Obsidian Wings makes the case in At All Levels that the Mayor of New Orleans waited too long to order an evacuation. Yes, the hurricane track was originally away from the city, but even after it shifted, there was first no order, then a request for a ‘voluntary’ evacuation, and then, at least nine hours late, the actual order.
(None of which absolves the feds for a substantial failure to pre-position assets, and a very near total failure to get into gear once the hurricane had passed.)
liberal pen pal .:. FEMA: Agency of the Damned has lnks to all kinds of help that FEMA turned away. Amazing.
Sue Ann, who lives her principles and does good in her spare time, is getting madder and madder:
On Wednesday 4 private jet ambulances left Miami to respond to the direct pleas of 4 New Orleans Hospitals that had requested help transporting ventilator patients from the evacuation area.
The jets landed in NO and waited 7 hours on the tarmac then were REFUSED and turned back by the National Guard. No patients were transported. The planes next went to Baton Rouge and picked up whomever they could.
A Florida man who spent his own money to buy 150 flatboats to help with the evacuation was REFUSED again by the National Guard. The would not allow him to give the boats to aid the rescue efforts. He turned back and gave them out in MIssissippi which isn’t as flood damaged.
Food being shipped to the area is also being turned back. Caravans of individuals can’t donate food. If it’s not done through the proper channels of some “approved” religious organization you can’t help.
When I saw this quote on Atrios’s site, I thought it was a parody.
But Editor and Publisher, to whom he cites, is reporting it as straight news:
Barbara Bush: Things Working Out “Very Well” for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them.”
The former First Lady’s remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” program.
Then she added: “What Im hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this [she chuckles slightly]is working very well for them.”
And here’s a link to the audio of the NPR Marketplace segment containing this incredible quote. It’s real. Although some people might I suppose call it a nervous giggle rather than a chuckle.
PS. E&P actually ameliorated the quote from la Bush. What she said on the tape about New Orleans’ newly destitute is: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they want to stay” in Texas.
Long before FEMA dropped the ball, local authorities decided they didn’t need one. See LENIN’S TOMB: Everything has gone according to plan. (spotted via Making Light)
Lies and Truth
Lies
It’s almost awe-inspiring to see the level of energy and coordination the Bush White House can bring to bear in a genuine crisis. Not hurricane Katrina, of course, but the political crisis they now find rising around them. … the storyline and the outlines of the attack are now clear: pin the blame for the debacle on state and local authorities.
And that comes after all the photo-op fakes. See, for example, The Potemkin President but see also President Potemkin for why this slanders Prince Grigori Potemkin.
So TPM’s café has a whole thread devoted to fact-checking the administration’s lies and buck-passing.
Of course, with the gullible this stuff works. And what’s more gullible than the White House media? White House lies on when LA governor asked for state of emergency to be declared. The Bush administration spin succeeds in suckering Washington Post, which doesn’t fact-check and reports: “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.” The Post then runs a misleading correction (“A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.”) which fails to source the error to anonymous White House operatives but instead takes the rap.
More Post laziness or worse: Spinning poll results to make Bush look less bad. (But to be fair to the Post, they did break this story on how Karl Rove seems to have claimed a homestead (tax) deduciton he clearly had no right to…and might even have committted voter fraud.)
Chertoff on Face the Nation: it was two disasters (hurricane and flooding) one after the other; no one could have expected that…
Truth
The DHS was preparing for both a storm and levee collapse. Full details via Isthatlegal.org. Isthatlegal.org bonus: see Eric Muller, You Can’t Cross-Examine A Hurricane on why Chertoff, a great prosecutor, and maybe a great terrorist-hunter, is not the guy you want running disaster relief.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, on how the feds kept promising help would be there tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. Links to interview transcript and videos at Boing Boing. Other local officials argue that FEMA was making things worse, not better. The Times-Pic editorializes that “Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.”
Compare the Bush poll numbers as spun by the Post (above) to these tracking poll numbers:
Thinking just about the President of the United States … Do you approve or disapprove of President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina?
9/4 9/3 9/2 9/1 8/31
Approve 38 41 40 46 48
Disapprove 55 53 53 44 39
New Orleans Begins Counting Its Dead. The death toll is thousands, maybe more than 10,000. Nobody really knows.
Jotwell Blenderlaw