Mickey

Um...I wasn't endorsing or refuting any view point, just providing a link to an informative piece which stated clearly that the facts they were able to assemble neither absolved nor put blame on Bush. I'll go back and read it but I thought one of the reasons they thought the jury was out was in fact because the work asked for, even if funded, wouldn't have been done in time. I may have missed it because I am short on time today but I don't think I have seen a post in this thread which challenges any of the facts actually asserted by FActCheck.org in the linked article.

As long as we are going to be arguing about Katrina and who screwed up the worst, we might as well use the facts. FactCheck.org has a good article with lots of information that looks pretty solid and balanced to me. For those interested: Fact Check

You just play one on TV

My wife and I were in the market for a full time babysitter anyway and have the space for a live-in so that we could provide room and board as well as a weekly stipend. She contacted a staffing agency which "volunteered" to help Katrina victims find work. As it turns out, what they have volunteered to do is to charge would be employers $5,000 to list the job they want to fill. Nice.

I'm there with three other family members.

That wasn't the only criticism. For example, he didn't know of the thousands languishing at the convention center even though the networks had been covering the story there. Those people were told to go there buy the authorities. How could the man most responsible to help them not know that? I don't know the answer but it is a legitimate inquiry. I know someone who had and has more experience and who Bush himself praised in a debate with Al Gore: James Lee Witt. The hiring of such an inexperienced man is, again, a legitimate inquiry.

It has always been the case that disasters offer politicians a chance to garner some publicity and to look heroic. They are going to take advantage of it from the White House to Congress and on down the line. The Congress isn't going to sit on the sidelines for long while everyone else hogs up all those spotlights. I'm surprised the hearings didn't start yesterday. On some levels, congressional hearings do have some upsides. One of them is that they can happen very fast and force people to answer questions under oath and to produce documents. That can happen in a suit but it takes a long, long time for those to move forward.

Duuuuude, step away from the bong maan.

It can be pretty difficult to get a real grasp of an event this large and complicated. One thing is for sure, no one is going to want to be the scapegoat for this and that is certainly behind the increased volume of some of the debate. I guess the History Channel will have it all worked out for us in a documentary in 2007.

Yeah, but that is nothing new and it will never change. This may very well be the worst natural disaster in US history so you have to expect that the media is going to go more than a little crazy. There has been very good and very bad coverage of this and everything in between. You can't possibly have a disaster of this size and scope without there being extensive study and investigations for years after.

Encore, Gavin, Encore! Not unexpected since you started this entire thread with a blanket insult of everyone who might disagree with you stating: "Don't worry, I expect crickets. This requires deeper thinking and can't be reduced to talking points or BUSH BAD." So you see, you started off an angry and bitter man and finshed that way. What is wrong with Rick Scarborough and his "Vison America" anyway?? He is speaking at at the "Countering the War on Faith Conference" which features some of the "leaders" whose views so closely mirror the ones you have so often expressed such as Sam Brownback, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, Phyllis Schlafly, David Horowitz, Zell Miller and Judge Roy Moore. Why is associating you with such conservative icons suddenly an insult?

That wasn't meant to target you, just commenting on the level of responses I have received as soon as I suggested that the hiring of Brown and demoting FEMA from the cabinet were legit issues to investigate.

That's right, he was against it before he was for it and claimed credit for it only after he denounced it. He created its predecessor on his own nine days after 9/11 and though he initially opposed the creation of DHS, he soon took the initiative and never looked back, proposing its creation in a nationally televised speech and ran with it from there. Besides, I seem to recall that Bush had control of the House and maybe even the Senate then? I am not sure they were capable of mounting enough pressure to force anyone to relent. I am not suggesting that the creation of DHS itself was a mistake, submerging FEMA into it which is just one of many apects of the creation of DHS is the issue that is going to be looked at in this context along with many other, more complex ones. Was it better to have FEMA at the cabinet level with direct access to the President or was it better to have it folded into DHS? These are questions that I think are reasonable ones to ponder at this point but apparently, just the thought that maybe mistakes were made and maybe they weren't all made by the mayor of NO are not tolerable by some here.

