I think you misunderstood me (as I expected). I was merely trying to say that because the view of NO was mainly of black victims, America in general was more likely to not respond with maximum effort. They are also more likely to dehumanize the victims, and put issues above lives. I wasn't speaking so much from personal perspective as from the perspective of Americans in general.

I think the short answer to your question unfortunately is "no", which is more than a little unsettling given that we're currently sitting on the peak of the season, which is going to last another couple months. We could very easily have 2-3 more major hurricanes in the U.S. before winter.

So even if those aren't your views, you would rather post that garbage than try to find a way to help and get over it?

You'd rather point fingers, keep hate alive and say "I wasn't speaking so much from personal perspective as from the perspective of Americans in general." than to look for true answers and just let go of it.

That's a great example of what I'm talking about.... it's always... "the other person thinks....." or "the other person says....." instead of saying we need to get past this shit, and work on helping these people first, making sure they have food water and shelter...... then deal with the other issues and clean our act up.

It's like when I listened to Springer this AM on my way home from work and he played some of Limbaugh, where Limbaugh had a caller saying (and I paraphrase) "These people hit the jackpot, we're giving those blacks and poor people designer clothes and money so they can trade it all in for crack?" and Limbaugh not only agreed but added more to it by saying "this will really make your day, we're even giving them credit cards." (Red Cross cards so that they can buy food and find shelter when they get relocated..... but I guess Limbaugh and his audience are right they'll all buy crack with it.)

Yeah, these poor people flipping lose EVERYTHING wade for days in raw sewage and filth, starve, watch people die in front of their eyes, will have mental scars we can never even imagine.... and we have people calling in on the radio AND radio hosts (most of whom claim to be "Christian" propegating and continuing to push and preach hatred towards victims of the USA's worst natural disaster in whoi knows how long, these self righteous ignorant talk show hosts and their audiences want to begrudge these poor people food, clothing and safety...... from their nice warm homes, as they wear dry clothes and know when and where their next meal is coming from???????

FUCKING GET OVER IT AND DO SOMETHING, DONATE WHATEVER YOU CAN AFFORD, EVEN IF IT'S ONLY BLOOD OR PRAYERS..... AND BE THANKFUL YOU ARE ALIVE AND DIDN'T GO THROUGH IT.... DON'T BEGRUDGE THESE PEOPLE ANYTHING..... ASK YOURSELF WHAT WOULD CHRIST DO????? WHAT WOULD YOUR GOD THINK OF THE HATRED AND PETTINESS YOU DISPLAY?

CNN is breaking with the story that "FEMA director Michael Brown (is) being sent back to Washington; Homeland Security Director Chertoff to announce new leader for on-the-ground Katrina relief efforts, senior administration official tells CNN."

There isn't a link yet for this on CNN.

Why? He did such a good job; Katrina didn't kill a single Arabian horse after all.
;)

Well, its the natural outcome of his disassembling strategery. It's a good move, given the track record...there's nothing that can be done to undo this tragedy, but at least it seems that the leviathon is finally moving.

Now hold on. I actually heard that segment on Rush's show wednesday, I happened to be in my car at the time (usually I'm working). I heard the lady call in. Rush did NOT agree with her. He told her she was wrong and that these people didn't hit the jackpot. When she said they'll trade clothes for crack he asked her why she was so angry.

You really don't know what you are talking about here and are straight up lying. I'm working on finding a transcript from that segment and when I do I'll post it up here so everyone can see how you are lying.

---
ok found it

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/dai...ain.guest.html

Now that lady cynthia that called in, she's a disgrace, she doesn't speak for me, rush, or any other conservative. But after you read this transcrip tell me again that rush agreed that these people hit the jackpot and can't wait to buy crack with it.

You wear your partisanship on your sleeve, pan. Whether you want to admit it or not. and your spreading of misinformation and lies doesn't help your credibility one bit.

