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

Really?

(xpost)

Bush's reaction will be interesting.

this administration never properly deals with its incompetents. indeed, they are often rewarded with promotions or medals. my expectations are low...

Buckle your seat belts, The reconstruction and relief "effort" is going to be the biggest cronied up slush fund of all time. But hey, maybe some of those refugees can just apply for their contractors' license, steer a few grand to their Republican congressional candidate, and then lean on a shovel for the next 10 years while the checks roll in. That's the free market at work!

For those of you crafting menus at home, that's pork for major Republican donors, cake for people putting "Astrodome" as their current address on initial claims for unemployment insurance.

Really?

Nope, it was actually the size of West Germany.

Perhaps no city in the United States is in a better spot to turn Katrina's tragedy into opportunity. Long known for its commercial fervor, Houston, the largest city in the South with a metropolitan population of more than four million, has one of the busiest ports in the United States and remains unrivaled as a center for the energy industry.

Halliburton moved its headquarters to Houston from Dallas in 2003, joining dozens of companies based here that provide services for oil and natural gas producers.
Halliburton differs from many oil services companies in that it also does significant business with the federal government. Halliburton has a contract with the U.S. Navy, similar to its contracts in Iraq, that has already kept it busy after Hurricane Katrina. The company's Kellogg, Brown & Root unit was doing repairs and cleanup at three naval facilities in Mississippi last week.

Executives at other Houston companies said they were wasting little time in carrying out repairs in the Gulf of Mexico, where at least 20 offshore rigs and platforms are believed to be damaged or destroyed. Tetra Technologies, which repairs old platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or decommissions them, had employees in a helicopter the day after the storm passed to survey the damage.

"I always hate to talk about positives in a situation like this, but this is certainly a growth business over the next 6 to 12 months," said Geoffrey Hertel, the chief executive of Tetra. By Friday, Tetra had been able to send an 800-ton derrick barge it owns, the Arapaho, to the gulf to be used for platform repairs, Hertel said.

If the storm works to Houston's benefit, it would not be the first time a natural disaster of extraordinary size sparked some economic dynamism here.

The hurricane of 1900 in nearby Galveston, which killed more than 6,000 people and almost leveled the most thriving commercial city in the Southeast, paved the way for Houston, located 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, inland, to emerge as a regional center for shipping and oil refining.

The displacement of companies to Houston from New Orleans is an abrupt acceleration of a trend that has been going on for decades. Many large companies, particularly those in the energy business, have made that move over the years, leaving New Orleans more dependent on tourism and other service industries.

A surge of business activity in Houston might lift the fortunes of a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of Enron and two decades of job cuts in the energy industry.

That's when I start my finger-pointing, because a few days in and around this ground zero have convinced me that there are two things the federal government failed to do, and that for these failures there's ultimately no one to blame but the president.

First, an administration that since Sept. 11, 2001, has told us a major terrorist strike is inevitable should have had in place a well-elaborated plan for evacuating a major American city. Even if there wasn't a specific plan for New Orleans -- although it was clear that a breach of the city's levees was one of the likeliest natural catastrophes -- there should have been a generic plan. George W. Bush told us time and again that our cities were threatened. Shouldn't he have ordered up a plan to get people out?

Second, someone should have thought about what to do with hundreds of thousands of evacuees, both in the days after a disaster and in the long term. As people flooded out of New Orleans, it was officials at the state and local level who rose to the challenge, making it up as they went along. Bring a bunch of people to the Astrodome. We have a vacant hotel that we can use. Send a hundred or so down to our church and we'll do the best we can.

Hang around for the last graf of that one, it's a doozy.

in other news, Al Gore can be very funny when he wants to be. He still needs an editor, but still damn fine public speaking presence.

pics later.

Are you accusing them of miscounting hurricanes?

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

When critics of the administration bring up the global warming issue in relation to Katrina, it only weakens their argument. Stick to the topic at hand.

Bit of bad planning, that.

so there was a few angry people turned away. Enough stuck around(incl. yrs truly) making noise that the organizers(the Oregon League of Conservation Voters) when and asked the former Vice President if he'd speak again, immediately afterwards. He agreed, so we got in line again for the 2 hour wait.

Photos here

1) It was inevitable that eventually New Orleans would get a category 4 hurricane. This is not a new mutant strain of hurricane, and they just happen to come around every so many years.

2) Much of the "disaster," at least in New Orleans, was not the direct result of the hurricane's strength (though it was indirectly) but of poor planning, weak levees, the geography and demography of New Orleans, and sheer incompetence on the part of the federal government.

3) Bush did not singlehandedly cause global warming, nor could he singlehandedly have any noticeable impact on it during his administration. Even if he had signed Kyoto the day he stepped into office, it would take a long long time before the impact would be felt, and it certainly wouldn't reverse global warming by itself.

So again, as much as I wish Bush would take greater heed of global warming, I think it's totally specious to make it one of the main issues here, when we're really talking about failures of leadership, disaster prevention, and crisis management.

and really, at this point, al gore? if democrats can't find a better figure to rally behind, we deserve to lose.

"...one must recognize that there are limits to what powers the federal government should exercise in a crisis. Yes, it is the right and duty of the president to override state drug policy, to determine who can or cannot marry, to indefinitely detain citizens without due process and to torture and kill prisoners as he sees fit, but disaster relief is a matter that should be left to the states. Yes, the images of the drowned, the diseased, and the desperately dying drove much of the country to outrage, but how much more outraged would America have been if FEMA had fed the Superdome refugees without the full oversight and authorization of the State of Louisiana? Had the president sent rescue helicopters to evacuate New Orleans the day the levees burst, he might have saved thousands of lives, but he would also have overstepped his authority - and if there's one thing George W. Bush refuses to countenance, it is abuse of power."

also see fafblog's Do-It-Yourself Emergency Management Guide!

!!!

Oh, very witty, Alfred. What incredible insight.

xpost no, like Harding

http://thousandrobots.com/blog/files/palpatine_02.jpg

here and here