You calling me partisan is rich as you and Cliff badmouth Bush and the Republicans for everything bad in America.
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Did you know Katrina actually hit Biloxi MS, not NO? How come you don't see the msm floating stories about MS?
Maybe because the GOP governor has a direct line to Bush and gets what he needs when he needs it? /,i>
And LA has a governor that stiff-armed the fed. govt. LA delayed the Salvation Army and Red Cross from Houston entering the state for a while:
Government Tells the Red Cross to Stay Out of New Orleans
Don Boudreaux
The American Red Cross -- an exemplary voluntary disaster-relief organization with almost 125 years of experience -- was told by the National Guard and local authorities not to go to Katrina-devastated New Orleans.
According to the Disaster FAQs section of the American Red Cross's website:
Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?
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.
The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents.
Digest this: government turned away one of the world's most skilled and experienced agencies from bringing relief to starving, thristy, dying New Orleanians. Why? Why? Why???
Judging from the Red Cross's explanation (above), government apparently feared that the Red Cross would deliver relief with too much success. Why else would people choose not to leave a destroyed city, and even want to return to it?
So, government decided that letting people die was a better course than risking any success that the Red Cross would likely have at providing disaster relief.
Yesterday, E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post that major disaster relief cannot be done without government. The truth is that, at the same time the government was proving itself to be utterly incompetent at providing disaster relief, it was doing what it does with unparalleled skill: f*&King things up.
(Thanks to Ed Grass for the tip on this outrage.)
UPDATE: According to this Knight-Ridder report, the Red Cross isn't alone among well-respected private relief organizations kept, by government, from saving lives in New Orleans. The Salvation Army was stopped from carrying out a planned rescue operation. Here's the key part of the report:
As federal officials tried to get some control over the deteriorating situation in New Orleans, chaos was being replaced with bureaucratic rules that inhibited private relief organizations' efforts.
"We've tried desperately to rescue 250 people trapped in a Salvation Army facility. They've been trapped in there since the flood came in. Many are on dialysis machines," said Maj. George Hood, national communications secretary for the relief organization.
"Yesterday we rented big fan boats to pull them out and the National Guard would not let us enter the city," he said. The reason: a new plan to evacuate the embattled city grid by grid - and the Salvation Army's facility didn't fall in the right grid that day, Hood said in a telephone interview from Jackson, Miss.
"No, it doesn't make sense," he said.
cafehayek.typepad.com
And yes, the governor was in charge of the NG at the time:
............
Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."
Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.
washingtonpost.com
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As for Biloxi, you're comparing a small casino/fishing city with NO....the major port of entry on the Mississippi?
Still Biloxi was hit dead on by Katrina.
What you all have allowed to happen to NO is a venal sin and should be persecuted accordingly. For that travesty alone, it will be a cold day in hell before I vote for another GOP candidate.
Your politicizing a tragedy is despicable. The fact that your party contributed majorly to the tragedy makes it worse. You're as much a fraud as Clifford. |
