Making Baby Jesus Cry

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by nononono
What an unbelievable mess. Here's the full version of what Nagin said on CNN about this. Blanco's office was apparently unavailable for comment:

NAGIN: Look, I've gotten promises to -- I can't stand anymore promises. I don't want to hear anymore promises. I want to see stuff done. And that's why I'm so happy that the president came down here, because I think they were feeding him a line of bull also. And they were telling him things weren't as bad as it was.

He came down and saw it, and he put a general on the field. His name is General Honore. And when he hit the field, we started to see action.

And what the state was doing, I don't frigging know. But I tell you, I am pissed. It wasn't adequate.

And then, the president and the governor sat down. We were in Air Force One. I said, 'Mr. President, Madam Governor, you two have to get in sync. If you don't get in sync, more people are going to die.'

S. O'BRIEN: What date was this? When did you say that? When did you say...

NAGIN: Whenever air Force One was here.

S. O'BRIEN: OK.

NAGIN: And this was after I called him on the telephone two days earlier. And I said, 'Mr. President, Madam Governor, you two need to get together on the same page, because of the lack of coordination, people are dying in my city.'

S. O'BRIEN: That's two days ago.

NAGIN: They both shook -- I don't know the exact date. They both shook their head and said yes. I said, 'Great.' I said, 'Everybody in this room is getting ready to leave.' There was senators and his cabinet people, you name it, they were there. Generals. I said, 'Everybody right now, we're leaving. These two people need to sit in a room together and make a doggone decision right now.'

S. O'BRIEN: And was that done?

NAGIN: The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, "No, you guys stay here. We're going to another section of the plane, and we're going to make a decision."

He called me in that office after that. And he said, "Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor." I said -- and I don't remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O'BRIEN: You're telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

NAGIN: Yes.

S. O'BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?

NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the -- I was abdicating [I'm guessing he really said advocate - this was a rush transcript] a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

S. O'BRIEN: And the governor said no.

NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn't happen, and more people died.

Since Blanco wouldn't put the state government's operations under federal control, it's her fault that FEMA hasn't been doing its job?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I can't believe that Souter didn't include praise for Rehnquist when he spoke to Linda Greenhouse, and you can't believe that that New York Times wouldn't have recited any such comments in its article. One of us must be wrong.

I acknowledge that the media, especially the liberal media, like the NYTimes is biased and slants its stories, but why would Linda Greenhouse slant her story to omit Souter's praising eulogisation, when there was plenty of other media reports of Rehnquist's other colleagues (all of the others) praise (including but not limited to Ginsburgs comments), thus making Souter look like a classless buffoon? Why Ty, why?

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I missed that.

You spend a lot of time attending to the public utterances of people like Sean Penn and Alan Dershowitz (and, of course, HRC) who bother you. .

The Dersh-bag comment was on Fox, its not like I am searching the back alley world of the blogs to find this story.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If it was the gays who bothered you, I would say you were repressed, NTTAWWT. I think it means you're a closet liberal.

Welcome aboard.

The babyjesus is all things to all people.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Since Blanco wouldn't turn the entire state government over to federal control, it's her fault that FEMA hasn't been doing its job?

Was that the single option made available to her? And you are actually defending her apparent decision to play politics and worry ovre turf battles when thousands and thousands of people's lives were on the line? Shame on her.

I am looking forward to having the facts come out, because it looks to me as though she has been both ineffectual and obstructionist, a deadly combination.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Good point. So when making a rescue, the Coast Guard determines whether a boater is beyond three miles from the shore, and only then proceeds? Thanks for clearing that one up.

I have very little doubt that when the spin subsides, it will be determined that Nagin and Blanco, inter alia, made some errors, but I have a very hard time believing that one of them will be failing to have timely asked for federal aid. If there's anything that most states do very well, it's ask for federal resources, and Louisiana is surely right up there in this department.

Jurisdiction is mean low tide as an ordinary matter. The 3-mile boundary is to develop minerals, etc. But the federal gov't still has jurisdiction over the "seas" there.

As for asking for federal aid, that rather misses the point. If a partner gives you an assignment, and says "you're responsible for this" you don't wait until the filing deadline to tell him you have questions A, B, and C, problems M, N, and O, and need resources X, Y, and Z, and then tell him to solve it at that point, because he's the partner.

We live in a federal system. That means that states are primarily responsible for things like this, and it is there responsibility to tell the federal government that they need help, and they should do so in a way that actually allows that help to be provided. From what I can tell, neither N.O. nor La. had a plan for a storm of this size, nor did they develop a plan in conjunction with FEMA. The initial responsibilty for that has to rest with the state. When Blanco or Nagin comes up with some evidence that they, or their predecessors, had been beating up on FEMA for years, and getting the Heisman, I'll give your spin some more credibility. As it stands, they're trying to deflect the blame for their own poor handling of the planning onto the overwhelmed problem solvers that came in to a situation worsened by their own planning.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Good point. So when making a rescue, the Coast Guard determines whether a boater is beyond three miles from the shore, and only then proceeds? Thanks for clearing that one up.

