I know I'm goign to take some ribbing over this but I think they shoud rebuild NOLA someplace upstream that has higher elevation. The ancient Egptians did it with the temple of Abu Simbel, and that temple is pretty big, so such a thing is possible.

You have to see that it's kind of like getting Osama bin Laden to investigate 9/11, or Nixon to investigate Watergate. He's an interested party.

Am I paranoid or did it seem like the Feds really wanted people out of there for good..?

***sigh*** okay...let's review this one more time:

Leadership comes from the TOP.

Reagan was seen as one of the greatest presidents we ever had. Not that I agree with EVERYTHING he ever did, and I was too young to know much about him. But in a simple websearch, what I found wasn't "right-wing fundamentalist".

Roberts is going to be appointed.

The WBRZ people said it was confirmed that Blanco did indeed ask for 24 hours.

'Katrina' and America's Race Problems

The horror in New Orleans has exposed the United State's dirty secrets of race and poverty. Coverage of the disaster, argues American journalist Joan Walsh, at times portrays New Orleans' African-Americans as victims and at others as barbarians. Americans are ready to help their poorer neighbors, she says, but is the country ready to take up a national debate about racial inequity and poverty?

The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city's African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome -- rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country, it's excruciating to watch. But I'm especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical.

Ever since the first looting photos made cable news I've felt sick, like here we go again, we're going to have a new round in the culture war about the poor. Are they victims, or barbarians? If Sean Hannity's attacking them, well, I sure as hell have to defend them. When right-wing blogger Boortz is saying shoot them on sight, somebody has to say that's sick and crazy, right? Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. If looting Wal-Mart was the worst of it, I thought, we should consider ourselves lucky.

But it wasn't. Thursday we saw people shooting at rescue helicopters (with guns they stole from Wal-Mart, perhaps?), at hospital supply trucks, at workers trying to evacuate the sick from hospitals, the horrifying next chapter in an already awful story. I started to feel like my indifference to yesterday's looting was morally lazy, a reflexive shrug at having to really think about the poor, who they are, why they are. What a crazy, depraved way to treat people who are trying to help. But having said that, we're not absolved from trying to understand and reckon with the chaos. Like it or not, this crisis is going to be with us for a long time, because it's been coming for a long time -- we're going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we've long chosen to ignore.

As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the '60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who've been further dispossessed -- do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome -- abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park -- to fare much better? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium -- we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.

As if to make sure we didn't miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush. But let's be fair: John Kerry barely mentioned the poor last year. And while President Clinton's booming 1990s lifted some boats, and his welfare reform at least muted the ideological sniping about whether poor folks were victims or freeloaders, nobody's bothered lately to pay much attention to whether welfare reform made people's lives better, whether it paved a path out of poverty or just moved its subjects into the vast ranks of the working poor.

Then came Katrina, and we're forced to pay attention. We're forced to look at New Orleans, to really see it -- one of the nation's great party cities and also one of its poorest. If you go for Mardi Gras or the annual Jazz Heritage Festival, really if you go any old time, you know its majority black population is mostly hidden from white tourists. Beyond the gorgeous French Quarter and Garden District it's long been a crime-plagued, gang-ridden, corruption-befouled city. But as long as you stuck to Fodor's, you didn't have to care.

Now you do. Before Katrina, we were warned of coffins floating out of cemeteries, but instead we got poor black people flushed out of slums, and to some people they're apparently just as scary. But they're not going back any time soon. They're our responsibility now. They always were; we just ignored it.

Maybe we can't anymore. On cable news, our normally buttoned-down blow-dried correspondents, almost all of them white, are cracking under the strain of bearing witness to the suffering and even death of the people who weren't looting, who did the right thing and headed to the Superdome, only to find a worse hell awaited them. They've dropped their script and they're asking tough questions. CNN's Chris Lawrence was clearly shaken describing what he saw: "We talked to mothers holding babies, some of these babies 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions ...These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at some of these mothers your heart just breaks ... People need to see this ... what it's really like here. We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the convention center, and there's no one to come get them."

Later, Anderson Cooper was even harsher, challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu for thanking President Bush for his efforts to aid her state. "Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting," he said. "For the last four days I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi ... You know, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them them wrong way right now. Because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours and there's not enough facilities to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out here?"

Of course, it's unfair to blame the president for an act of nature like Katrina. And yet it's irrefutable that this administration's backward policies and politics made this disaster worse than it had to be, and its belated response will do nothing to address the problems that have suddenly been flushed out into the open. The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty and neglect to match the war on terror launched after al-Qaida struck -- and if we did, I doubt it would be any more effective. The president, who continued his vacation while Katrina raged, just the way he kept reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11, is headed for the Gulf on Friday. I'd like him to bring some answers, but I don't expect him to.

What I'd really like is to see him head today for the Superdome, bring his dad, and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry and Howard Dean -- any Democrat or Republican who cares, really -- and go to work, feeding and comforting the refugees and finding out what they need. Then I'd like to see them put people to work, rebuilding the amazing historic city we've apparently lost.

