gone back and looked at federal responses to hurricane disasters in the past? might help put your outrage in perspective.
nico - you are wrong. the feds didn't speed anything up. as media matters for america - a media watchdog - has noted, bush spoke to blanco and nagin just before they were going into a press conference to announce the mandatory evacuation. he sped up absolutely nothing. bushs incompetent reorganization of fema killed people.
how much do you really expect from the mayor of a town of 500,000 in the face of a huge natural disater? remember - he was in the center of this monster storm. and i don't think either he or the govenor slashed funding to maitain the levees.
I lived thru andrew. i watched fema - which did a poor job then - and it was no where near as bad as this - especially in light of the fact that clinton - and i'm no clinton booster - improved fema tremendously after andrew. bush dismantled it. he killed people.
i never said incompetence is grounds for impeachment. lying to congress is.
how many people have to die on this guys watch before you and the rest of the blind supporters figure out that something is wrong?
9.11
anthrax.
iraq.
katrina.
the list is long.
the successes are few.
cribbed from an admitedly left-leaning website...quoting the extremely right wing wall street journal....
George W. Bush made a third "Message: I care" mission to the Gulf Coast Monday, and along the way he continued to suggest that the problems with the response to Hurricane Katrina were the fault of either the news media or the complicated relationships among federal, state and local government.
Perhaps the president should read this morning's Wall Street Journal. The Journal has reviewed internal documents and e-mail messages from FEMA and other government agencies, and, in unusually blunt language for a news story, it says that they show "the extent to which the federal government bungled its response to the hurricane." And it's not just Michael Brown, the Journal says. "The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events."
Among the paper's discoveries:
The Department of Homeland Security didn't call in federal environmental health specialists until this Sunday -- 12 days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said its crews were ready to move in. "Even now, " the Journal says, "with mounting evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort."
FEMA didn't ask the Department of Transportation to help it find buses to evacuate the Superdome until Aug. 31, and even then it asked for only 455 buses to evacuate more than 20,000 people.
When officials at the National Institutes for Health tried to reach out to FEMA to provide help, they were unable to get through to the agency because its e-mail server apparently couldn't handle the traffic it was getting.
The Journal says officials within the Department of Homeland Security are beginning to acknowledge that the department's National Response Plan didn't exactly work. Lee Holcomb, the department's chief technology officer, said last week: "We at the department are not well prepared, and unfortunately, recent history has shown that that's the case."
norm, you're right about Bush calling Blanco after she made her decision, but the National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield called Mayor Nagin the day before to tell him that a mandatory evacuation was needed. he also called Blanco to inform her of the strength of the hurricane and its potential damage. make sure you read that carefully, 'national' hurricane center. Bush's later actions & reorganization of FEMA may have not saved as many people as they could have, but the federal government, led by Bush, did save many lives by their early contact with Nagin & Blanco, two politicians far more incompetent than Bush.
natural disasters kill people, not the politicians who cut back funding. but, according to your logic, why didn't Blanco kill people? it was her state, New Orleans was a unique state problem. are you asking now for a total federal takeover of states' responsibilities? big government 'failed', so you want more big government?
i've heard (correct me if i'm wrong) that, to renovate or build new levees capable of withstanding a cat 4 or 5 hurricane, construction would have taken 10 years, that takes us back at the earliest to the Clinton admininstration. why did Clinton premeditate this killing of New Orleaners by not acting in his term? (according to your logic)
you know you never can provide the 'lie' that you keep talking about, so i wonder why you keep referencing it.
a friend of a friend of mine died in a car wreck, according to your logic this happened under Bush's watch, therefore Bush killed him.
by your logic, any politician that cuts funding in a particular area is now guilty of murder for all the ensuing deaths in that area? very simplistic.
capital punishment seems to be the only area where politicans' cuts or increases in spending directly kill or do not kill. anything else is just political posturing by either side.
i'm curious, norm, do you blame, for one, the USS Cole attack on Clinton? (his watch)
nico -
again - nagin and blanco did kill people. send them to jail for all i care. i don't live in new orleans, or in louisiana for that matter.
i live in the usa and bush is supposed to be a leader - a leader who was re-elected almost solely on his alleged ability to protect the citizens of this country. he has proven himself incapable of that. therefore - BY HIS OWN STATED GOALS - he is incompetent. the failure of fema TO REACT TO THE NATURAL DISASTER killed people. bush reorganized fema, slashed it's funding, and installed cronies in positions of responsibility.
as for the cole - i don't know enough about the intelligence leading up to that instance to form a real opinion of the "cause". i do know there had been threats on american interests in the area and that certain standard safety precautions were not taken by the ships personel. in addition it was an al-queda operation that took 17 lives just a couple months before the transfer of power between the two administrations - and the clinton administration emphatically warned the incoming bush administration that al queda posed the worst security threat facing the nation. i also know that the bush administartion essentially ignored those warnings, and a myriad of other warnings, and that nearly 2000 people died on 9.11. despite the bluster and chest thumping about bringing back bin laden dead or alive, and smoking him out of his cave - that has not happened. again - another failure to reach HIS STATED GOALS. in other words incompetence.
c'mon nico - this is an amazing country - and bush is not fit to govern it.
