I watched CNN International and BBC news and like usuall BBC is much better rporting from New Orleans.
What I am missing are maps the clearly show where is what happening. CNN cuts togther scenes from different places without any structural information. The ancor comments are dumb, the undertone to the looting reports is racist. The “experts” don´t know shit.
Nobody is critizising the chaotic command situation. There were supposed to be helicopters dropping sandbags yesterday – non arrived. Was there even an attempt to prevent the levees from being overwhelmed? I didn´t read of any.
Strain of Iraq War Means the Relief Burden Will Have to Be Shared

“Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our people,” said Lt. Andy Thaggard, a spokesman for the Mississippi National Guard, which has a brigade of more than 4,000 troops in central Iraq. Louisiana also has about 3,000 Guard troops in Baghdad.
…
In Alabama, all the major Guard units activated for the disaster have already served in Iraq, and some still have contingents there, said Alabama Guard spokesman Norman Arnold.
Capt. Richard Locke of the Guard’s 1st Battalion 167th Infantry headed toward Mobile yesterday with a force of 400 soldiers cobbled together from four units because the rest of the battalion is in Iraq.

I hope the voters will notice and take care.

Posted by: b | Aug 31 2005 9:51 utc | 3

I was all wrong with the above post. The reason why New Orleans drowned is much simpler.
Is Katrina God’s punishment for abortion?>

In an email message we just received, a group calling itself Columbia Christians for Life alerts us to the fact that a satellite image of Hurricane Katrina as it hit the Gulf Coast Monday looks just like a six-week old fetus.
“The image of the hurricane . . . with its eye already ashore at 12:32 p.m. Monday, August 29, looks like a fetus (unborn human baby) facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation (approx. 6 weeks),” the email message says. “Even the orange color of the image is reminiscent of a commonly used pro-life picture of early prenatal development.”
And in case you’re not getting the point, the email message spells it out in black and white: “Louisiana has 10 child-murder-by-abortion centers,” the groups says, and “five are in New Orleans.”

Posted by: b | Aug 31 2005 11:33 utc | 5

WWL TV is live streaming their program now.

Posted by: b | Aug 31 2005 11:59 utc | 7

@DharmaBum in the other thread points to What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans? published November 2004. It describes the scenario nearly as how it has happened now. Estimate for pumping the city dry according to that study 9 weeks. Estimate of total damage $100 billion.
Sounds realistic to me.

Posted by: b | Aug 31 2005 15:03 utc | 9

Your Town Is Next
The central thread of the New Orleans situation is that there for years there wasn’t enugh money for protecting the city. So no protection was in place when disaster arrived.
The engineers charged with protecting the city from hurricane flooding saw their budgets slashed again and again since 2000, leaving them at the last to beg for emergency funds all this year for fixing just the weakest levees. The very levees now leaking billions of gallons of dirty water into the city.
No dice, said the Bush people. Iraq. 9/11. War President. It’s hard. Vacation. Terry Schiavo. Vacation. 9/11 is hard.
Seeing a community heartlessly stripped of its ability to protect, feed or fend for itself makes you wonder — what has Bush stripped from my community? What have we lost right here since 2000? Education, National Guard, police, gas prices, Medicaid, Medicare, Parks & Recreation, flood control, emergency preparedness?
What’s been taken from my town, in the night, when no one was looking?
The Bush gang has been quietly stealing from all of us, to give to the rich, to run a war of aggression on behalf of their oil company cronies.
This is a bustout, town by town, across this country. A mafia crew is running the White House, siphoning off our assets to their pals, feeding upon America, running up debts for our grandkids to cope with.
It’s catching up with New Orleans right now.
Your Town Is Next.

Posted by: Antifa | Aug 31 2005 16:06 utc | 11

Bush’s solution: Can’t anybody find Halliburton’s phone number?

