Bennet and the EASY way out

It has been interesting over the last couple of days to watch the reaction of the confirmed LEFT and the comments by Bill Bennett regarding hypothesis by a caller to his "Morning in America" radio show.

It appears inside the beltway it is easier to listen to rumor and polls than what actually happened. Bennett took his last caller of the morning who hypothesized that is America had not legalized abortion, there would be enough citizens to offset the use of the social security system. He said that the boomer generation is 30 Million folks larger than the X generation. Exponentially larger numbers of children have been aborted since 1972.

Bennett in his usual academic way floated out a hypothosis in a book called Freakenomics which discussed crime and the Black community. Under the book's premise, if all of the black children since abortion became legal were aborted, the book says there would be no crime. It is a premise Bennett said was morally reprehensible and unrealistic, still the Dems jumped at the chance to take the quote out of context and burn the former Reagan staff member. Alan Combs the Liberal on Fox News lambasted Bennett on his syndicated radio show in such a way that the relationship between the two may never be healed.

What is more disturbing, is the Bush White House did nto do ANY research and condemned the statement as well. If they listened to the statement bennett made, they would agree with it.

Is everything in America so partisaned that there is no chance for common debate? Has political correctness overtaken common sense and common debate?

It is simply wrong. Bennett probably could have chosen better words, but he is no bigot. He is an intellectual with good ideas and he is going to be injured for no reason. It sickens me.

Not All We Read is True - Really? The "Facts" from New Orleans Are Now A Footnote for Snopes

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Julius Caesar

An AP article posted today by Michelle Roberts shows that the rush by the media to paint as poor a picture of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina as possible were nothing more than a series of progressivley worse rumors.

We will all remember the "facts" reporter over and over by the mainstream media, Rapes of women, murder of crying children, bodies stacked like cordwood in freezers. They are all lies. There are no eyewitnesses. There is no evidence. There were not 50 or more deaths in the Convention Center there were three - one of which appears to have dies elsewhere and then brought to the facility.

So what happens now? Will Oprah recant the words Mayor Ray Nagin warned that evacuees spent "five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people." Nope. Will Nagin recant himself in the Congressional hearings? Nope. Nothing will happen. The rumors will be entered into the log of history as fact because they are in the public consciousness and they make the Bush administration look as bad as possible.

It is sad really - the fog of war, as it is called, now is simply obscuring the truth.

Farrakhan Says Bush Engineered Levy Destruction

I saw this little news blip in a Larry Elder column. Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan was in Memphis promoting the anniversary of his million man march and needed some controversy. Thankfully, the main stream media has not picked this up yet. Louis Farrakhan said, "I heard from a reliable source who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."

What? We've heard this before. It has been a rumor in the poor section of town for years and years. Does it make it any more true? NO.

Elder continues:

Washington Post reporter Eugene Robinson said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black. . . . These are not wild-eyed people. These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that."


For many people, past discrimination means present and future discrimination. End of discussion. Never mind the growing black economy, an all-time high percentage of black homeownership, and a "black GDP" that would make black America the 16th wealthiest country in the world.

Elder makes interesting points. The Democratically dominated media like to help further the fallacy that everyone "conservative" is against the poor and all Southerners are against blacks. Obviously both contentions are wrong. The North abandoned slavery prior to the War Between the States because they got a better deal in the indentured servants coming from Ireland. The Northern aristocracy (the forefathers of many of the Liberals and so called progessives now) ceased paying the housing and feeding of the slave nation and replaced the effort with real slaves - the Irish. They provided little housing and pennies a day for laborious work. Still, the fallacy continues as history is re-written to suit the "progressives" trying to further their points and attacks on conservatives.

Sorry for the delay

I have been very busy with work but all is calm now. Back to the daily posts.

It's time to review all Student Visas and forget the ACLU

An Egyptian student was arrested in my state recently at the University of Memphis for wire fraud. In his apartment they found a pilot's uniform, an id for the Memphis Airport and a series of DVD's including one called How an Airline Pilot Should Look and Act. Is that scary or what?

