Someone somewhere on the internet is going to make this argument, if they haven't already. If you find it before me, link to it here.
2get
....
You can say, by ignoring thr global warming situ. he will~ excerbate the deadly storms now and those to come?
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/08/chickenhawk-watch-bush-still-on.html
With bonus flamewar in the comments section.
Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh
>>3
Wait, I thought that golbal warming was suppose to melt the ice caps leading to colder oceans. Colder oceans of course mean less storms...
They couldn't do anything about the break in the levee because Bush sent all the National Guards to Iraq.
This is a man made disaster.
"All the National Guards?" No. Yes, it was a man-made disaster in that building a city below sea level next to the ocean and a lake is pretty dumb, but Bush didn't do that.
Let the levees stay broken, I say. Let Norlans be the state's newest lake, and go build Orleans 3 somewhere smarter.
"the two levees collapsed because of inexcusable neglect by the federal government. Since 1995, when flooding from a storm killed six people, public officials, newspaper editorial pages and even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had begged Washington to fully fund the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
The Corps received and spent more than $400 million in federal money, but recent funding shortfalls left $250 million in crucial work undone. Funding for desperately needed SELA projects dwindled, and the levees — designed only to withstand a Category 3 hurricane — were never beefed up.
Why? According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had long warned of a disaster just like this one, the war in Iraq has drained Corps resources. In 2004, President Bush authorized just 20 percent of what the Corps requested for work on the Pontchartrain levees, ignoring pleas from Louisiana's congressional delegation."
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/editorials/article/0,1713,BDC_2489_4045016,00.html
(reg. required)
Der Ehrenvorsitzende der FDP Otto Graf Lambsdorff fordert die Entlassung von Umweltminister Trittin. Die Äußerungen des Grünen-Politikers über eine angebliche Mitschuld der US-Regierung an Naturkatastrophen wie dem Hurrikan "Katrina" seien "selbstgerecht und gefühllos".
>>10
LOL!
translation: German Minister of Environment Trittin (Green Fraction) is accused of being "self-righteous and insensitive" for linking the US' (and namely Bush administration's) failure to raitify the Kyoto Protocol with Hurricane Katrina by insisting that radical climate change aided in the becoming of more and more storms and floods in North America and Europe.
His original article is here:
http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/thema_des_tages/?cnt=718533&
Shitty automated translations from Google:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/thema_des_tages/?cnt=718533&
Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901445_pf.html
Paula Zahn boggled at FEMA director Michael Brown's declaration that the reason about 15,000 shelter seekers at the New Orleans Convention Center have gone without food or water since the day of the hurricane is because FEMA didn't even know the refugees were there until today.
September 22, 2004:
The administration also argues that its new pre-disaster mitigation grants, which are awarded on a competitive basis, will help states pick up the slack. But again, emergency managers say it's not enough. In recent congressional testimony, a NEMA representative noted that "in a purely competitive grant program, lower income communities, those most often at risk to natural disaster, will not effectively compete with more prosperous cities.... The prevention of repetitive damages caused by disasters would go largely unprepared in less-affluent and smaller communities."
And indeed, some in-need areas have been inexplicably left out of the program. "In a sense, Louisiana is the flood plain of the nation," noted a 2002 FEMA report. "Louisiana waterways drain two-thirds of the continental United States. Precipitation in New York, the Dakotas, even Idaho and the Province of Alberta, finds its way to Louisiana's coastline." As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have been repeatedly damaged by flood waters--the highest number of any state. And yet, this summer FEMA denied Louisiana communities' pre-disaster mitigation funding requests.
September 1, 2005:
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
Here's an essay that blames the government for the situation; but it's written from a libertarian perspective, so the answer is not a different government, but simply less of it.
http://mises.org/story/1902
More of the tired old "our government sucks, therefore all government sucks" argument, and vague statements about how the market will magically make everything all right. Because we know businesses are always willing to invest in long-term projects with no appreciable profit in the short term, right?