Americans are ready to do the right thing. Americans want to help their neighbors -- even when those neighbors are people they don't know, who are poor and have different colored skin. If you close your eyes, you can imagine a silver lining. Inspired by a president who got down in the water himself and started bailing, America could find the will and the resources to put people to work building a country, not destroying one the way we're doing in Iraq. But that is just a dream. In the real world, the water is likely to keep rising. Still, I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor in chief.

I understand your opinion, but you didn’t answer my questions, what countries have more privacy rights than we do?

What part of your sex life can be investigated exactly?

You must truly and emphatically be out of touch that you would have to ask me about what Christian Charities give to the poor, most charity assistance you see in the US comes form Faith Based originations not only do they help the poor here, they help the poor all over the world. That has to be the dumbest question I’ve seen on this site.

Was he running the country from that stage in Cali? Guess there was a sat phone in the body of that guitar keeping him up to date on the events in NOLA huh? I heard he played his favorite song that day a tune called "My Pet Goat"

The point on this should have been the Governor, and through her FEMA and DHS, and they all share in the blame for the delayed and discordant response (imo).

The Bible says that the idler shall not eat the worker's bread; Veterans Hospitals are for those who served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard.

“The idler shall not have place in the church, except he repent and mend his ways” (D&C 75:29). He also commanded, “Thou shalt not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer” (D&C 42:42).

To conclude, here is what I see as the libertarian position on the storm

You must have missed the part where I said the Democrats know him very well too, that was part of the point I was making. As a Chief Justice or any Justice they are there to interpret the law and follow the constitution not their political aspirations or agenda’s, I know that’s important to liberals to get their side in, but even their side is supposed to defend the constitution. What countries have more privacy rights than we do?

What part of your sex life can be investigated exactly? As much as people criticize Christians, its Christians and faith base organizations that the country comes to depend on particularly what we are going through with Katrina.

You mean you don’t know Roberts isn’t a mystery man that applied for the Job. The President is the one who appoints Justices. It’s a concern for Liberals, but he’s a very well known judge by the President and Congress, not to mention people in law.

Perhaps a looser schedule for people who don’t know the system, the President is entitled by law to take vacation.

All I get from those who know better is obfuscation wjhen the facts and the law are not on their side, and from the rest of the libs all I get is twisted words to mean what they want them to mean, so they post smokescreens.

The President himself doesn’t do these jobs, this is why he has various people in these positions. He depends on this people to do their jobs, when these people don’t do their jobs it’s not the Presidents fault. This should be common sense.

You can't. BUT, while I do maintain that it is important not to stop "speaking up," I do not at all apply that to PoF.

What's the use in having a mayor and a govorner

I fail to understand how one man (the president) can be blamed for this disaster. There are many levels of government, and it appears that they did nothing either, no plan, no action afterward.
the presidency has already stated that the results are unacceptable and are doing everything they can.

It must be nice to be so sure of oneself, especially about a process with which you have no familiarity (the CONUS Emergency Management Process). Before the Federal govt responds to a disaster like this the respective Governor must request it, which if you have followed this story closely you will have noticed she delayed that for several days. Even if they wanted to respond they are not the experts on NO or the surrounding area, most of those folks are casualties or are just overwhelmed.

They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sakes, shut up and send us somebody." - Aaron Broussard Jefferson Parish president pleads for help on NBC's 'Meet the Press' Sunday.

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water," said Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. "They wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."

"If one person criticizes them, or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me. One more word about it... and I -- I might likely have to punch him."
-- Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., on ABC's 'This Week' defends sheriff's department.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
-- President Bush praises Brown during visit to Alabama Friday

Now, before you dismiss my comments, I was in Homestead for Hurricane Andrew and several weeks afterwards (lost almost everything and damn near died). I was here in Panama City for Opal and Ivan, and assisted the military response to several Caribbean nations after hurricanes. My military specialty was medical disaster and contingency planning, and I am a Certified Emergency Manager in the IAEM. I have worked in the arena at all levels, local, state, regional and national (military and civilian), and even coordinated humanitarian trips to several African nations.

I understand the process and I am telling you this exceeded even our wildest estimates.

The legal doctrine of "Respondeat Superior" was posted here in order to confer upon Saddam Hussein, constructive culpabiltiy for the acts of the terrorists holding Iraqi Diplomatic Passports, upon the suggestion by msquared that an accuser would be required to show that Saddam personally directed the terrorists to murder an American Citizen.

Truly, it is a scary thing when politics and religion are mixed. I felt as though I was responding to drones, or cult members. There was no point in which I could level with them. So I gave up.

why does BUSH not see,.....

that the world is watching,....and they will remember

The deaths in NO from the lengthy evacuation process are sad, and I hope that after-action reviews help us to prevent future recurrences. When an incident of this magnitude occurs (eclipsing any plans/projections/preparations) we unfortunately have to use military type triage, which includes accepting that some will die and using our finite resources to help those who can be helped.