I am not lying, I said I heard it on Springer and paraphrased..... which is the Left's version of Limbaugh and if you find the transcript and show his response was different and altered by Springer.... then I will appologize for jumping to conclusions.... but knowing Limbaugh and how he blamed the London bombings THE DAY of the bombings on the left I was not surprised.

So maybe Springer is the liar? Don't listen to springer he'll rot your brain with his lies.

Two flavors...MSNBC link... and story from CNN

Having read your transcript, I will admit again..... I heard my version on Springer having taken a vow never to listen to Limbaugh again after the British bombings.

It does appear from the transcript Rush tried to handle it well and didn't agree.

He did have to jab the Dems.... I guess that is why he makes his huge money though..... just as Springer makes his jabbing the GOP.

Both sides are wrong and I have been saying that. I have never said I was non-partisan, in fact I have always admitted to being Left, but I am willing to listen to the right and will agree and work with them when needed..... this is a time when partisanship needs to be thrown out and we need to work together.

What we have seen from our showings of a show on each side is that the talking heads are spewing hatred, taking jabs and using this tragedy to further their side.

It's wrong. And I admit I was wrong for believing what I heard on Springer before checking it out.

sorry for calling you a liar, then. :icare:

Lol.... now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. No reason to be sorry, I was called out and rightfully so. I'm man enough to admit I was wrong and that I should have checked the facts, and not just 1 side.

And I have admitted in other threads, I am as big of a hypocrit as anyone else... I can be very partisan as I shout the partisanship needs to end.... I think I'm in the majority there though.... where ya know the partisanship is wrong but then you see something you totally disagree with or "a shot fired" and the passion bubbles over before the mind can process and be rational.

I love happy endings. Dabs eyes and sniffles

:)

I still don't think you're understanding me. I was trying to point out the inherent racism in the reaction of the country. Unless you expect me to just look past racism, which I really don't see being of any help. One thing I will not stick my head in the sand over is racism.

Nor should you..... but there were better ways to say what you said. And yes, unfortunately there is inherent racism from ALL races..... but we shouldn't be using that as an excuse or as a way to force more guilt across the US......

People are people and noone deserves what these people have gone through the past 2 weeks.

I'm not forcing guilt on anyone. Honestly, I can see much justification for racism. It is other people who chose to attach negative connotation to what I said. And I don't see any better way to get my point across. I think maybe I could've trimmed 3 words from my initial comments, but that wouldn't have had the same emphasis IMO. I think I was extremely succinct and to the point.

Are y'all arguing about something, because honestly, I can't tell :) I wasn't under the impression that anyone was saying that the residents of New Orleans deserved what they got, only that alan was saying he believed that inherent racism affected the nature of the response. Am I missing something?

Couldn't agree more, pigglet! I hear alan's argument, and I feel pan's anger. I agree with both.

meembo

word. my perception was that they were sort of flip sides of the same coin, or bastard cousins or something. all of a sudden there's this contention, and i'm not seeing the point of departure. i think we should all be a little pissed right now (i'm a little scared. southern state, hurricane = happen), and the extent to which poverty and race are intertwined, or whether any inherent associated apathy is involved in the sluggish response, I think, are very real and important questions. I have to say, it's hard for me to imagine that if the Hamptons or Manhatten was in this kind of shit, that they'd be letting those people chill out for a week or so before they got aid to them. I realize it's not that simple, but I think it might be a real factor.

Good to see Bush finally woke up to the PR nightmare he has on his hands and took the head of FEMA off the relief efforts...

Sadly, instead of just admitting the guy is an incompetant twit, they are still saying, "this isn't a demotion", "he's done a comendible job", etc. Not that I expected them to but it would have been nice to hear them say, "He blew it. When we needed FEMA most, the head of the organization let us down. We are rectifiying that situation. Now let's roll up our sleeves and make this happen."

This approach while respectable would raise too many questions that the Admin would like left unasked. It wouldn't be good politics.

