Katrina's POLITICAL aftermath (keep the political discussions HERE)

I was thinking that thread would be for more macro-level discussions about disasters, climate change, etc. More long-term stuff than Katrina politics.

maybe people really are just taking food and water, and the whole thing is another right-wing straw man. This whole "spectacle" is racist in its conception. You know when they are talking about "poor", they really mean "black" etc.

Living in Chicago, we don't see as much of this racial pornography on the news anymore, but I'm really having a flashback to the eighties with all this talk of poor black people walking around with plasma tvs or whatever (as if those are even useful when everything is covered with water and there's no electricity). Then there are always paid provocateurs (oh never mind...)

Let's see some pictures and specifics. Otherwise, I'll have to assume this is another right-wing fiction (isn't this trick getting a little old)?

for the hard of thinking UK readers, like me: it's an area the size of britain that's been devastated.

Or was the whole thing just a photo op?

i'm kinda reminded of the ep of Reno 911 where Junior drives the jewish kid to his first asian whorehouse

I wouldn't be so pessimistic about that - most people don't know that stuff because they don't need to. When the need arises, people can be amazingly adaptive.

Let's see some pictures and specifics. Otherwise, I'll have to assume this is another right-wing fiction (isn't this trick getting a little old)?

i'm not right-wing by any means, and i'm disgusted by the way things are being handled at the moment, but i did see a few news clips and hear a few confirmed reports of looters taking expensive, non-essential goods. maybe that's just the typical alarmism of cable news making mountains out of molehills, but i'm not making it up.

Like I said on the other thread, these are the people whose ideological role model, Grover Norquist has been quoted as saying that he wants to shrink the federal government down until it can be drowned in a bathtub. The administration's lack of action is not an accident or the result of poor planning or organization. The lack of a response is an accurate reflection of how Republicans view the role of the federal government.

yeah, i thought about putting it in the not-quite category with missouri, but politically it really aligns these days with other middle and southern appalachian states, coal country notwithstanding. what makes kentucky southern (if it is) and wv not?

(sorry to be off-topic)

http://corner.nationalreview.com

I read it daily because, generally speaking, it is so fucked in the head AND YET these are people who defend, are read by, talk with etc. White House folks. Ergo it's important to track these fools.

(Goldberg is in fact Jewish BTW.)

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And a quick addition to say that over there Dreher just posted this:

GUY HAS A POINT [Rod Dreher]
From an Associated Press dispatch, bad news for the president from a grassroots political analysis:

An old man in a chaise longue lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog." He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here."

Its my understanding that even prior to this disaster NO had the most corrupt police force in the country, so I think you can take it for granted that "helping themselves" was par for the course for the NOPD. Footage I saw was also accompanied by a newscaster saying the cops had publicly stated they had given up trying to stop looting.

otm. the cops ARE the poor people.

as for looting, it strieks me that the looting per se isnt really a pressing issue, so much as the reported violence that is accompanying it.

wv seceded from va whereas we were just wishy-washy.

xpost guys my stepmom's niece's husband is a nola cop. but he'd probably agree with y'all about the corruption on the force.

Arthur Silber's been writing a lot lately on the kind of mindset of the folks in power.

Atrios asks: “Haven’t they done fucking anything in 4 years?”

The answer must be in two parts. Yes, they’ve done a great deal: they’ve consolidated their own power, they’ve demonized all their opponents and smeared them as “unpatriotic” and “anti-American,” and they’ve almost completely neutered the media so that the administration is never seriously questioned by anyone, even by those whose job it is to question them.

But in terms of protecting Americans from a terrorist attack or the aftermath of a natural disaster: no, they haven’t done a fucking thing. They never intended to...

same here. and the reported rapes. that's sickening.

"the Land of Do What Thou Wilt"?

that sounds awesome.

The full answer to your question, to be blunt, is: we don't fucking know! I'm sure the government themselves (or most of it) don't know why things are just not panning out the way they are expected to pan out, as far as recovery efforts. This is a first-time thing for the U.S. in many ways.

Yes, it's incredibly awful and embarrassing... and cruel.

I'm not sure where this comes from but...

"CNN just reporting that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (of California which as a reminder is not a Gulf State) has been leading the charge to get Congress back to Washington, DC for an emergency session. Meanwhile, House Speaker Dennis Hastert has resisted, responding that Congress is already scheduled to reconvene next Tuesday and many Congressmen have important work (fund-raising of their own, not for victims) in their districts that can not be dropped on a moment's notice. Bear in mind that Hastert DID bring the House back from vacation for a special session on a Sunday night to address Terri Schiavo's feeding-tube issue."

xpost Jesus. What a fucking douche Hastert is.

words fail me.

What really concerns me is that there's no real angle for Bush here -- he has nothing really to gain by inaction. In fact, with the Gulf's oil production, he has a lot to lose. You'd think that even for the oil they'd move into gear. The fact that they didn't seems to indicate that they're both hamstrung by earlier poor decisions (FEMA funding), and by sheer incompetence.

Someone earlier pointed out that Bush said "no-one could forsee the levees breaking". Well this is a board of internet mentalists, and we foresaw it. There have been predictions of "this will be worse than Camille" since Saturday. Why weren't troops mobilised then?

Medics talk about the "golden 72 hours" to save people after a disaster. That time is now up, and thousands or hundreds of thousands are still trapped. With no water. In the richest nation on Earth. Why has this happened?

of course, this will not happen.

Know what? FUCK OFF, SMUGLY ANCHORGUY.

Bush Bypasses Senate to Install Official

"Bush used a "recess appointment" Wednesday to name Alice S. Fisher to lead the agency's criminal division. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., had blocked the nomination because he wants to talk to an agent who named Fisher in an e-mail about allegedly abusive interrogations at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo."

its made doubly hard by the fact that reporting in the uk seems so muted (NB I DONT have a TV, so this is skewed). this is a humanitarian disaster, and it seems unprecedented in what it represents. reading of the dying in the streets, the dead bodies. i dont even know what i would think if i read about that happening in the UK, its juts unbelievable. why dont i feel so strongly when worse (eg in terms of loss of life) disasters hit other more impoverished countries? well thats the point isnt it. Q: is louisiana so far from the gaze of gov. power that it migth as well be another country?

Of these three, I feel comparatively lucky to live with the threat of the one prospective disaster that is entirely independent of human action. Global warming = more hurricanes. Dumb foreign policy = more terrorists. But earthquakes, they just happen whenever they want...