Crap Throwing Monkey

Not like this. Not even REMOTELY like this. Even the San Fransisco earthquake didn't completely isolate the city like this has, and that was literally the horse-and-buggy era.

That's right, that was Smith. Cooper was being an !@#$ on other topics last night. "But senator, do you have anything to say about the lack of federal response?" "The federal response has been tremendous." "But do you have anything to say about the lack of federal response?" Best coverage I've seen so far has been from the Weather Channel. All their reporters seem to have the attitude of "We don't have an agenda, we don't have axes to grind, we just report the !@#$ing weather."

I'm rather surprised you're not crusading about the killing of that Reuters reporter by US troops in Baghdad the other day...

And considering the vital nature of New Orleans' port to the nation's economy and national security, I'd have been willing to take a billion out of DoD's budget to shore up the levees. (Hell, I'm willing to cancel the bull sh-- FCS, DD(X), and LCS projects to subsidize the price of hamburger). The real problem is: how many people do you think ever heard about the funding slashes before? A $70M cut in the federal budget doesn't get a hell of a lot of press...and even if it did, most people are embarrassingly unable to do the common-sense risk-reward analysis that shows that spending $70M to prevent the dozens of billions of dollars disaster we've had might be a good trade. But it's like I said yesterday: that's the definition of government. The short-term trade-off of a $70M budget item for a long-term risk of a multi-billion dollar cost looks good to people who can look at that risk and say "Well, it's not likely to happen on my watch." That holds as true for the President and Congress as it does for that pinhead of a mayor in New Orleans.

God damned Thais and Indonesians...don't they know that it doesn't take ANY time to figure out a response? Why aren't their planes in the air above New Orleans RIGHT NOW dropping water on people's heads?

"We're living like animals! So let's act like animals! How could this situation get so bad?" I am honestly ashamed to be an American.

Haven't been watching the news this week, have you?

Yes, apparently you are an idealist.

Who wouldn't? No one's ever lost an entire city before...

FEMA was created for response. Preparatory planning is a local responsibility. The mayor's preparatory planning was nonsense, if only because he didn't have the resources to properly execute an emergency plan he should have requested aid. But FEMA was never going to walk into New Orleans and say "Here's what you have to do"...and if they did, you'd pitch a fit because the federal government would have been greatly overstepping its bounds.

No. You pick places no one notices. People still haven't missed Iowa.

I didn't make it in a vacuum, I qualified it the same way you are!!!! Again, read the whole post, you !@#$ing idiot!

I don't recall Miami being under as much as 20 feet of water with most of the infrastructure shattered, either.

Plus, there's a difference between "field hospitals" and "medical teams". I heard 40 medical teams...but a lot of them are apparently at one hospital (at the NO airport).

Been reported all morning. I've heard as many as 400 resigning...which would be about a quarter of the force.

The media sucks. I heard FOX and CNN yesterday report on conditions at Charity Hospital. Two completely different and diametrically opposed stories. I was hearing about the FEMA deployments two days before the hurricane hit, though. Everyone right now is so stressed out over this, no one seems to be thinking back any farther than what happened yesterday. Makes for a lot of revisionist history.

That was inaccurate on my part. Lots stayed on in NO. But a lot of police have walked off the job. Not that I can blame them...but things like that are usually - almost always, I'd say - attributable to poor senior management. Which I said, if you'd bothered to pull your head out of your ass and read my entire post.

In Miami they were quick. In Homestead, it was something like a week, and while people bitched a lot, there was still less bitching than there is now. (And ironically Bush Sr. was crucified over it, too.)

I've seen it in a bunch of different places. TV (one thing I saw on TV, for example, that I haven't seen in print is that FEMA deployed 40 emergency medical teams to NO, all arriving before today. They deployed something like 24 in ALL of the hurricanes last year), links, newspapers. Some of it is in the links I posted yesterday somewhere. People assume that, because the response can't keep up with conditions, it's weak. It's not, the response is immense. 50k troops, a naval task force, medical and rescue teams from all over the country (the Swiftboat guys from California saved hundreds of lives yesterday) deployed in less than a week is an incredible feat. If it's still not enough for conditions, that doesn't mean it's not an incredible feat...it just shows how ungodly horriffic the conditions are. Like I've said before: New Orleans has ceased to exist as a city. For all the support the region can provide to the response forces, we might as well be trying to pull 50k people out of the Amazon basin.

Rudy's administration had a long history of exerting good municipal control over NYC. He had much better management skills than this yahoo in New Orleans, and I don't recall his emergency services ever abandoning him. Hell, I don't even know if he's a Republican or Democrat. And I generally don't like his politics, not since he grossly abused RICO to take down Drexel-Burnham. But keep pretending everything's a partisan issue.

I think they're airlifting to the Superdome, for the most part. Some of the medical cases are being airlifted to the airport. Probably a few are getting out of town...but I don't think anyone ever gave any thought to how to get people out of town after it's shattered like this.

I don't know that anyone sitting in the president's chair would have made a difference; the decisions at the root of the problem were taken at a much lower level long before this happened. Only federal-level thing I can think of that might have mitigated this would be some sort of a QC review process at DHS for establishing the completeness of municipal emergency management planning. But strong leadership from the White House wouldn't have helped much; the convulsive relief efforts are less a function of high-level federal leadership than they are of abyssmal local conditions. Other than that, nice post. Very nice synopsis of how the chain of communication got so screwed up.

If he were Rudy G he wouldn't have lost control of his city. Although Rudy didn't have to deal with an ongoing disaster. Planes hit, buildings fell...event's over, time for clean-up. It's not like planes and buildings fell from the sky for a full week.

Because people think life is like TV, where if something is failing it means that someone screwed up. We live in such a risk-averse society that most people can't fathom that sometimes sh-- just happens and life is messy.

And air drops aren't precision, either. Where you aim and where it lands are two different points, sometimes vastly different.