Memphis, Tennessee, the home of Elvis and apparently an Al Qaida cell. Here is a clip from the story in the Memphis Flyer:

29-year-old Mahmoud Maawad was busted this week after federal agents searched his apartment and computer on September 9th and examined his Internet purchases of flight instructions and pilot paraphernalia. Since June, Maawad ordered $3,300 of merchandise over the Internet from Speedy’s Pilot Shop in San Diego, including a private pilot course, flight simulator software, a flight gear bag, several DVDs, a $239 Navy leather flight jacket, a $19.95 DVD on “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act,” and instructional programs on “airplane talk.” His email address was pilot747_200@hotmail.com. After purchasing approximately $2,500 worth of merchandise, Maawad’s debit card was rejected by Speedy’s for lack of funds and his last three orders were not filled. Agents are in the process of examining his computer hard drive.

Maawad told police "My school is everything. I stay in this country for seven years. I stay for school." Yea, right! SEVEN YEARS in this country? How much planning and damage could already be done? I recall a professor/scientist/ biochemist with super-secret credentials going missing from Memphis in 2001 - he was an expert in Ebola and AIDS. What if he was kidnapped and his records were stolen before he was found dead?

Here is more troubling news from the Flyer:

U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Thomas Anderson agreed with Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Parker, and Maaward becomes the second Memphis resident of Arab descent to be held without bond because of investigations by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. In April, Rafat Mawlawi was jailed in a separate investigation in which prosecutors have linked him to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida. He is awaiting trial on October 3rd.

I think it is time for the US Immigration department to cancel all student Visas from Middle Eastern Countries (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) and countries outside the Middle East who harbor Terrorists like Indonesia and some former Soviet republics.

The ACLU will scream that this is "profiling" and "discriminatory." They'd be correct, but it also will keep the US safer. Profiling is ok, in my opinion. It helps narrow down the suspect. When a blonde woman or an elderly man from Scandanavian descent begin bombing or trying to hijack airlines I'd add them into the profile as well. As it is, most of these folks are Muslim Extremists from Theocracies (or countries with specific influence from radical Islam) in the Middle East. I say start there and then move on.

With the way the US borders are, this student from Egypt could have been educated in Toronto and just drove across the border. The US border policy is so porous, it is comical. For this I blame both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Do it now. Protect the country and let these students be educated elsewhere. The US Educational System is poor anyway, right France? Germany? The UN?

Chavez at it again!

The Napoleon of the South is at it again. Hugo Chavez somehow found its way on the anti-Bush ABC network this week claiming the US is planning to invade his country with aircraft carriers and planes. He did it on Nightline and Ted Koppel was more than happy to let him do it.

Apparently, an R&R assignment to Curacao led the paranoid Chavez to claim the US was poised to attack his country. He claims the US would be in for "a 100 year war" if that happened.

First, if the US attacked they would route the Venezuelan armed forces in less time than it took to drive tom Kuwait to Baghdad. Second, why does Chavez think his country is so attractive? It has oil, yes, but he like every other dictator has to rule his people by fear. The fear of one enemy. The less educated in Venezuela probably believe him. The Cubans, Chavez's greatest ally, surely do.

Chavez is in NYC for the UN summit of world leaders. He told the UN they should move its headquarters out of the US. That is one thing I agree with Chavez on. I think we should also remove our subsidy of the organization until all of the corruption is gone.

My last question is why ABC would put this yahoo on the air. ABC has gone to hell in a handbasket since Peter Jenning's death.

A Media Examination Post Katrina and Roberts

I have been quietly watching the media to see what much of the media is saying and how they are saying it. The headline writers are exacerbating fallacy laden stories with incredible headlines even in the smallest of papers. The national reporters on the big three and the cable three have apparently been transformed into commentators and not journalists. The spiral into the muck has a tighter turn as the major media become less and less relevant.

