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Pastimes : Lake New Orleans -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (11)	9/1/2005 12:51:31 PM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 1118

I think you will find the following on point>> In storm's wake, there's more than 1 way to plunder There are two kinds of looters active as New Orleans descends into chaos. Nobody would begrudge a desperate family from lifting food or bottled water. But there are others who break into stores and shops to steal luxury goods, such as jewelry, fashion jeans, TVs. One police officer has already been shot in the head. On Wednesday a broadcast news producer was reporting that other police officers were standing by as pillagers grabbed what they could. "I think [police] think it's safer just to let them go on," she said. As they float their TVs away on air mattresses, the thieves seem ecstatic, even though there's no place in the city where they can plug in those TVs to watch them. Perhaps that doesn't matter to them. Perhaps all that matters is the act of grabbing. These looters, while desperate and ridiculous, serve another purpose. They remind Americans that the same could happen in almost any big city, and that we're all one natural or man-made disaster removed from that kind of barbarism, and we don't know how to speak of it. So we don't speak of it, lest we're accused of causing offense, and the longer it remains unspoken, the more threatening it becomes. There is another kind of looting. It has nothing to do with plasma TVs shoved into plastic garbage cans lashed with chunks of Styrofoam as the poor of New Orleans float treasure past sunken cars, trucks, downed power lines. Instead, it has to do with words. The users of these words don't get wet in the toxic stew flooding that sad city. These folks stay far away, and stay dry and wear suits and ties. They're political and insist they're civilized. One of the first was Jurgen Trittin, Germany's environmental minister. It was his self-appointed task, as a member of the Green Party, to find someone to blame for Hurricane Katrina. Naturally, as a European of the Left, he blamed the United States. We're at fault, since we're Americans, although that's not his stated reason. The stated reason for Hurricane Katrina is U.S. President George W. Bush. Writing in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, Mr. Trittin bashed Bush for not protecting the environment and for not supporting the Kyoto Protocol, something not-President Al Gore surely would have done. American conservatives argue that Kyoto was a flawed and foolhardy attempt to globalize environmental standards that would have penalized American interests while giving China and others a pass. American liberals dispute this, saying Bush's retreat from Kyoto foreshadowed his aggressive foreign policy that has isolated the U.S. from sophisticated regimes such as France and Germany (sadly, they neglect to mention that sophisticated European interests were busy sucking up Oil for Food cash from Iraq's Saddam Hussein). "The American president is closing his eyes to the economic and human costs his land and the world economy are suffering under natural catastrophes like Katrina and because of neglected environmental policies," writes Herr Trittin. In other words, the U.S. caused Katrina and the dead of Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama belong to George Bush. The other attack from the Left was offered by one of Bill Clinton's high priests, Sidney Blumenthal, in Salon.com. He writes that the dead of New Orleans can be attributed to the Bush administration sucking money from the city's levee improvements to pay for the Iraq war. He also blames the Christian right and other alleged schemers. "By 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war," he writes in what has already become the Democratic flood rallying cry. If Cindy Sheehan were speaking, she'd probably blame the broken levee on those Zionist neo-cons who tricked the U.S. into a war with Iraq to protect Israel. The American political left was almost singed badly by such talk. But Sheehan's anti-Israel bias wasn't reported early on, because it got in the way of the narrative so many in the media wanted to tell. Blumenthal wraps the New Orleans levee around the war with Iraq but doesn't blunder like Sheehan. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate questions about flood control. I share some of them, including whether a city several meters below sea level, surrounded by water in hurricane country, can be reconstructed. But to ask them while hurling accusations isn't about determining cause. It is about framing a disaster as a campaign poster for the next elections. President Bush did that as well, using 9/11 footage in campaign commercials, and was properly denounced. Like looting, this uncivilized shaping of the politics of Hurricane Katrina is expected. But can't they wait, at least a few more days, until the bodies are recovered from the water? John Kass Published September 1, 2005 chicagotribune.com

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (11)	9/1/2005 1:17:46 PM
From: Rande Is	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1118

You asked for specific solutions, which could/should have been done. For about the third time now, here are just a few examples: From last Thursday through Sunday, organization of equipment and personnel should have been performed to perfection. Safe staging areas designated to the East, West and North of destruction zone for gathering of both equipment and rescue personnel, I.E. Airboats, Rescue boats, Rescue Copters, pontoon boats . . . positioned into place as soon winds die down and waters are safe for travel. Secure equipment and personnel from counties, cities and state governments from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, upper Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. Thousands of boats, copters and planes could have quickly been dispatched along with personnel. Swift boats were loaded onto cargo planes at March AFB in California yesterday to be dispatched to the area. Why could this not be done DURING the storm? Grids of neighborhoods could have been assigned to hundreds of helicopters responsible for specific neighborhood areas, with access via following freeways to staging areas to provide order to copter traffic. After a rescue, mark a bright orange "X" to show the house is completed. As it was, rescue directors said pilots were directed to fly randomly through neighborhoods. A thousand small boats should have swarmed the waters two days ago. Rande Is