Bill Clinton, in a departure from the norm, elevated FEMA to cabinet level post so that the head of FEMA was able to report directly to him. FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew was widely criticized. This problem may have cost, according to some analysts, Bush his second term. This made FEMA a pretty hot issue at the start of Clinton's first term. Clinton's appointee, James Lee Witt, was the first FEMA director to have prior experience in emergency services having headed a state agency for emergency response for 4 years prior to his appointment. In contrast, Bush '41 had appointed an inexperienced buddy of John Sununu and put Marilyn Qayle on FEMA's board. In February 1996, Clinton elevated FEMA to cabinet level status: Witt

First of all, this is not a stupid-ass conversation, it is an ass-stupid one, thank you very much. As you know, presidential administrations often propose legislative initiatives and even draft them. They are then handed off to administration supporters in the House and Senate who propose them and try and get them passed with the administration involved every step of the way. In the end, it is signed into law by the President who could veto it if he really disagreed. In this case, Bush created the White House Office of Homeland Security just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. Congress had no role in the creation of that office. In June of the following year, Bush proposed, in a nationally televised speech, the creation of DHS. Eventually, Tom Ridge who had been the head of DHS's predecessor, the WH Office of HS, was named by the President as the first head of the DHS. It was created by passage of the Homeland Security Act. Being that the Republican Party was in control of both the House and Senate and that Bush was and is the leader of that party, I think it is fair to say that he had a lot of control over what was in and what was out in regards to DHS. It is up to the various investigations being proposed to ultimately figure out what went well and what went not so well in this disaster. I have no doubt that many people are going to have their feet held to the fire. What bothers me here is that you can't even suggest a mistake on the part of the administration in general or Bush in particular without drawing rabid responses. I'm sure even Bush's closest advisors are able to recognize that hiring a fromer Horse club atty to head FEMA was maybe not the smartest presonnel move in the history of Presidential appointments. Suggest even that it is a legitimate avenue of inquiry here and out come the knives.

Thanks for establishing that FEMA director Michael Brown thinks that FEMA is doing a great job and that FEMA thinks its director is doing a fabulous job as well. Talk about a daisy chain. I said he hired a guy with no experience in emergency services. True or false? I said the guy he hired had prior experience running a Horse ASSociation, true or false? I said the Horse ASSociation fired him, true or false? I said James L. Witt was available and that Bush praised him, true or false? I said that the press knew there were thousands stranded at the convention center before Brown did, true or false? (before you answer:Koppel-Brown; Soledad O'Brien-Brown; Zahn-Brown) You are not even willing to suggest that there is even the slightest possibility that Bush did anything wrong, directly or indirectly, under any circumstances, are you? George Bush didn't create this hurricane nor is it his fault that locals had their own share of screw ups. However, he did hire a man with no experience in emergency services when there were far more experienced people available and he did downgrade FEMA from a cabinet post folding it in to DHS. Further, there is no doubt that in the middle of this crisis, administration officials were saying things in public that were simply not true either intentionally or in ignorance of the facts. At the very least, these issues are worthy of public critique and analysis but you can't even tolerate that can you? You have to launch a rage filled insult campaign at anyone even suggesting that there were some problems worthy of legitimate inquiry. Let me save you some time in drafting your reply, simpy cut and paste: Bush=GOoD.

Social darwinism is the idea that wealthy white europeans were more highly evolved than other humans and that behaviour, be it criminal, deviant or otherwise, was inherited as a genetic trait, ie racial, trait. Language is not a behaviour, it is learned. I used it as an example because it follows, for reasons having nothing to do with genetics, reproduction. It is not genetics at work, it is the simple fact that children learn language from their parents. So though it follows reproduction, it isn't inherited.

Evolution isn't a straight line path, it has many peaks and valleys. Natural selection tends to speed up when major environmental changes occur so that certain minor adaptations suddenly confer greater advantages than they did prior to the environmental upheval. Not all adaptations are equal, some are far more successful than others and so have an effect much faster than others. I don't think we have nullified natural selection. We have just slowed it down a bit aided by the lack of significant environmental changes and our own ability to protect ourselves from such changes. Still, there are environmental changes drastic enough to overcome our technology. An ice age perhaps. Volcanic eruptions. Plauges. An asteroid hit. That sort of thing. Think of the spanish language as a genetic nuance. Parents who speak it tend to have children who do thus it is almost as inheritable as any true genetic trait. Although it confers no direct reproductive advantage, it does rise and fall along with the reproductive rates of spanish speakers. Those rates show that spanish speakers are out-reproducing english speakers and accordingly, the number of spanish speakers in proportion to native english speakers is tipping in favor of spanish. In a relatively short time, we can see spanish spreading to the point where it may one day overcome english as the "native" language of the USA. Of something like language can spread through natural selection even without confering a direct reproductive benefit, how hard can it be to understand how a physical trait could go from rarity to dominance?