Putting someone in charge who seems to have a clue was a good move (if way late).



Note: This is not to say, FEMA is the only party blame. Read my posts, I think we can all agree that there is plenty of blame to go around at all levels.

From what little I have seen so far on the national news programs, it seems that our response to the hurricane victims has been large and continues to pour in. The major critizism seems to be around the slow evacuation and aid to those gathered at the Superdome and the Convention Center.

Just how late was the response? How many lives did the FEMA delay cause? It seems to me that the people evacuated are in better shape than those still in their houses.

Just how fast can we evacuate a whole city anyway? I guess I have more research to do. From what I can tell so far, it seems that more lives would have been saved by better planning at the local and state level than anything that the feds could have done.

I agree, I'm not trying to use this to slam Bush, but in all honesty, I feel a truly strong president would not have waited this long to "reassign" someone screwing up so badly. Much the same way voters maybe "reassigning" people as soon as elections can be held.

My feeling is that Bush was too scared to admit he had a problem, and tried to show strength by sticking with the man (it wasn't Bush doing the reassigning, from what I read it was the Homeland Secretary who did). A truly strong man stands up and says, "I made a mistake and I'll rectify it."

Springer is the LEFT version of Limbaugh? Where the hell have I been? I always thought Springer was just a disgusting freak show. I havn't watches/listened to Springer OR Limbaugh for years and years- they are equally in poor taste, IMO.

Springer has a radio show and he's good. Very partisan but he's good at it surprisingly.

Michael Brown (aka "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" -GWB) has resigned today as head of FEMA:

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...T-BROWN-DC.XML

This was the right thing for him to do. It is also the right thing to do for the other 4 FEMA Bush appointees with virtually no experience handling disasters:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090802165.html

That is the only way to restore credibility, and it is only a first step, followed by reorganization of the FEMA bureaucracy.

Thanks for the update. Washington state's FEMA regional director is now under scrutiny by the press to make certain his credentials are credible. It would appear his claim to experience is that he helped clear a mudslide when he was young. :hmm:

Brownie may have served as the poster child that causes each state to look closely at their FEMA staff. Why does that sound so hopelessly optimistic?

Bush: 'I take responsibility'
What does this really mean? If he were a Japanese politician, this statement would be followed with "Here is my resignation". Since he clearly won't resign, what does "responsibility" mean? How does the nation hold him accountable? Do we dock his pay?

What it means? "Boy, I have egg on my face, time for damage control".

How can you hold him responsible? You can't, he's a lame duck president.

Although the dock his pay idea is quite humourous.

I guess we'll find out on Thursday night, but I think it's potentially a step in the right direction. What I'd like to know is the rationale behind the lethargic response of the feds, after the storm had passed through, from Bush's perspective. Does he not see it as his job to get involved, etc?

Bush and company really fucked up on this one. This is the first major stumble in Bush's PR machine. While I am surprised that he would come out and accept responsibility, I think it was the right thing to do (which is even more surprising).

Let's hope some good can come out of this.

Do you think this is something worthy of a presidential resignation?

You do realize that the federal response to katrina was faster than the federal response to Hugo and Andrew, don't you?

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05254/568876.stm But I'll probably get spanked :D by host for posting this next one, since it is so biased, oh well, you might as not even read it since KKKarl Rove wrote it. :hmm:
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007508.phphttp://www.windsofchange.net/archive...all_-print.php

No. As much as I'd like to see Bush out of the White House, I don't think this is an impeachable offence.

But, if it isn't, what other option is there? And if there is no other option, what good is taking responsibility? It just seems like an empty gesture.

I would have replied with a simple..."Exactly". But that, it seems, is much too short of a response.

Well, Stevo - I'll have to look into it a little more to be able to say exactly how to respond to that. I will say it's contrary to everything I've seen, read or heard about this situation and its relationship to previous disaster relieft efforts, but until I've had time to check into it I'll hold my tongue. And that'll have to wait a bit. Dinner plans and such.