Here are some facts:

The President's poll numbers are down - but not as far as you might think. The President sits at between 41 and 47 percent depending on whose poll you look at. The problem is, journalists, like most 14 year old are only interested in what the easy top of line information is. I know, I have been there. The NY Times has skewed their results to make Iraq look like the main culpret in the response time to Katrina - despite facts to the contrary. They like a pitbull on a branch are too engaged on that one story element and can not look around to hear what really happened. They like many liberals are still in the fog of war that emerged immediately after the hurricane.

Roberts will be confirmed. The best and perhaps funniest thing here is that Roberts was so much smarter than Biden, Kennedy, and Feinstein it was almost not fair. Sentator Schumer asked Roberts a 10 minute question, in which, he named himself once every 12 seconds. How do you do that? I will remember Biden melting down so much even a liberal columnist has called him irrelevant. I also will recognize that Senator Kennedy has only one set of talking points regardless of the issue. It is always about Race, Class, and a "woman's right to choose".

Special Interest groups will always combat a Republican nominee for any position regardless of ideology or track record. NOW called Judge Souter the judge who would single handedly overturn Roe V Wade. Is that a joke? Souter rules with Ginsburg more than twice the number of times he sides with Scalia. Gindburg wanted to place the age of conscent at 12 and said prostitution was protectedby the Consitution.

ABC after Peter Jennings is now the most liberal network period. It is not even close.

Robertson, Kennedy and Howard Dean

Judge Robertson held his own today against some hot rhetoric from the left. Senators Biden and Kennedy both took their shots, but Robertson showed restraint and intelligence. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day was questioning from Senator Feinstein about his stance on female attorneys. She made one of a series of mis-steps and miss calculations in regard to 20 year old memos. In an exchange egarding gender equity and housewives becoming attorneys Feinstein accused Robertson of being anti woman. Roberts responded that the statement was meant as a "lawyers' joke" and that he fully supports equal rights for women.
"Obvious, in the memo that I wrote to Fred Fielding that it was about whether or not it's good to have more lawyers. Whether they were from homemakers, from plumbers, from artists or truck drivers had nothing to do with it," Roberts said.
"The notion that that was my view is totally inconsistent and rebutted by my life, " Roberts said. "I married a lawyer. I was raised with three sisters who work outside the home. I have a daughter for whom I will insist at every turn that she has equal citizenship rights with her brother."

Regardless of the explanation, Democratic bull dog Howard Dean was on Hannity and Combs this evening being interviewed by Democratic lap dog Alan Combs. Dean said in a five minute interview that Robertson was anti-black, anti-hispanic and anti-woman and, for the most part, did not speak for America. I hate to break it to you Howard, but you speak for fewer Americans than almost anyone. Your vitriol will haunt the Democratic party in the next election and in 2008. If Hillary does run, you can mark my words today that Howard Dean will not be the DNC chairman.

Dean further described President Bush as the most divisive since before the Civil War. He would know divisive when he saw it, but without a liberal media, this president would be held in the same regard as FDR and Kennedy. I has oft said I am no Bush apologist, but he is a liberator in Iraq, a healer after 9-11 and a rebuilder now in Louisiana. If it were not for Fox News and the Washington Times, America would never know.

What will happen in 2008 if a Republican is elected President again? I hazzard to guess.

Busy Day in Washington - Grandstanding taken to a whole new level!

It was a very, very busy day in Washington.

John Roberts takes the stand and says he approaches the law "like a referee" and is there to serve the law. He is faced by a literal who's who of criticism laying the groundwork for what appears to be a decided block play against Roberts.

The most absurd and sad discussion came from Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California. Her diatribe into Hungarians who were forced to remove their shoes before they were shot: "During World War II, it turned out that Hungarian fascists and Nazi soldiers forced thousands of Jews, including men, women and children, to remove their shoes before shooting them and letting their bodies float down the Danube. These shoes represent a powerful symbol of how religion has been used in catastrophic ways historically." What? It could be a long, long set of confirmation hearings.

Michael Brown quits as FEMA chief. He is replaced by a 30 year veteran of public safety. Why this was not the frst move by the Bush Administration I am unsure. The larger issue is why the National Media continues to ignore the fact that the local and state governments were primarily to blame for the delay in services to the poor in the 9th ward. The facts are these:
The Mayor wanted Grayhound busses instead of the school busses over which he had control. He now says "I'm not sure who to blame but it is not my fault."

