Crap Throwing Monkey

Uh, no. They're busy responding to a major natural disaster. Really, if ANYONE at FEMA was sitting around watching CNN right now, you'd be shitting a brick. And if you're going to make that argument anyway, you could just as easily turn it on its head and ask why CNN didn't contact FEMA and say "Hey, did you know...?" If CNN's the only people who knew a crisis was developing, why didn't they do something about it? Looking for someone to blame right now is bull sh--. In a crisis, communications always breaks down. The Pentagon's mission is by definition crisis management, they spend billions of dollars on communication, and they plan on communication breaking down anyway. It's what happens. If you know a way to keep it from happening, permanently for all eternity, patent it and you'll be a rich man...

I think a lot of people simply aren't understanding "chaos". "Chaos" is something that Jack Bauer resolves in 59 minutes, 24 times a day, so why should real life be any different? Frankly, people (including the media - especially the media) need to start realizing that New Orleans literally isn't a city anymore. Somebody name one functioning municipal service New Orleans has right now. Right now, we might as well be trying to support and evacuate 50k people out of the Amazon river basin. New Orleans, from a functional standpoint, is roughly that far away from the rest of the country. And people are surprised things aren't going perfectly?

I've got to believe someone's head is going to roll for that. I can't blame the office of the president for the mistake (it's not like any president goes into the field and rides herd on every single detail)...but I feel it's perfectly justified to blame the president if someone isn't swung from the yardarm for the grotesque !@#$-up.

Only about 20 countries have offered so far. It's in another thread, somewhere. People have got to stop being so quick to complain. The news is moving faster than we can absorb it, it seems.

FEMA didn't know...New Orleans didn't tell them. It takes two sides to !@#$ up a communications channel. Like you said, everyone's covered in sh-- on that one. And it represents the bigger problem: the situation spiraled out of control rapidly. More quickly than anyone anticipated. It's not that the physical disaster wasn't prepared for, it's that the administrative disaster went well beyond anything anyone predicted very rapidly.

That's what the free market's for. Eventually the gas guzzlers become so expensive to operate that people stop driving them, and the market establishes an equilibrium. Just because it hasn't happened yet, it doesn't mean it won't, or it's not a valid model. And most of the recent predictions are that it'll happen around $4/gal, based on inflation-adjusted historical trends. So we may be seeing it soon.

It was deep, deep sarcasm anyway. It wouldn't have mattered who was president; like people have been saying, this has been a catastrophe in the making for years, even decades. The natural reaction in situations like this is to look for someone to blame; the federal government is a convenient target. The real shame of it is the number of people who are already playing partisan politics with a fundamentally non-partisan event. There's plenty of valid lessons to be learned in this disaster (and they will be learned. They're already being learned. We now know if you concentrate on search & rescue and support over maintaining order, you won't accomplish either. Control must come first in a disaster, even at the expense of lives.) But a small but noisy set of zealots will never learn anything from situations like this, just use it to justify their own narrow opinions. But I think the original sarcastic post made that point more succinctly...

We live better than everyone else. Take that away, people aren't much different no matter where you go.

Mass transit in New Orleans isn't (wasn't ) quite what it is in NYC, though. A car's more necessary there. Most of the people who didn't own cars, didn't because they couldn't afford them.

Did you know that Bush actually asked the CIA to divert the hurricane to New Orleans to raise the price of oil for his oil cronies? Rense.com, baby, Rense.com! It's right above the "actual footage" of the huge "UFO battle" over Los Angeles.

Sen. Landrieu (sp?) from is on CNN right now saying very smart things. In part: "I have a lot of anger right now, but I can't blame anybody. There's no one to blame." Dumbass reporter is trying to get her to say that the response is completely insufficient, just to see if he can get the story. She absolutely refuses to bite, citing point after point of what's being done and thanking everyone under the sun (absolutely gushing about the President; it's almost unseemly). Reporter, of course, doesn't care, because it's not a juicy story. !@#$ing media.

Because hindsight is 20/20. Except after the storm passed, people were still saying in hindsight that the hurricane was over-hyped and New Orleans was lucky. So maybe hindsight is just 20/40.

Yeah, the government drop taxes. That'll happen. The government, any government, is run by the First Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: "Once you have their money, never give it back." As for the release of stocks from the SPR...that blog entry underestimates the psychological impact of the action. Sure, a million barrels makes virtually no difference to overall supply (particularly when the bottleneck's not the oil supply but refinery capacity). But just releasing ANYTHING shows the oil and gas markets that the administration is committed to keeping gas and oil, if not low, at least stable. Even if the amount is insignificant, the act itself serves to calm the rising panic in the market.

Probably because troops and law enforcement can get IN to the other areas much easier. And even so, I've heard of incidents. At least one hospital in NO called for help and was told "We can't get to you, you're surrounded by 10 feet of water."

Why waste the ammo? Looting in and of itself is a small problem at this point. It's merely symptomatic of a much bigger problem: the breakdown of order that's disrupted the emergency response and evacuation and risked tens of thousands of lives. First priority isn't saving Foot Locker. First priority is saving lives. If the idiot stealing Air Jordans isn't endangering the rescue effort, who gives a damn? But if he is...then shoot him.

You friggin' Bush apologist. Where do you get off telling us what to think? I'm not saying this is Bush's fault...but if this idiotic country had elected Kerry, New Orleans would still be destroyed, but all the people would at least be safe.

I don't recall that ever being much of an issue in stadiums...

Maybe that's what the Koran meant. An hellish eternity of the sisyphean task of trying to get laid but not knowing how...

Hell, people agree with Lyndon Larouche and Rense.com. "Agreement" does not make an opinion valid.

And billons of gallons multiplied by .1 cent is big bucks, too. If they started rounding up the .9 to 1.0, they'd be pulling in even bigger profits and people would B word even more. I was always under the impression that the nine-tenths a cent thing was tax-related, anyway (tax at the pump, not corporate income tax). I remember being told that as a kid, but I don't know if it's true or not.

Tell 'em to send body bags.

Which, by the way, is why they don't go randomly dropping pallets of food on people's heads. Your post though...crisis management 101. A crisis is pretty much by definition a cluster!@#$. You don't address a cluster!@#$ with yet another cluster!@#$.

No, repeating "Bush bad" ad nauseam makes you partisan. "Bush is bad because..." followed by a concrete example of poor job performance that's at least peripherally grounded in reality (i.e. not "...because he said 'Mission Accomplished' on an aircraft carrier wearing a flightsuit") might prompt a lot less flack. Notice no one's taking EII to task for his Bush-bashing. It might have something to do with him saying "Bush is bad...because his short-sighted budget slashed the funding for the maintenance of the New Orleans' levee system." It's called "having a point". Give it a try sometime.

Boneheads on a message board saying it is one thing. I really wasn't prepared to start hearing it from senior politicians this soon...

And it would be all better if they water-bombed the population from C-130s...