It was my undertanding that while NO had some flooding from the hurricane, the area was comparably small in relation to what we saw after the levee broke.

How many times do you have to be told that the flooding occurred on Tuesday and not Monday...I know I have mentioned it to you on at least 3 separate posts...On Monday nobody was trapped in their houses since there was no major flooding...

As to using "infrared technology" to detect the survivors well hon. we don’t have any...that is a 1960 era technology that is no longer in use...We now use thermal imagery 1990's era technology, which is far more refined...the point is moot since there was no flooding on Monday....

what are u gonna do carry around a 40 inch plasma tv that u can t plug in ...u know that every store owner is going to claim 100 % loss whether or not that is the case ...is nt it more important to try to save the lives of people who are stranded and sick and starving than have some ***hole w/ a gun shoot them ??? the situation in new orleans is so messed up ...the gov t really blew it ...bush is the worst ..that they were nt there the next day w/ food and water and relief workers is a disgrace ...what do u do if u have no money ,no place to evacuate to ..and u r running out of food ..people thought bill clinton was bad for getting a blow job in the white house ..well bush has screwed and killed thousands ..he should be impeached and thrown out of office ..who did he ask to help w/ the relief ?? bill clinton !! Zarek

u r a fu8king idiot

Oh my dear< but I did vote for bush

It's quite funny but every single person in this thread that has claimed to be wearing no meakeup in their pictures CLEARLY looks like they are wearing makeup! even if it's just eyeliner or lipstick, still counts as not being au naturale.


we all do it, why make excuses for it? It's part of being a woman. Men here's a newsflash for you: even the most natural looking women wear at least a little bit of something.

To quote Doris Day I think it was: (!?!?) "it takes me an hour to look like I am not wearing make-up at all!"

Why????? Bush didn't cause the hurricane! food , supplies are great and Im sure they will come to good use BUT I believe we as a country donated over 10 bill to the sunami effort and countless other. Loans Getting repaid?

Yes we are ok! We actually can take care of ourselves!! Wish other countries could do the same.. Thats why we are the "superpower of the world"

My point was that my sister and these people got MOVING on a minutes notice.Thats entirely different to accepting death .They wanted to LIVE so they ran and with no thought of wat,who and where..Thats my point

this is why: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/celeb.html

From what the news has reported I don't think these folks knew what they were up against. I think the mayor should have told these folks, 'Hey look we have a cat 4 maybe 5 hurricane approching and the leeves are not built to withstand this. Get out now'.

I find this an offensive juxapostion to just trivialize human suffering in this way. What a careless notion. Hope that noone ever trivializes your suffering in such a way.

I had suggested in another forum that they could drop food and water out of hellicopters to the people scattered about wating to be rescued from their roof tops,...it was a suggestion that was scoffed at,...4 days later it was a suggestion that was implemented,...and seemed to work pretty well.....with air bases so close to the affected area why wasn't it done sooner?

Somebody mentioned it earlier. What does a bus ticket to the next city cost?

I remember interviews with residents on the week prior to the disaster. Many placed their fate with god. They chose to stick it out. No one mentioned being incapable of leaving.

Totally obvious to me other are in fear to admit this they don't want a possible race war on their hands, so people are just going to say over and over again race and or class had nothing to do with it...And how many people leave an area they live in when there's a warning of bad weather? Especally when they don't have money, for gas, lodging, food...I wonder how many of these people that died were old, or handicapped on monthly checks? We will find out...Soon.

I honestly think people were hoping for the best case scenario. Many times, we've witnessed hurricanes coming toward the coast only to sputter out or change course. I think the residents believed this and decided to hunker down.

I'm white actually the color of my skin is white and in my opinion it's racism, I don't care what others think, just my opinion...It's also racism of class "Poor people, and African Americans..."

Yep before bushy boy and his croonies even went out on their little tour of the destruction they were patting each other on the back like a rerun of cops good old boys, "You can put the race card away for a rainey day..." I don't think so what happened here is racism at it's finest and I thought we were beyond all this. Bullshit we bomb the crap out of a country because they might have weapons of mass destruction, and none were ever found..Then one of our greatest cities is neglected for awhole week during a disaster because the victims were people of color, and poor it's very clear to me...

^^^ I can defend Irishmary's posts.. But I won't touch this one ;-)

You can put the "race-card" away for a rainy day.

The USA should bring in some engineers from Holland to assist in planning things. They have reclaimed land from the sea, and have done an excellent job at keeping their country safe - even though it is mainly below sea level.

The only thing they would have to learn about, and factor in, is the physics behind the weather there.

It won't ever happen, based on good ol' Yankee pride though.

No. It shouldn't be rebuilt. Why? So every year people can suffer and rebuild and suffer and rebuild? I know New Orleans has suffered from natural disasters alot already but why do people have to live in places that are potentially dangerous. I have considered moving closer to the ocean many times because I love it but I can't get over the troubles that come with living by the ocean, not to mention how expensive it is. No, I think I will stay in the interior of BC where I do feel safe and I know my family is safe. I am not staying out of fear, I am staying due to pure logic.