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If you have HBO, I recommend Lee's documentary, it is excellent.

The one bone I have to pick is the generic bashing of FEMA. The rank and file of FEMA are the about the hardest working Federal employees there are. They are top flight people. I worked with them when I was the legal advisor to the Joint Task Force dealing with natural disasters (we call it Consequence Management to drive any humanity out of it).

The political apointee level FEMA... that is another story altogether. Once you get above the Regional level of FEMA, all bets are off. Clinton's FEMA director being a notable exception. FEMA screwed the pooch - but it was a top down screwing, not a bottom up.

W

Government as a whole let the people down.


Not federal.....not state.....not local. Government as a whole.


But as the saying goes....rely on the government and your bound to be disappointed.

IMO many agencies of the government should be scrapped and contracts awarded to local disaster recovery and aide groups. Rarely can the government do as well what a non-profit group that has specialized in disaster recovery for decades can do.

Just my 2 cents.

Does he also "document" the dynamiting of the levees - a repeat offense from what the government did to these "po people" down Nawlins way during Betsy in 1965?

The cluster**** started with the incompetence of the racist mayor of New Orleans and their idiot governor who would've rather be damned than to cooperate with GWB. If what goes around truly comes around, they've got some bad karma heading their way.

I would agree that the biggest failure falls on the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governer of Lousiana with the Federal Government coming in a close 2nd.

You know people try and turn this into a partisan type of failure. Liberals try and blame the feds (who are republicans), conservatives try and blame the state and local politicians (who are democrats). This is wrong IMO. GOVERNMENT failed the people. All levels. Republicans and Democrats failed the people. Im sure there must of been a indy or green person in there that also failed the people. They all just looked at each other like "so.....what are you guys going to do"......meanwhile the flood was getting higher, the water more contaminated, the death count rising and the damage raising.

I will say however that no one was on the same page. The Govenor came out and said "the storm is approaching, I am inacting a MANDATORY evacuation of the area." Less than 24 hours after that the Mayor came out and said "you dont have to leave your homes if you dont want to". I dont know what that tells you guys but that tells me even state and local authorities were not on the same page.



******Required reading assignment*****
The 10th Amendment

Uhm.......thank you?

A touch more.... the cluster F*** of the people of Louisiana has been an ongoing project for many years and didn't just start when Katrina came to visit. The level (or depth?) of the corruption in the state is simply amazing. One of their Governors (Edwin Edwards) sits in prison as I type.

Anyhow, the Louisiana politicians have been skimming the federal moneys targeted for levee repair/upgrading for as long as the feds have been funneling it down there, and the work on the levees is despicable. I'm not an engineer, so I don't know the terminology, but to give you one example, there are metal enforcement things that were supposed to be put down to a depth of 30 feet and it was found that they actually went down 13 feet. I can probably find a link if anyone is really that interested.

If you really want an honest evaluation of what went on, you should read the book "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" by Douglas G. Brinkley. Brinkley is a Professor at Tulane. I've seen him discuss it on television, and he doesn't pull any punches on placing "blame" where it belongs, and that includes the Louisiana political bunch.

One extremely important thing people want to ignore is personal responsibility, and sadly, a HUGE number of New Orleanians were sadly lacking in that department with generation after generation of perpetual welfare families. The poplulation of the city is still less than half of what it was pre-Katrina from what I hear on the radio (New Orleans stations). I can guarantee you the people of Houston and Atlanta, and probably Birmingham are ready for their "guests" to go back home so their crimes rates can go back down.

The coast of Mississippi was erased as opposed to being doused like the flooded areas of New Orleans. Isn't the press amazinly silent about our recovery efforts here? Maybe because the people here are just going about the business of cleaning up and rebuilding and not standing around on a street corner with their hands stuck out and whining because the government's not there with more handouts....?

Dennis - Falcons fan in a part of Saintsdom called Biloxi, MS