Posted by: GlennS | Aug 31 2005 17:11 utc | 13

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — A day after Hurricane Katrina dealt a devastating blow to the Big Easy, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday night blasted what he called a lack of coordination in relief efforts for setting behind the city’s recovery.
“There is way too many fricking … cooks in the kitchen,” Nagin said in a phone interview with WAPT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi, fuming over what he said were scuttled plans to plug a 200-yard breach near the 17th Street Canal, allowing Lake Pontchartrain to spill into the central business district.
Thank God Bush consolidated FEMA into Homeland Defense, and brought all those disaster preparation expert managers into the mix. Nothing like a cabal of muddling managers to “manage” to muck up this mess.
The final word?
“That four weeks is going to stop all commerce in the city of New Orleans. It also impacts the nation, because no domestic oil production will happen in southeast Louisiana.”
Holland is built below sea level. Why won’t Bush fly in another layer of management from Technische Adviescommissie voor de Waterkeringen? He can contract them through Halliburton on an IDIQ cost-plus T&M.

Posted by: Lash Marks | Aug 31 2005 18:27 utc | 15

Is there no blame to be placed elsewhere? Without mentioning political party affiliation, was there no responsibility attributable to the Governor, or the Mayor of New Orleans for urban planning? For disaster relief planning? For, perhaps, ordering evacuations earlier than Sunday morning?
[TRULY ANGRY RANT]
Undoubtably there is, and that should come out in time.
But that doesn’t negate the absolutely criminal negligence, no it’s more than that, because negligence implies a certain passivity, the criminal intransigence of aiding and abetting this catastrophe, that this administration is guilty of.
It’s one thing to allow our own citizens to die through passive denial of aid like healthcare, welfare, police and judicial protections etc. Every ruling clique in this country throughout history has been guilty of that, to some extent.
But, the record here–the continual withdrawal and denial of aid–reads like a deliberate program of homicide directed against its own populace. Here again, the Bush administration has crossed a boundary that no other before has.
Call it evilness. Call it neo-con hubris to believe that they could shape reality to what they say it is. Call it a deliberate attempt to control and rule American society and the world through the fascistic sowing of chaos and terror. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who still had half of their critical reasoning faculties left after 9-11.
Call it what you will. But there is no denying the unaccountable criminality of it all. There is no denying the active defunding of emergency needs. There is no denying the government’s burying it’s head in whatever alluvial river sand was left, ignoring the blandishments of mere “scientists,” as the wetlands eroded away at the rate of 45 sq. miles/yr. There is no denying that if this only impacted Louisianans, then the State government would be at fault. But it’s clear that, with the clustering of oil industries in the area, this impacts the whole country and is the federal governments fault. There is no denying that Bush played politics with Homeland Security after 9-11, defunding and demoralizing FEMA, and leaving no clear chain of command in case of emergency. It’s clear that, despite all the bandstanding of the Administration and Congress, no plans have been put in place to protect us in case of emergency. And finally, there is no denying that, for the purposes of waging an illegal war, this administration compromised the original and necessary mission of the National Guard, thus endangering the lives of all Americans.
If Louisianans in specific, and Americans in general, seek to sweep this one under the carpet, well, then I believe there is little help left for us. The Bush Juntanaut (portmanteau: junta + Juggernaut) will simply do with us as they wish, slowly, through a process of divide and destroy, until there is no resistance but that of Nature to their dominion. And eventually, after the bulk of mankind is subdued by this bottomless, unquenchable maw of empire, of power, of profit, greed and conquest, of religious rightgeousness and American exceptionalism; after the humans of this world are laid low, a new movement will come to the fore. But it will not be a political movement, and they will be unable to conquer it. Whether it begins as the mighty roar of the lion, or the quiet whimper of a beaten cur, whether they hear it coming or not, it doesn’t matter. For it will alrady be too late. Nature, personified as Gaia, the whole interconnected web of life, each species in its niche mutually sustaining each other, having been reduced to the state of a moth-eaten blanket, will simply, quietly… unravel. And George W. Bush, or whatever puppet comes to suceed him, standing at the edge of the promontory of power, like Faust peering over into the abyss, will suck in one final fetid breath of hubris, and exhaling, will quietly vanish, taking along those of his kind, and the universe–well, the universe always was, and always will be. It will just be a little more quiet.
So, Seth, and others like you: Keep your arguments of reasonabelness; nurture and hold them close to your heart and chest. Ultimately, they may be all you are left with.
[/TRULY ANGRY RANT]

