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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (248468)	9/1/2005 12:17:30 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1573447

"We can't win in Iraq, so let's bring our troops home" John, the more I learn about this, the madder I get. Cat. 4 or Cat. 5 hurricanes are the ultimate acts of nature, all you can do is cope. But our ability to cope has been systematically and methodically gutted for the past 4 years. IMPACT was out right cancelled, presumably because it was a high profile and effective Clinton era program. But nothing replaced it. FEMA and Corp. of Engineers money has been diverted to other things. Maintenance work on the New Orleans levee system was stopped. The capper is that FEMA was instructed to stop all planning for coping with natural disasters, so we have no way to get prepared for dealing with something like this. 40% of the National Guardsmen from Louisiana are in Iraq. Essentially nothing happened on the national level until yesterday. Hurricanes cannot be prevented. But they have the salient quality of taking time to get to where they are dangerous. Given that their destructiveness is known, they can be prepared for. Relief equipment, men and material can be prepositioned and readied for use on short notice. Hospital ships can be equipped and moving towards the area ahead of time. But it has to be coordinated on a national level. And it isn't like that is unprecedented, we have done these things in the past. True, in an ideal world, everyone would evacuate. But the reality is that there are always those who won't or can't. Even if everyone is willing to evacuate, it takes time. Figures I have seen indicate that it would take at least 3 days to evacuate everyone from New Orleans. Predicting landfall for a hurricane 3 days out is impossible. While a few people can afford to evacuate every time a hurricane 3 days might make landfall dangerously close, those people are few. And New Orleans isn't alone in that. So there are going to be people trapped in any city that gets hit with a hurricane. Nero might have fiddled while Rome burned. But Bush played the guitar while New Orleans drowned.

To: Road Walker who wrote (248468)	9/1/2005 1:09:04 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573447

September 1, 2005 Waiting for a Leader George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end. We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported. Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis. While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection? It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal. nytimes.com