A recent finding discovered that a T-Rex was actually pregnant. They had to cut a fossile T-Rex bone they found because it was simply too heavy to move in one piece. When they did so, they found that it was not entirely fossilized. They found that it had medullary bone, a thin layer of highly vascualrized bone previously found only in female birds during ovulation. The bones of birds are hollow to begin with and forming eggs robs them of calcium weakening their bones. The formation of medullary bone temporarily shores up their skeletal structure while forming eggs. When the last egg is laid, the medullary bones are reabsorbed into the body. It is an amazing discovery offering as it does proof of the now widely accepted theory that birds and dinosaurs are related species. It also enabled the researchers to conclude that the 68 million year old specimen was a pregnant female. Of course, since the bible says the earth is only 10,000 years old, I guess none of this research matters and in fact, despite all evidence to the contrary, that 68 million year old specimen too large to move by helicopter can't possibly exist.

Always with the personal insults, once again demonstrating what a class act you are. Take a bow.

This is really nothing new. The ony reason you need a new CJ is because the old one died or retired so the question of promoting from within or giving it to the new judge who will have to be found anyway always comes up. More often than not, in the modern era of the court, the job has gone to the new recruit. Bush is not out of line on this one. Of course, whether he should be confirmed or not is another question entirely, that is what hearings are for.

This kind of post reminds me of when people point to Ancient Rome as some sort of warning to future nations not do what they did lest they fall as Rome did. Of course, the fact that Rome lasted far longer than just about every modern state and experienced success, by the brutal standards of its time, far greater than any other is ignored. New Orleans has been a great and vibrant city for well over 200 years so do we pronounce the entire city a failure because of Katrina? As for the twisted connection between this terrible disaster and evolution, I guess it is better than the approach by other righties, blaming it on gays (Blaming homosexuals) but makes about as much sense. By the way Gavin, the guy who spewed that particular garbage is with Vison America in case you want to sign up.

Right, there has never been a flood before. This is the first one ever so it wouldn't have mattered if it was handled by someone with years of experience in emergency services or by a guy who worked for the International Arabian Horse Association who, by the way, fired him. If Bush at least hired someone capable of watching televison, FEMA would have known that there were thousands of people at the convention center before Ted Koppel told them. It's bad enough that you can't seem to make an intelligent point but then to embarass yourself further by topping it off with personal insults is just classic.

No need to hire Winston Churchill. James Lee Witt, who even Bush praised during a debate with Gore, did a great job at FEMA as its director under Clinton. Keeping him would have been the smart move. Moreover, FEMA was made a cabinet position under Clinton. Bush demoted FEMA by folding it into Homeland Security and then hiring not one but two directors with no qualifications. Those are decisions he made and people have a right to be critical of them if they believe they made this situation worse than it would have otherwise been. I'm sure there were local foul ups and mistakes as well but in this thread we are talking about Bush and every criticism of him in this thread has been immediately attacked with little or no consideration of even the slightest possibility that he might have made a mistake. Going to the scene and trying to get butts moving in the right direction doesn't require a photo op with an aide worker. I thought this was the President that didn't govern by focus groups and polls, that cared about substance, not appearances? Who cares if people would be critical of him or not if he worked to get things done rather than pose for photos? Too bad. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn't get you good press. What is really the thing that bothers me the most is that these guys were all over the tube (Chertoff and Brown) spinning and spinning while people were dying and worse, they got caught saying things what were either bold faced lies or incredible blunders. Bush supporters are so quick to defend and justify his every move that I don't think they realize just how bad his credibility is when so much of this kind of thing keeps seeping out of his administration. When you have key officials saying things that every one who has cable television knows is total BS, it takes a toll.

George Bush isn't to blame for a category 4 hurricane but as long as he is going to troll for photo ops hugging aid workers then he has to take the undeserved bad along with the undeserved good. There are specific actions that are directly his fault. Can we blame him for appointing Michael Brown to be head of FEMA when his only apparent qualification is having been fired as general counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association or does he get a partisan pass from you on that one as well? The fact that neither Brown nor Chertoff knew there were thousands of helpless people at the convention center when to see that all you had to do was turn on your TV is just mind boggling. The man who can fire those idiots is the guy who hired them, the President. If Bush isn't going to fire them then he will rightly have to take responsibity for their so far abominable performance.