I believe all interstate navigable waterways are under fed jurisdiction (including the rivers), though I could be wrong. For example, it is the coast guard that was in charge of determining to what extent the Miss. would be able to carry aid/rescuers after the storm hit (it isn't navigable below Natches, about 135 miles upriver, due to wrecks apparently). I have no clue if it is sole or joint jurisdiction.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by nononono
Ty, according to that transcript of Nagin, Blanco couldn't or wouldn't make a decision when she had the president right in front of her offering options. Granted, the transcript doesn't say what the Pres. offered, but if it is true she needed 24 hours to make a decision, then she truly has no business being in charge of anything.

I think that's referring to these two paragraphs from the WaPo article you posted earlier:

• Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.
  
  The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Stop and think about this for just a second. The conservatives here -- well, Penske mostly -- are busy blaming state officials for not doing their job. Now we're supposed to believe that their failure was in not turning over the whole operation to the federal government? Um, right. And the federal screw-ups were pretty clear before the episode described above.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by nononono
Was that the single option made available to her? And you are actually defending her apparent decision to play politics and worry ovre turf battles when thousands and thousands of people's lives were on the line? Shame on her.

Is it written somewhere that the federal government should be taking over all state and local resources in such circumstances? It'll be news to all the principled conservative on this board. Shame on her, but the White House wasn't playing politics and worrying over turf battles at the same time? Right. It's not like this was her proposal.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
As long as he has helped at least one person, who cares what his intentions are? \.

Efficient allocation of resources. If there were two jobs, attending to the sick/wounded and coordinating evacuees to assist family members in finding one and other, would you assign the volunteer doctors to the latter task and volunteer-lawyers to the former?

[nononono]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I think that's referring to these two paragraphs from the WaPo article you posted earlier:

• Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.
  
  The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Stop and think about this for just a second. The conservatives here -- well, Penske mostly -- are busy blaming state officials for not doing their job. Now we're supposed to believe that their failure was in not turning over the whole operation to the federal government? Um, right. And the federal screw-ups were pretty clear before the episode described above.

The nagin transcript was from yesterday, but it adds some color to the dynamics described in the WaPo article, though it is unclear when each of these talks took place. Sounded to me as though the face-to-face happened after the events in the waPo article, but perhaps not.

I think you mentioned how you do not live in Polarized World and so it's possible there were screwups all around. I agree. But I'd say that putting aside lack of preparedness beforehand (perhaps Nagin's area), it was and is reasonable to expect the governor of the state to do something other than cry and punt. ATthe very least she should have made sure that her people worked with and for the feds or whoever could come in and do the job her folks could not. It wasn't the time to be afraid of decisions or to be worried about appearances. And what was she doing going on tv complaining about not getting help if she wasn't able to accept it?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Where was anyone's plan to confront this? I've read that FEMA identified three situations as the biggest threats to the U.S.: a terrorist attack on New York City, an earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. I've also read that when planners got together to plan for the latter, someone would bring up the question of what to do about the people who did not self-evacuate, and there'd be a lot of dumb stares. No one had a plan.

So there was a huge failure here, by a variety of people. This includes the DHS and FEMA, whose mission statements suggest that preparing for events like this is their job. If this is how they've been doing their jobs, those of us in NYC and SF have a lot to worry about. (Would you trust your average big-city mayor to plan for one of these disasters?)

Are you kidding. The city and state had massive plans to address the contingency and followed none of them. The plans included using the buses to evacuate people? Where were the buses? Why didn't Nagin use them? Why? WHY?!!?!!??

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by nononono
Ty, according to that transcript of Nagin, Blanco couldn't or wouldn't make a decision when she had the president right in front of her offering options. Granted, the transcript doesn't say what the Pres. offered, but if it is true she needed 24 hours to make a decision, then she truly has no business being in charge of anything.

She turned federal assistance the weekend before Katrina hit and the levee broke. WaPo reported it and it has been posted here.

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
2. And blame for the finger pointing lies squarely on Ty's and SHP's shoulders.

Piss off. I haven't said a thing, unlike Penske and you.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Is it written somewhere that the federal government should be taking over all state and local resources in such circumstances? It'll be news to all the principled conservative on this board. Shame on her, but the White House wasn't playing politics and worrying over turf battles at the same time? Right. It's not like this was her proposal.

I don't think the WH was worried over "turf"; LA is hardly turf they wanted to grab (if so, they could have, and worried about the legal, political and other consequences later). No, the turf protection was Blanco's, unless there is some other reason she refused the help she criticized the fed government for not offering and/or providing fast enough.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
And why did it take so long for Blanco and Nagin to get the National Guard there? Oh, wait...

Nice deflection but before the Guard was needed people could have been evacuated, why didn't Nagin use the 250 plus buses that subsequently drowned to get people out? Why? WHY?!!?!?!?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Since Blanco wouldn't put the state government's operations under federal control, it's her fault that FEMA hasn't been doing its job?

She impeded the necessary coordination. Why are you so reticent to lay the appropriate blame on the first responders?