A National Guard Commander who has responded to Hurricanes for nearly 20 years says this was the fastest Federal response in his experience - and cites Hugo (5 days) and Andrew (4 Days). Hmmm, maybe Brown was not such a boob - but you will never get the NY Times to agree. They wast to discredit Bush anyway they can.

It is an interesting time to be an American in this more partisan than pragmatic and logical country .

Fox news found the smoking gun

Thanks to a loyal reader, we have a transcript from last night on Fox News which proves the Mayor knew what would happen to the Hurricane victims.

Last night we told you about an editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune blaming President Bush and the federal government for failing to adequately respond to the Katrina disaster. But earlier this summer, the paper reported that Mayor Nagin and other city officials were warning "the poorest of New Orleans' poor" that if a hurricane hits, "you're on your own."
City administrators distributed hundreds of DVDs in vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, telling residents that while some city and school buses would be deployed to move those without transportation, "you're responsible for your safety." This despite the fact that New Orleans' emergency hurricane plan places the responsibility for evacuation on the mayor and city's transit authority.

Now the folks on the left will try to divert and attack the Bush Administration despite a Gallup Poll which places blame firmly at the feet of the local government. Only 13% say President Bush is primarily responsible for the slow response.

Additonally, Major Garrett reported this evening that the Red Cross was ready to go to the Super Dome and Convention Center to help with food, water and hygene kits, but the Louisiana State Department of Homeland Security told them they could not go because they did not want to the Super Dome and Convention Center to attract more refugees or to enable the refugees to remain longer. Talk about a smoking gun!

If you couple the Presidential disater degree the Friday before the storm offering troops and funding with no response, the Sunday pleading to evacuate by the President, the rapid storm response to Mississippi on Monday and inaction by the State of Louisiana and then the nasty rhetoric by the Mayor and Governor BEFORE any help was officially requested, it does not look good for the local officials.

I hope there are hearings and they call the Governors of Alabama and Mississippi and the responding agencies because they will tell the truth and the ineptitude and "criminal behavior" as the Dems are calling it in relation to the President is revealed to true - but in relation to the Democrats who have run Louisiana for more than 40 years.

The Smoking Gun for New Orleans

The line of Bush haters gets longer, but typically, they have no facts. As I have stated, I am no Bush apologist, but I loathe those who cast stones without merit. The Libs have this dead wrong, but see it as an opportunity to get at Bush.

When history is re-written he will have been at the controls of the weather machine that created Katrina and then barred all rescue efforts until the poor and black folks in New Orleans all died. But, as history will write, thanks to the wonderful media, the poor, downtrodden folks were saved! HOORAY for the media and the left. The champion of the poor who have worked for 50 years to keep them oppressed and in New Orleans $10,000 below the average national income level.

Here are the real facts as they came out this weekend in an AP article which few papers picked up across the country. This photo of thousands of busses under water is the testimony to the ineptitude of local authorities.

FACT: Bush called Governor Kathleen Blanco on Friday to offer aid and to make the areas potentially effected by Katrina disaster areas in advance of the storm. Blanco requested no aid. In contrast, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbor mobilized the National Guard and started the wheels of government turning.

FACT: Bush called Blanco on Sunday "begging her to evacuate new Orleans" according to the AP. She declined. As it was it took her until Wenesday - a full two days after the hurricane AND a day after the levy broke to ask for aid ! The libs out there want you to believe that the troops should have rolled in immediately. Unfortunately that is unConstitutional and basically against every principle of a representative Democracy. The problem is, you see what happend in New Orleans and witness the failire of an intitlement society at its worst.

FACT: The New Orleans Disaster Plan surfaced this week and - surprise - was not followed by either the Governor or by Mayor Nagin. There are appendices that cover every constituency in the city. Nagin was supposed to start more than 72 hours before the hurricane to evacuate the city. He was supposed to use the more than 2,000 city owned school busses to evacuate the poor and the folks unable to move on their own. The Superdome was to be used as a last resort because when Ivan struck 14,000 showed up. The scene quickly deteriorated into an area of crime (theft and rape). Nagin did nothing, and the 2,000 busses drown in flood water.