Bush has now publicly taken resposibility for the respnse mess up. i am not a fan of his but it took some balls to do that.
Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 13, 2005
Filed at 12:13 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Tuesday that ''I take responsibility'' for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.
''Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,'' Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.
''To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility,'' Bush said.
The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government's ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in responding to Katrina.
''Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That's a very important question and it's in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond,'' Bush replied.
He said he wanted to know both what went wrong and what went right.
As for blunders in the federal response, ''I'm not going to defend the process going in,'' Bush said. ''I am going to defend the people saving lives.''
He praised relief workers at all levels. ''I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there,'' he said.
Bush spoke after R. David Paulison, the new acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors now in shelters.
this is what i've been waiting for...not that it's all the administration's fault, because it's not, but i've been waiting for some glimmer of 'the buck stops here'. bravo for mr. bush.
with roberts saying that roe v. wade is entitled to respect as a settled precedent and bush taking responsibility for inadequacies in the katrina response, i'd say this administration is showing some symptoms of becoming reasonable. 'course there's always tomorrow. maybe they're just having an off day.
un - f'ing - precedented.
accountability from this white house.
aamazing what poll numbers in the 30's will do.
so what does "i take responsibilty" mean?
the sad thing is that this is political he is saying he is taking responsability to get all of us off his back, it dont mean nothing. it is a political calculation, no heads will roll.
At least he is proving to be a better politician than I thought of.
Some things that we've forgotten:
1. What Happened to the Rove leak investigation?
2. Those anthrax attacks, how come nothing new ever came of that?
3. An "activist" judge just said that Bush can hold any American citizen without charging him/her with a crime, where's the outrage?
well, bush said he takes responsibility "to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right."
a head has rolled >> the director of FEMA, a friend of bush's who bush put in charge of FEMA. i think that shows that the president made a miscalculation about brown and he has taken steps to fix that problem. although i'm not sure why bush put him there in the first place.
i love this one from bush's cronies >>
''Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical,'' Bahamonde wrote.
Less than three hours later, however, Brown's press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. ''He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes,'' wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.
''We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.''
FEMA Official Says Boss Ignored Warnings
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm," Bush said.
hmm, seems the white house knew days before katrina hit that this is exactly what would happen.
White House Got Early Warning on Katrina
gee...the white house lied? i find that nearly impossible to believe.
uh, cooperation? confidentiality? uh, okay. whatever.
White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers
this is the sheer genius of the bush machine...you create a bumper sticker that says "...i take full responsibility...". but the truth is they don't have the balls it takes to own up to responsibility. unfortunately the typical american citizen is only interested in bumper stickers, so they continue to support him only because they don't know any better, and it seems they don't want to know any better.
until the opposition...be it democrats, or as i would prefer, independents...figure out a way to counter this, the country will continue on it's steep downward spiral.
for instance...the current white house bumper sticker is "...protect you from terrorists or protect your rights..." of course free-thinkers realize that the truth is the government should be, and certainly can do both. in other words "...a smart guy could protect you AND your rights..."
Do you think it is the governments responsibility to pay for this? If they do, then they wouldn't be able to give as much money to the roads, or the schools, or the trains, or the police, or organizations like the red cross?
Maybe, as architects, we can get on more city planning commisions and require that big business and the developers pay for this stuff up front? It sure would suck for the guys who are just starting out, but if the laws and regulation required this, then who knows what good we could create? We would have to set up some kind of break for the little guy. But perhaps we could regulate things in relation to how much development a developer does in one area in let's say a 10 year period. The developer could in turn require that his tenants pay more, if necessary to purchase the property. Yet we are in a day in age when speculation alone sells properties before they are even built. So why can't we just work it in?
I know the developers would be pissed I am saying this. After all, a lot of my good friends are developers. However if the people aren't willing to pay more in taxes, perhaps this could be a way to get the super wealthy to pay for a little bit more. This is just a thought, I am very young and I may be very wrong. I am just posing an idea.
In turn these developers could get set backs from the government i.e. tax break. How can you get upset about not getting money before you even know you are getting it? I don't know, this is just a thought....
Hmmm.. but what architect would want to do this? Wouldn't you lose commisions this way? Who is going to do it? Are you? Why don't I blame the person next to me?
Hey, I am going to stay friends with both sides, that way no one gets angry. Before I make decisions, I'll make sure no one gets upset and ask both sides. Maybe I can even put this in the marketing campaign when I am getting the developer to sell the property I am designing for them. How does that sound?
well it seems bush's own party is going to slam him for his administration's short comings on katrina as well as every level of government below him, but the harsest criticisms are laid on the bush administration. of course the white house has no interest in focusing on the past.
Republicans' Report on Katrina Assails Response
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.