>businesses are always willing to invest in long-term projects with no appreciable profit in the short term, right?
"Vanishing buffers. Engineering feats that tamed the flow of the Mississippi and turned it into one of the world's richest shipping channels came with a heavy price: Relentless erosion of marshes, swamps and barrier islands along the coast that once acted as buffers to the surging waters from storms. Without them, New Orleans sat defenseless.
In the past 75 years, 1 million acres of marshes and swamps — enough to cover the state of Delaware — have vanished. For more than 20 years, scientists, environmentalists and concerned local citizens have warned of the danger, but top state officials did not get serious about reversing the damage until a few years ago."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-09-01-katrina-new-orleans_x.htm
http://www.ww4report.com/node/1039
"The Bush administration policy of turning over wetlands to developers also likely contributed to the disaster. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands around New Orleans, finding that every two miles of wetland between New Orleans and the Gulf reduces a storm surge by half a foot. Bush had promised to continue his predessors' "no net loss" wetland policy. But he reversed the policy in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Corps and the EPA announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups (Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Earthjustice, National Wildlife Federation) conducted a study that concluded in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary—much less a category four or five—hurricane."
Bush Admits Fault on Hurricane Response
"Scorched by criticism about sluggish federal help, President Bush acknowledged the government's failure to stop lawlessness and help desperate people in New Orleans.
"The results are not enough," Bush said Friday in the face of mounting complaints from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Bush promised to crack down on crime and violence, rush food and medicine to the needy, and restore electrical power within weeks to millions of customers across the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/02/national/w142153D44.DTL
>libertarian perspective
>"A day later the water and food were running out, people were dying, and the sanitary conditions becoming disastrous. Finally someone had the idea of shipping all these people Soviet-like to Houston to live in the Astrodome, as if they are not people with volition but cattle."
Libertarian perspective indeed. And not the benign kind either, but the whiny, over-emotional naïve kind.
>"What was missing that made the looting rampage possible was the bourgeoisie, that had either left by choice or had been kicked out. It is they who keep the peace. And had any stayed around to protect their property, we don't even have to speculate what the police would have done: Arrest them!"
what
Seriously, don't read that stuff. And if you do, do a universal search-and-replace government->pavement. It sounds much more cheerful that way. I'm glad this wasn't linked by anyone fully agreeing with the writer.
Watch professional performer Mike Myers try to keep a straight face as Kanye "Kanye Who?" West self-destructs on live TV.
http://www.dharmaboost.com/kanye-west-slams-bush-nbc-red-cross-fundraiser.html
That's the third time now somebody posts that. The previous times were a whole lot less patronizing.
Yeah, you're one to talk about patronization, man.
This essay says it's not a black vs white thing, but a pink vs gray thing. What color are you?
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html
> Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it. Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion.
> That has nothing to do with me being white. If the blacks and Hispanics and Jews and gays that I work with and associate with were there with me, it would have been that much better. That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal.
And so on for several more paragraphs of patting yourself on the back. I can't help but notice that the people he denounces have been in that situation, and his "tribe" hasn't. It's easy to act morally superior in a situation that only exists in your mind.
He may or may not be correct, but what he does not have is any arguments for it, beyond a horribly overinflated sense of self-righteousness. I think I'd behave well in a crisis situation too, but I don't believe that makes me special, and I don't think I need to write long articles about how well I'd behave in some hypothetical crisis I have no experience with. And I keep in mind the possibility that I might be wrong about myself.
I also have some trouble accepting talk about compassion from someone so quick to condemn people as groups.
And of course, there's this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563532,00.html
On the other hand, societies in Africa don't seem to be able to run themselves either. Take a look at what happened to South Africa or Zimbabwe.
Oh, I am quite open to the idea that some societies work better in a crisis than others. I'm just not going to assume mine is one without having been through an actual crisis.
WWI & II?
Probably not the same thing, but the aftermath in some countries looked similar to this.
