Making Baby Jesus Cry

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Since no one thinks any of these people were actually responsible for the hurricane, I prefer a little more substance to my opinions, but thank you for yours.

Dude, you don't need more substance. You just got whacked on that one, but you don't want to admit it. Spanky's right. You can't claim the state or loacl govt was less responsible than the fed for the mess in NO. You can't even try to make that argument with a straight face.

I don't care what parsing of blog wisdom you offer me. Or what investigative journalism the web may cough up to support such an absurd argument.

The simple fact is, the state and city had a primary obligation to care for thier poor. They fucked up. Even if the feds promised from the first time this hurricane was seen on radar to take over all evacuations/safety plans, the city and local authorities still had an obligation to ensure their citizens' safety. Responsibility stems outward from ground zero. The feds fucked up - no doubt. But they were the final fuck up in a long line of fuck ups here.

Now, maybe you don't want to hear that, because it takes away a wonderful bully pulpit you can use to batter Bush, but its true. The city and state can't abrogate thier duties here and then cry "its all the fed's fault." Thats just absurd, and you know it. This debate is idiotic.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I just stated facts. The fact that they were unpreprated for this catastrophe is a fact, not an opinion.

You don't want facts. You want evidence of federal screw ups, and will believe anything that is printed that supports the idea that this was the Feds fault and yet you distrust even the most obvious facts that would show that the state and city screwed up.

The reason why you cite Federal screw ups is because Bush is president. You defend the governor and the mayor because they are democrats.

You say that you are not defending the mayor or the governor. Yet you keep asking what they could have done. You say you are not just trying to attack Bush when you keep citing alleged FEMA screwups.

You say you have heard of no evidence showing mayoral or governor incompetance. The Buses have been all over the news. They were on the front cover of the Mercrury news day before yesterday. There were all over the TV (and we live in the same town) They have been the biggest news item. Yet you don't believe Penske's pictures? There have been constant reports of all sorts of city and state screw ups. Telling refugees to go to the wrong place, telling them to leave and then not to leave, not providing any transportation for people that want to evacuate. You would have to plug your ears not to hear of all the screw ups. Yet you have heard of nothing that shows they have screwed up.

Yet even though you don't see any of this you find plenty of articles from all over the place that critisize the feds.

The President asks to take control of the state resources and you immediately assume that Bush is playing politics. No evidence to suport it, you just make that assumption. But you say you need more facts in order to make an opinion. Please.

You are a knee jerk ideologue that does not care about the facts or the truth. If there was any doubt, you sckepticism of Penske's pictures is the irrefutable proof. If there is one thing anyone that has watched the news for two minutes can be sure of, is that those buses caught in the flood were in the city of New Orleans and were municiple buses.

Look Spanky, kiss my ass. You say the busses were all over the news -- I just said I haven't seen much of the news lately, and have asked about seventeen times for a cite to a story. As I said before, I'm asking because I want to know.

I start with a presumption that the New Orleans municipal government is incompetent. I remain willing to confirm that bias. Maybe you don't know this Penske fellow well enough, but I will never take any picture he posts on this board as proof of anything except his psychological problems.

I have no trouble believing that the state government fucked up, too, though I still don't understand what else they should have done to make a difference.

As I said earlier, the thing that bothers me about this parade of conservatives stomping on Nagin and Blanco is that you all are so self-evidently doing to spare Bush et al. the political damage. They can all share the blame.

Your hostility is to piss me off. Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? You keep accusing me of meaning the opposite of what I say, which means either that you are calling me a liar or that you are not bothering to read my posts. I can deal with the former, but for the love of God promise me that you will always read me posts. Without that, all is lost.

[Nut Case, Sensitive]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Blanco was shouting through Monday that the Bush admin was trying to wrest "control" away from her, thus asserting that she was, supposedly, in control up to that point. Certainly you aren't suggesting that last week evidenced planning & coordination of any sort? That the situation was completely out of anyone's control seemed to be exactly the problem. Perhaps it was an inevitable one given the scale of the disaster, but I don't think the level of chaos & breakdown broadcast 24/7 on TV was inevitable.

It's one of the beauties, or anachronistic inefficiencies, as you please, of our federal system. The Feds can't respond until requested to do so by the state authorities, and even then, unless and until the Feds take over, the State is in charge of coordinating and deploying the requested resources. The Nat. Guard, police, troops, trucks, etc. were supposed to be under Blanco's direction. If she couldn't hack it, or if her command infrastructure was too damaged to permit her to coordinate, she needed to turn it over to someone who (in theory) could do it. She didn't, and fought the issue when the Feds tried to put things under military command - probably, frankly, the only institution with a strong enough command & organizational system to keep it together in such a situation.