Posted by: Malooga | Aug 31 2005 19:13 utc | 17

The New Orleans dikes are the sole responsibility of the US Corps of Engineers. Breeching of the dikes by a storm surge of a category 4 or 5 hurricane east of New Orleans was predicted. The failures of the dikes and the flooding of New Orleans are the direct responsibility of the Corps, the US Congress and the President of the United States who did not authorize or build water control levees that could withstand a Category 4 hurricane.
Civilization and control of water go hand in hand. When chaos and floods inundated China, this was a sign that the Emperor had lost the mandate of heaven. Civil war followed until a new leader emerged who could control the bureaucracy and water.
George W Bush has lost the mandate of heaven.

Posted by: Jim S | Aug 31 2005 19:37 utc | 19

BTW Billmon is in top form today and saying it better than I could with his new piece, “When the Levee Breaks.”

Posted by: DeAnander | Aug 31 2005 20:09 utc | 21

I detect a lot of preparatory ass-covering going on on the part of various federal officials. It will be interesting to see what Bush has to say at 5 pm.
It should be considerably easier to slam the Bushies for this criminal negligence, because they can’t so easily raise the shields of fear and patriotism and Islamic terrorism to cover up what they did.
Nobody has yet said anything about the effect of high tide – new moon on Sept. 3.
As for the future in US politics, maybe there is a bit of hope from Giordano’s report of only ONE meeting here:
The Zapatistas Activate a New Kind of Bomb in the Mexican Southeast
Listening to the Voices of an Army (of Organizers) in Formation
By Al Giordano
and his conclusion:

[…] inflicted citizens and their delegates who came to the same table largely unaware of each other, spoke their word, exchanged contact numbers and emails, conversed over coffee, tortillas and beans, sought and built alliances with each other, and talked frankly with the few reporters there to listen to them.
And yet these testimonies here provide only a glimpse into the breadth and depth of this national movement – last week it was 92 indigenous organizations at the microphone, the week before it was 48 political organizations of the left, next weekend more than 300 non-governmental, artistic, and cultural organizations will send delegates – being activated: a social tsunami gathering force, far off the shores of election campaigns and mass media simulation.
And those who look only to the powers from above – to the Commercial Media, to the owning-class, to its politicians and parties – will be the last to see that great wave rolling over what they mistakenly thought to be real, static and permanent. But here it comes, from an ocean of humanity that is today on a mountaintop in the Mexican Southeast, striking out toward… well… kind reader… moving toward… the unwanted and seemingly invincible impositions all around you, too.

Posted by: Owl | Aug 31 2005 20:14 utc | 23

I wonder why no news agency is commenting on the fact that as we watch this disaster unfold and wonder about how effective the response effort will be, people in Florida are still suffering from the hurricanes of ’04?
It would seem a salient point that the people of Florida still have tarps on their roofs and discuss how f’ed up this Administration is regarding disaster response?
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7873338/
While I am certainly against all US tax payers financing the continual rebuilding of vacation homes along places like Myrtle Beach and the Outer Banks, I would think that years after disaster strikes the government would do SOMETHING to ensure that people are made whole within a reasonable amount of time. If the response in Florida is any indication of what we can expect in NOLA, then I expect that this will be a tragedy that continues for decades into the future.

Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Aug 31 2005 20:50 utc | 25

Environmental friendly politicians have always had a hard time selling their ideas–nobody gets credit for stopping the environmental disaster that never happens. It would be nice if this tragedy would give people cause for second thoughts, but I wouldn’t count on it.
BTW a first for me, passed a gas station on the way home from work (Augusta, GA) $3 per gallon gasoline.

Posted by: harv | Aug 31 2005 22:19 utc | 27

Antifa, I just sent your comment to everyone I know.

Posted by: mg_65 | Aug 31 2005 23:17 utc | 29