Reply With Quote
its not!
thats my whole point Mr. Astute
leave it to the liberals to be the first about anything that happens!
its not!
thats my whole point Mr. Astute
Spurminator has made excellent posts and Dan could learn something. This is not the time for politics.
Correct me if I am wrong but Bush issued a a state of emergency BEFORE the hurricane even hit. In fact it was 2 days before it made landfall.
I am not a Bush backer by any means....but now is not the time to debate this. First you give the relief needed to the area for a sense of normal, then debate the compententcy of Bush.
It is politics to turn this into a he said she said youre fault my fault thing
but its not politics to point out injustice
and it never ing will be
yet it seems the majority of this thread agrees that we should ignore racism because racism doesn't really exist/nbadan posts propaganda/we can't take faded's sarcasm/im too conservative to be conservative
I disagree completely. I think most people in this thread agree that the pictures in the original post display an unequal depiction of those people. I think you'll see a lot of the same sentiment in the Katrina Thread in the Club.yet it seems the majority of this thread agrees that we should ignore racism because racism doesn't really exist
If you ask me the girl in the first picture looks like she's half black or mulatto anyway...It is New Orleans you know...
I think the reason for the different captions is that the first picture was from a story on the impact of the hurricane...and the second picture was from a story about the looting.
They are all looters...but I totally underatand people looting food...I do not understand the people shooting at the ambulances and evac vehicles.
If I was there I'd be a food looting mofo myself.
As for the races of the looters...like I already said...New Orleans is a majority black city...most of the refugees are black...as are most of the looters...
If the situation was reversed and it was a white majority city I think the refugee and looting situation would also be reflective of that.
Why is W turning down help from the international community?
MSNBCWASHINGTON - In a dramatic turnabout, the United States is now on the receiving end of help from around the world as some two dozen countries offer post-hurricane assistance.
snip
However, in Moscow, a Russian official said the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency had rejected a Russian offer to dispatch rescue teams and other aid.
snip
Offers have been received from Russia, Japan, Canada, France, Honduras, Germany, Venezuela, Jamaica, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, China, South Korea, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, NATO and the Organization of American States, the spokesman said.
snip
Still, Bush told ABC-TV: “I’m not expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn’t asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country’s going to rise up and take care of it.”
I'm en tired of this arrogance.
There's REALLY nothing new under the sun.
===================================
September 1, 2005
The Storm After the Storm
By DAVID BROOKS (token conservative op-ed for NYT)
Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.
In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.
The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.
Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.
Then, as David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.
Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come.
In 1900, another great storm hit the U.S., killing over 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex. The storm exposed racial animosities, for this time stories (equally false) swept through the press accusing blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas' leading port.
Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans. As Barry writes in his account, "Rising Tide," the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played "Bye Bye Blackbird" as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.
Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water's pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long's success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.
We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.
Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.
E-mail: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] m
======================================
The true measure of tiny, trivial, ignorant man is being taken now:
September 1, 2005
Waiting for a Leader
George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.
We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.
Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.
While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?
It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.
*The New York Times Company
I like how people give their state and local officials a pass and all of sudden join in bashing the federal govt. Well folks the people you voted into local and state offices are the ones letting you down, I'd be ing at city hall or at the state capital.
thats my 2 cents...
I'm slowly getting caught up on matters, but no truer words could be said.
It's well established that NBADan is not part of the solution.
I'm going to take the high road and blame Woodrow Wilson for this whole mess.
I'm blaming the French.
BostonSHANGHAI, China --Nearly 600,000 people were evacuated as Typhoon Talim plowed into southern China on Thursday, forcing authorities to shut down schools, highways and airports, officials said.
......
Fujian authorities evacuated 286,000 people, ordering boats into port and placing rescue teams on standby, according to the Web site of the Fujian Meteorological Bureau.
Just to the north in Zhejiang province, more than 291,000 people were moved away from the coastline, rivers, aging reservoirs, mountain villages and dilapidated housing, according to the official China News Service. More than 29,000 ships and fishing vessels took shelter in harbors, it said.
600,000 poor Chinese evacuated safely. Isn't there a Maoist re-education camp we could send * to?
Here is some more blame game to rile us up, with the claim that BushCo has been scrimping on emergency preparedness.
September 2, 2005
A Can't-Do Government
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do at ude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
E-mail: [email protected]
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The mayor of NO said that there is a 3 star Army general on the ground that Bush sent in after he (mayor) pleaded for better federal leadership who is "getting done" per his news conference last night.don't really see any one central figure or organization willing to lead here and as things worsen that might only drive more and more individual help away.
The press was expecting the general to be at the PC, but one of the media coordinators for the mayor said that the general told them he didn't have time for press conferences right now.
So it definitely sounds like someone's in charge and working hard on things, we just aren't getting any face time.
----------
And Dan, you amaze me. You could be on fire on the ground one day, have President Bush walk by, have him stop and piss on you to put the fire out, and you'd come here to about the color of his urine. I think you hate America more than OBL.
Has anyone posted Moore's latest rant? Sounds like he'll be profitin.....errr, I meant do enting on this pretty soon.
Way to play the race card Moore.
No one makes more money of American tragedies than Michael Moore...that fat will be feeding his fat ing face off American Death and Misery yet again.
^whottt scoffs michael moore
comes original again
Don't you have some rich white people to go and hate, racist?
i never said i hated rich white people you liar
i said they were full of
get it right liar
you lied about the weapons of mass destruction!
you lied about the link between Iraq and Al Quaeda!
Bush Is The Most Inept President Of The Information Era!!!
I like the cut of your jib
Tpark
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