Seems we've been thread jacked, we aren't blaming Bush for the Hurrican (Although global warming put it on steriods, but that's another argument all togther) We want to hold him accountable for his fuck ups afterwards. Waiting 4 days to respond, having a croony be the head of FEMA, the Bush family's empathy (Laura "The first Robot" and Barbara "Let them eat cake" Bush) lack of funding and military in the area because of the War in Iraq. Things like that.
And by an annoucment by Bush, Hell has frozen over and Bush says he takes responsibilty for the mistakes. However his PR team figured out it was the only way he could salvage his domestic agenda, especially with Brown resigning after Bush said he still backed him. That's was probably what caused it.
"Takes responsibility" is such an empty statement...
Does it mean he takes responsibility for the murder of the 40 old people left to die in that nursing home?
Then he should be charged for murder.
The Bush administration in general seems to think "taking responsibility" means saying "I take responsibility", and then somebody else patting them on the back. This isn't exactly the first time they've done that.
In some countries, big accidents (>20 dead) are considered enough for the government to resign.
I realize this isn't reasonable in a country of the size of the US. On the other hand, this isn't exactly 21 dead. But I guess Bush "taking responsibility" is enough. sigh
>>33
Does the government resign because they could have prevented the accident or did not react very well or what? It seems kind of silly to just give up the throne when something bad happens.
A meteor falling out of the sky and killing people wouldn't cause any government to resign. But in any situation where the responsibility for preventing and mitigating damage ultimately lies with the government, it's pretty natural for the governement resign if it fails at this task. This way, "taking responsibility" actually has some meaning.
>>35 answered quite well, but I'd like to add a further perspective.
Look at it like this: the FEMA director or whatever his title was resigned (or was fired, don't remember). Bush said he "takes responsibility". Why wouldn't he resign then? (ignoring the fact that it might be impossible, I don't know if US presidents can resign)
>>36
Why wouldn't he be able to resign? Think people would force him into exile or jail?
>Why wouldn't he be able to resign? Think people would force him into exile or jail?
I simply meant I'm not familiar with the legislation - I could imagine a president not having the power to resign. Naturally there is some mechanism for removing him/her, but that could not be accessible to the person him/herself.
I doubt any government in the US would resign just because they screwed up. I don't know about other countries, but I guess the US doesn't have that tradition. Nixon resigned but he was in the process of being impeached anyway.
>>40
12 confirmed deaths, that seems about correct. I never saw any news report mentioning "200 bodies".
1 confirmed murder so far, I assume it's the 7-year-old from http://4-ch.net/news/kareha.pl/1125260828/78
No rape test done?
1 suicide confirmed, that should be the guy from http://4-ch.net/news/kareha.pl/1125260828/79
Some confusion still remain:
"Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed."
Vanishing bodies? I recall one account that said one guy got upset by the view of an ongoing rape near him and the guards doing nothing, he ran out, jumped on a running truck to get them to help but got shot by them, or something like that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/national/nationalspecial/29crime.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5094&en=74a33a33d7d7f26e&hp&ex=1127966400
"State officials have said that 10 people died at the Superdome and 24 died around the convention center - 4 inside and 20 nearby. While autopsies have not been completed, so far only one person appears to have died from gunshot wounds at each facility."
The Bush administration is partly responsible for the horrible response to Katrina.
Still means they fucked up.
42<< Man... I never thought this was so serious where the gaurds would do absolutly nothing. I wonder who'se order was this on.
In times like these government opinion needs to stop because you do not have a lot of choices either help them or do not because if you go half way you piss off everyone. Rendering all politicizing absolutely useless, bush and his team of crack rednecks and money launderers chose to go down this path.
This tragedy was the sole result of our slothful, lethargic beauracracy. FEMA had so many transport assets at their disposal it's not even funny, and yet at least half of these were ignored, or destroyed due to lack of action. Also, the Louisiana State Gov't is responsible for inflaming the issue, race-baiting does NOT help to diffuse a crisis.
Don't forget Pat Robertson. He's also responsible for Katrina from all his "wrath of God" stuff.