For a week people have been complaining mostly about the red tape, lack of communication, lack of direction, etc. I've been hearing a lot more about the failure to get troops, vehicles & resources anywhere near the people they are supposed to help than in there being no resources available - as others have noted, trucks of water & food, flotilas of drs, etc., were trying to get to the area but couldn't get in. The local military bases were (per CNN yesterday) put on alert the weekend before the storm hit, and were reportedly pissed as hell that no one deployed them while chaos errupted on TV (because that would be the equivalent of martial law, per Blanco, who's alternative to martial law was to issue "any means necessary" shoot-to-kill orders to the police to establish order).

I am certainly not saying that, had FEMA/the Feds been properly in charge things would have gone much better, but at least it would have been centralized, which might have helped even in the face of rampant incompetence.

Here's an article that's not bad: AP, Saturday, Sept. 3

Read this article and see if you can identify any competant player. Blanco is accepting National Guard help from New Mexico before the Hurricane hits, but not getting back to Michigan until days after the storm. Washington isn't getting the paperwork out to process Blanco's requests until Thursday after the storm. Bush isn't taking steps he took after 9/11 to bring in military, national guard, and civilian airline assistance.

Enough. It's all NUTS. I'm back to my nuts.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Look Spanky, kiss my ass. You say the busses were all over the news -- I just said I haven't seen much of the news lately, and have asked about seventeen times for a cite to a story. As I said before, I'm asking because I want to know.

I start with a presumption that the New Orleans municipal government is incompetent. I remain willing to confirm that bias. Maybe you don't know this Penske fellow well enough, but I will never take any picture he posts on this board as proof of anything except his psychological problems.

I have no trouble believing that the state government fucked up, too, though I still don't understand what else they should have done to make a difference.

As I said earlier, the thing that bothers me about this parade of conservatives stomping on Nagin and Blanco is that you all are so self-evidently doing to spare Bush et al. the political damage. They can all share the blame.

Your hostility is to piss me off. Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? You keep accusing me of meaning the opposite of what I say, which means either that you are calling me a liar or that you are not bothering to read my posts. I can deal with the former, but for the love of God promise me that you will always read me posts. Without that, all is lost.

Responsibility -

1/3 citizens
1/3 state/local
1/3 fed

Can everybody agree on this and move on?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Spanky
Then why is he still asking about a substantive news article about the Buses? Nice try, but you have to face the fact that he is that unbelievably biased that he could doubt the truth of a real picture that has been everywhere in the news but accept obscure Blog posts as if they are the irrefutable truth.

The dems have their heads in the sand. Ty and Gatti are so full of shit on this as to attempt to pretend that obvious photo parodies, with markers like strangecosmos.com or sacredcowburgers.com, which are sites that anyone can go to, confuse them as to whether an actual picture of buses in NO underwater are what they obviously are. The bias reeks like fresh cowshite.

Here is a site to the louisiana emergency plan:

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans...pplement1a.pdf
Go to page 13, read paragraph 5. It states:

5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.

Here are the buses. The pics have been on CNN and Fox to name a few.









I can't get on the mercury news, but I was reading the LOndon Telgraph earlier today as I am a multiculturalist, and lo and behold respected columnist Mark Steyn was writing about them:

Mark Steyn was writing about them:

[i]Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.

[coplor=red]Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. [/color]

In contrast to all of the above, for comparison, here's a photoshopppe satire. Ty and Gatti are pathetic in their blind liberalism to say the below makes the above confusing. BUt such is the legacy of Clinton and the politics of personal destruction.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Dude, you don't need more substance. You just got whacked on that one, but you don't want to admit it. Spanky's right. You can't claim the state or loacl govt was less responsible than the fed for the mess in NO. You can't even try to make that argument with a straight face.

If I ever start to say something like that, I'll let you know first so you can accuse me of changing my tune. I don't see anyone in the government who's done a good job, so far as I know.

I don't care what parsing of blog wisdom you offer me.

I'm sorry, I don't recall quoting a blog here about any of this. A U.S. Senator, some major newspapers, yes. The Department of Homeland Security's website, yes. Maybe I posted linked to something from a blog about the hurricane, too, but I don't recall it just now.

The simple fact is, the state and city had a primary obligation to care for thier poor. They fucked up.

Leaving the city aside, since I get the thing about the buses and about how Nagin was supposed to go door-to-door to persuade 100,000 people to leave their homes to get on a school bus to go who knows where without any money instead of riding out the storm the way so many people do, and we can just stipulate to the incompetence of the municipal government, would you please tell me what Blanco was supposed to do that she didn't do? After hours of this, I'm still willing to believe that she fucked up somehow, if only someone will tell me how. (I will not hold responsible for failing to clone the several thousands members of the Louisiana National Guard, or for not requisitioning boats and helicopters in the hours before the hurricane struck.)

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Guiliani is a Republican and by extension a leader. Ironically, Nagin used to be a Republican but switched to a party where he felt more at home, i.e. the party of opportunistic finger pointing no-responsibility non-leadership.

Bill White, by all indications, is a Democrat. How, so far, has he fucked up?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Not for nuthin', but I believe Ty's comment about the photos was a global one directed at Penske's years of photoshopping, rather than a literal one declaring that there' can't be any submerged buses in New Orleans. Be in the presence of Penske posts over a long enough period of time, and your willingness to accept or believe any image that he posts drops at a roughly constant rate.

