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