I'm assuming the national guardsmen in the first article has an engineering degree, that's for sure. :D

edit crap, I almost forgot the second part of what I wanted to say. I went through Hugo, and luckily was far enough inland that the worst thing that happened was my jetski got messed up. I understand it was pretty bad in some parts of Hilton Head and so forth - but from my recollection, the aftermath was nothing, nothing compared to Katrina...primarily because of the New Orleans being 8 ft. below sea level thing, as far as I can tell.

Let's look at some of the finger pointing show maybe a good response so that the finger pointing can stop and we can move forward and build better so next time we are better ready:

Why didn't people (the government) take the storm more seriously?

I remember the night it hit, I was going into work. Drudge was commending the mayor for maintaining a sense of order and not doling out fear.

I also remember going in having heard that the storm appeared to be weakening and the worst was to miss New Orleans.

Noone knew what the results would be. And even had they told, the resulting mass hysteria would have created similar events.

In my mind I see it like this,

I could go out say run and panic because we don't have enough to save everyone.... creating lawlessness, destruction of that which was going to save people and and total out of control behavior which may lead to more deaths than the storm.

OR

I could look at what I will need to do afterward, knowing there will be 1000's needing help and make the best possible plans I can to save as many as I can. But also realize whatever I do plan may not be available or feasible right away.

I need to turn to someone (FEMA) that is trained and has practiced and formed all kinds of plans to do this job. But then, how do i contact FEMA, how do we coordinate things, and so on. (I have a feeling even though we have FEMA, few mayors and governors (if any) are truly apprised of how to respond, who to call, how to get the help needed.

And even then when you are in panic in the manner of which the panic was in this situation, no matter how educated, what position you hold nor who you are, noone truly knows how they will react nor can be called upon to remember every piece of red tape they have to go through.

OR

I can simply not do a damned thing because I truly have no idea how bad it will be.

Why didn't all the buses get moved out?

Well, let's see, if I recall they kept playing with the strength, raising and lowering it. And by the time the buses were loaded, noone can tell me those buses would be loaded in time so when the hurricane hit, they would have been big old corpses, getting blown off the roads and then the fingers pointers would have said, "who's bright idea were the buses?"

Even if the transportation was safe, you'd cause mass hysteria and riots from people trying to get on, because you could not have possibly had enough transportation for everyone. So then the question would have been "how do you decide who can go and who had to stay?" and that would lead to more finger pointing.

Also where would the buses go? there was no evacuation route that I have seen talked over. the traffic jams that already existed probably caused many many deaths. I remember days before the storm the gas stations had run out of gas, the interstates were bogged down with cars that had overheated, run out of gas, wrecked, or just broke down..... traffic wasn't going anywhere, just look at the news the Fri, Sat, and morning before the storm.

So where were the buses going to go?????????

Why didn't you force evacuation?

Well, gee, it's man's nature to disbelieve how bad something is going to truly be when looking into the jaws of death. It's like smokers, you smoke there's a very very strong chance you will die, but until most smokers hit a wall and realize how bad that death will be they tempt fate. Same can be said with storms, noone who stayed truly knew how bad it would be so they took their chances to stay where they knew.

There were those that couldn't be evacuated, the infirmed and poor with no means of transportation, but again, by the time you loaded them, they'd be on death trains. And how can you force evacuation if you cannot transport every last person out?

And having heard some of the people before, I can understand their thinking... "everything I know is here, I'll take my chances." And again as human nature we don't think how truly bad something will be until it happens.

Why didn't the governor/Bush have troops down there BEFORE the storm?

Can you imagine the outcry as our men and women in the service got ordered down there to their deaths? Come on this isn't even a realistic complaint, yet I've heard it.

Why didn't we get in there sooner and help?

We helicoptered people off roofs, but the city was underwater, what could have been done FEMA did prevent (supposedly) that is not finger pointing that is putting blame where blame truly should be.