FACT: The AP articles cite the Constitution which guarantees state rights. Basically, the President offered troops and the Governor declines which is her right. He offered aid and she declined. The blame should fall at the doors of the Mayor's office and the Governor's office.

Additionally, there was a 2002 Times Picayune series that prophetically described what happened in New Orleans. They described it all in detail after living through Georges and Ivan. It knew that the leadership IN Louisiana would not be able to save the poor.

An AP article chronicled the cases of former Hurricanes. A September 19, 2004 AP report wrote "Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter - a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land."
Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome - where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived.
Noted the AP then: "New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans."
Noting that much of the city lies below sea level, only kept dry by a system of pumps and levees, the AP recalled that as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city - warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste - urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm. But nobody told them how to flee Ivan. As happened before Katrina struck, residents who had cars took to the highways while the AP reported others wondered what to do. "'They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that,' Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. 'If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either.' "'If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,'" Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told the AP.

In the case of Katrina, there was huge fleet of school buses the mayor could have dispatched to aid in evacuating people unable to leave on their own. Instead, the buses sat in parking lots that later flooded, making them unusable when tens of thousands were stranded in the flooded city.
Dealing with safeguarding the city's population had always been a problem, the AP recalled, adding that the situation was worse at the time of Ivan since the Red Cross had stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes were deemed too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.

In the case of Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then just as they later did with Katrina, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon - with Ivan just hours away - did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public. Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome as Ivan approached, but said the evacuation was the top priority. "Our main focus is to get the people out of the city," she told the AP. "We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter," Nagin said. "We wanted to make sure we didn't have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn't want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days."

Noted the AP story: "When another dangerous hurricane, Georges, appeared headed for the city in 1998, the Superdome was opened as a shelter and an estimated 14,000 people poured in." But just as happened after Katrina, the AP reported there were problems, including theft and vandalism. With Ivan approaching, far fewer took refuge from the storm - an estimated 1,100 - at the Superdome, and there was far greater security: 300 National Guardsmen.

Wrote the AP of the Ivan debacle: "The main safety measure - getting people out of town - raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.

"Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believed his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. "It was so bad that some broadcasters were telling people to stay home, that they had missed their window of opportunity to leave. They claimed the interstates had turned into parking lots where trapped people could die in a storm surge.

"Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans. But it appears that nothing had been changed by the time Katrina made its appearance in the Gulf.

After Ivan, Blanco and other state officials boasted that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas.

"We were able to get people out," state Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc said. "It was successful. There was frustration, yes. But we got people out of harm's way."
After Katrina struck, however, escape routes out of the city were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, leaving some motorists on the road when the Hurricane arrived.

It did not happen this time and the meat and potatoes of the plan were not used.

To use a popular Liberal phrase - The Liberals Lied and People Died. In this case - nearly 10 times the number who died in Iraq or in 9-11. Mark it down because you will never read it in a history book.

The Poster Boy of Bush Haters

The Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin will become the poster boy for the Left in their continued hatred against President Bush. His rhetoric is unbridled. If I were a new orlease refugee, I would be wondering what in the hell this guys has been doing for a week. He had his head so far up his nether regions that he waited until the wather was lapping the levees before calling for a manditory evacuation and then did not provide any means to do it despite the fact he knew nearly 100,000 residents in the 9th Ward did not have cars. The Governor is fighting for her political life in Louisiana. She could not be elected dog catcher at this point so she is going to the well to get a former Democratic administration God (Read Clinton) to run her relief effort. If she would look in the mirror and admit she screwed up and was not ready like Haley Barbor where the Hurricane actually struck. Instead both the Mayor and the Governor are taking the easy and popular way out by blaming Bush. It's all the Democrats have since they never bring a solution to the table. Below is the story of the levee being repaired a mere five days after a football field size breach was discovered in the levee. Let's remember, dear reader, New Orleans is not suffering from the effects of the hurricane - they are suffering from a Levee break.