Carry on.

Translation: MY head is in the sand of denial.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

In the midst of so much human suffering, to call aerial photos of buses the "signature image" of this disaster is truly twisted and wrong. Anyone who could think that has their head lodged far up their ass.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Not for nuthin', but I believe Ty's comment about the photos was a global one directed at Penske's years of photoshopping, rather than a literal one declaring that there' can't be any submerged buses in New Orleans. Be in the presence of Penske posts over a long enough period of time, and your willingness to accept or believe any image that he posts drops at a roughly constant rate.

2

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Maybe you don't know this Penske fellow well enough, but I will never take any picture he posts on this board as proof of anything except his psychological problems.

Translation: My head is in the sand of denial so I will engage in the politics of personal destruction to shift the focus away from the truth that hurts my head. LOOK OVER THERE!!!!!

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Look Spanky, kiss my ass. You say the busses were all over the news -- I just said I haven't seen much of the news lately, and have asked about seventeen times for a cite to a story. As I said before, I'm asking because I want to know.

Give it a rest. I have been barely watching the news and the Buses have been in my face since the weekend. You say you havaen't been watching the news yet you are able to cite all these articles showing federal screw ups. To miss the buses you would have had to ignore every news stattion and every major paper. However, I guess this shows you just get all your information from Blogs.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop I start with a presumption that the New Orleans municipal government is incompetent. I remain willing to confirm that bias. Maybe you don't know this Penske fellow well enough, but I will never take any picture he posts on this board as proof of anything except his psychological problems.

You say this now - but you have not. If you really started with that assumnption you should be asking for evidence that they are not responsbile. Not the other way around.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop I have no trouble believing that the state government fucked up, too, though I still don't understand what else they should have done to make a difference.
.

These two sentences contradict eachother. Can you really deny that they could have not been better prepared.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop As I said earlier, the thing that bothers me about this parade of conservatives stomping on Nagin and Blanco is that you all are so self-evidently doing to spare Bush et al. the political damage. They can all share the blame.

This is an ideological response. You believe some people are distorting reality so you fight fire with fire. This also contradicts your earlier statement of not defending Nagin and Blanco. Now you admit to defending them to counter the slander coming from the conservatives.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop Your hostility is to piss me off. Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? You keep accusing me of meaning the opposite of what I say, which means either that you are calling me a liar or that you are not bothering to read my posts. I can deal with the former, but for the love of God promise me that you will always read me posts. Without that, all is lost.

I read your posts very carefully. Usually I take the time to directly quote them. So to claim I am misinterpreting them is a joke. In fact one of my recent posts just compared two of your posts. I didn't even need to point out the contradiction it is so obvious. I just find you annoying because you change your story. You try and pretend you said things you didn't say instead of admitting you are wrong. And then when I point it out the contradiction you say that I am misinterpreting your posts.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Responsibility -

1/3 citizens
1/3 state/local
1/3 fed

Can everybody agree on this and move on?

originally by Nut Case
It's all NUTS. I'm back to my nuts.

I'm onboard. A beautiful illustration of the necessity of basic self reliance - 'cause you sure as shit can't rely on any of those other assholes.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In the midst of so much human suffering, to call aerial photos of buses the "signature image" of this disaster is truly twisted and wrong. Anyone who could think that has their head lodged far up their ass.

Translation: I am still in denial.

Me: After reading that post that is all you can come up with? Pathetic. Come on Ty, put aside the bias for a second. And as for the substance of Steyn's comment, he is right. That picture is illustrative of why people died in such large numbers, i.e. Nagins incompetence before the hurricane even hit. Despite the plan, which I posted, which cited the buses. Please pull your head out of the sand Ty, you are better than this.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

OK, from one of my favorite blogs quoting another of them (hi Sebby!), quoting a newspaper, here's something that suggests wild incompetence on the part of the municipal officials in New Orleans:

Via Brad DeLong, a report from the Times Picayune from July 24th of this year about the New Orleans city government’s plan for evacuating the city in the event of a major hurricane. The plan (presented here in full) was: 1. Make a video telling people that if disaster threatens they will have to get the fuck out of town themselves, because the city isn’t going to do anything to help out. 2. Distribute the video around town on DVD. This completes the evacuation plan.

• In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind; Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult
  By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer, New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005
  
  City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.
  
  In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. “You’re responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you,” …
  
  Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. …
  
  In an interview at the opening of this year’s hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched. “It’s important to emphasize that we just don’t have the resources to take everybody out,” he said in a interview in late May.

So, the city told them in advance that they’d be left to drown like animals and FEMA were careful not to take any action—e.g., planning and executing a relief effort—to prevent this plan from being put into effect. It’s clear that the city and federal authorities were just made for each other. What a nightmare.

Crooked Timber (which links to other stuff on city, state and federal preparedness, none of which I've read)