Supposedly, there were the Carnival liners that were willing to hold people, there were first responders ready to get in, trucks ready with water and food that were stopped before they could deliver.

And I yelled as loud as anyone, why aren't we getting the materials there.... now the passion has subsided and logic is prevailing.

With the liners, how were the people going to get there? Even though the streets were 8 feet under, the liners couldn't come that far in. So you had to lifeboat people.... and again it comes to how did you decide who, and surely with this you are seriously going to have riots and quite possibly see people destroy the very boats there to help them.

With the supplies that were coming in..... they would have only gotten so far and again as we saw with the looting, I am more of the belief riots would have occured and you would have seen people fighting and getting killed trying to help others because it was impossible to help everyone.

Which again leads to the "how did you decide who to help and why didn't you help these people over here?" Even with logical and pure fact answers people would still claim those facts were all wrong and you didn't help over there for this reason or that.

In conclusion, noone wants to see Bush fall more than I do. But this isn't the thing to get him on. Nor should the GOP be trying to get the Dems, the mayor nor Governor.

It's pathetic the talking heads and partisans have turned this into not just finger pointing but political holy war. There was NOTHING either side could have done.

I am not trying to defend anyone, I am trying to end the partisan bullshit and the finger pointing so that we can help these people in the best and united ways possible. We can't blame anyone, for noone has been through anything like it before, and training and hypotheticals are just those.... I truly don't believe anyone was prepared or knew how to handle it and I don't believe anyone would ever have had that knowledge.

We just need to go in and continue doing what we have, doing the best we can to help as many as we can and to rebuild a better and stronger city. Now we have experienced worst case and now we can truly be prepared...... until the next worst case comes through.... but even then we have a better starting point IF WE LEARN FROM THIS AND STOP POINTING FINGERS.

Your analysis is one of the most refreshing I have read on this board and elsewhere.

Hopefully we can figure out how our cities,states, and feds can work together better next time. The partisan bickering will get us nowhere.

One of the top priorities this country needs to have is a complete reorganization of FEMA similar to what Clinton did in the early 90s.

Somebody needs to take a list of all FEMA employees, go down that list and get rid of every single political appointee, and replace them all with experts with the best credentials they can find. Then they need to make a list of all the internal bureaucratic regulations the agency has to follow, and go down the list and get rid of 90% of them. Then they need to make the head of the agency directly answerable to the president.

That's basically what Clinton and Lee Witt did, and the results were obvious. The agency won the 1996 Public Service Excellence Award, mainly due to its praised responses to the Midwestern floods of 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Bush's mistake was to sink the agency back into a bureacratic swamp after 9/11, after using it as a dumping ground for unqualified political appointees. That's exactly the same shape it was in back when his dad was president, and Hugo and Andrew and the Loma Prieta California earthquake hit. After Hugo hit South Carolina, the governor of South Carolina Ernst Hollings called FEMA a "sorry bunch of bureaucratic jackasses." After the earthquake, Congressman Norman Mineta said FEMA "couldn't manage a two-car parade." After Andrew, the Wall Street Journal ran a story saying FEMA was beyond repair and should be dissolved entirely.

Then came Clinton's reorganization, which made the agency not only functional, but award-winning. I don't think there's any doubt anymore that a similar revamping is needed now -- there will be another terrorist attack, and there will be another San Francisco earthquake, and there will be more hurricanes.

Why is the FEMA failure only Bush's fault. Why are we not holding senators and congressman responsible? If you remember shortly after 9/11 bush opposed the DHS. It was the senators that drafted the bill and both houses passed it. While bush could have vetoed the bill, it is not entirely bush's fault. I have yet to hear, once on this board, that the Senate or House should take any blame at all. They are the ones in this country who make the laws and decide where money gets spent. Go look at the bill and look at all your favorite liberal senate leaders who voted to put FEMA under the new Homeland Security department and tell me again how this is all Bush's fault.