NEW ORLEANS, La. - A week after Hurricane Katrina, the levee break that caused
much of the area's flooding was repaired, floodwaters began to recede and the
mayor made his direst prediction yet: as many as 10,000 deaths in his city
alone.
Louisiana officials said Monday afternoon that the repeated
helicopter droppings of 30,000-pound sandbags into the football-field-wide break
in the 17th Street canal leading to Lake Ponchartrain succeeded in stopping the
water, and water was being pumped from the canal back into the lake. Some parts
of the city showed slipping floodwaters as the repair neared completion, with
some low-lying areas dropping more more than a foot.
"We're starting to make
the kind of progress that I kind of expected earlier," New Orleans Mayor Ray
Nagin said even before the plug of the break, which opened up a day after the
hurricane and flooded 80 percent of the city up to 20 feet deep.
The good
news came as many of the 460,000 residents of suburban Jefferson Parish waited
in a line of cars that stretched for miles to briefly see damaged caused by the
same levee break, and to scoop up soaked wedding pictures, baby shoes and other
cherished mementoes.
"A lot of these people built these houses anticipating
some flood water but nobody imagined this," sobbed Diane Dempsey, a 59-year-old
retired Army lieutenant colonel who could get no closer than the water line a
mile from her Metairie home. "I'm going to pay someone to get me back there,
anything I have to do."
"I won't be getting inside today unless I get some
scuba gear," added Jack Rabito, a 61-year-old bar owner who waited for a ride to
visit his one-story home that had water lapping to the gutters.
Katharine
Dastugue was overjoyed to find that floodwaters had gone across her lawn but
stopped just inches from her doorstep. As she stood waiting for a boat to take
her in, she made a list of thing she hoped to salvage before being forced to
leave again Wednesday.
"If I can just get my kids' baby photos," she said.
"You can't replace those." flooding, and thousands of homes were damaged.
In
New Orleans, Nagin upticked his estimate of the probable death toll in his city
from merely thousands to telling NBC's "Today" show: "It wouldn't be
unreasonable to have 10,000."
As law enforcement officers and even bands of
private individuals — including actor Sean Penn — launched a door-to-door boat
and air search of the city for survivors, they were running up against a
familiar obstacle: People who had been trapped more than a week in damaged homes
yet refused to leave.
"We have advised people that this city has been
destroyed," said Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley. "There is nothing here for them
and no reason for them to stay, no food, no jobs, nothing."
Riley, who
estimated fewer than 10,000 people were left in the city, said some simply did
not want to leave their homes — while others were hanging back to engage in
criminal activities, such as looting.
Nagin said the city had the authority
to force residents to evacuate but didn't say if it was taking that step. He
did, however, detail one heavy-handed tactic: Water will no longer be handed out
to people who refuse to leave.
In another effort of "encouragement," a
Louisiana State Police SWAT team, armed with rifles, confronted two brothers at
their home in the Uptown section of New Orleans, leaving one sobbing.
"I
thought they were going to shoot me," said 23-year-old Leonard Thomas, weeping
on his front porch. "That dude came and stuck the gun dead at my head."
One
officer, who did not give his name, said his team tried to make sure that the
two men understood that food and water is becoming scarce and that disease could
begin spreading.
Even though almost a third of New Orleans' police force was
missing in action, a caravan of law enforcement vehicles, emblazoned with
emblems from across the nation and blue lights flashing, poured into the city to
help establish order on the city's anarchic streets and give police a
much-deserved break.
Four hundred to 500 officers on New Orleans' 1600-member
force were unaccounted for, police officials said. Some lost their homes. Some
were looking for families. "Some simply left because they said they could not
deal with the catastrophe," said Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley. Officials said
officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas
and Atlanta, where they would also receive counseling.
At a news conference,
the leader of the National Guard effort declared the city was largely free of
the lawlessness that plagued it in the days following the hurricane. And he
angrily lashed out at a reporter who suggested search-and-rescue operations were
being stymied by random gunfire and lawlessness.
"Go on the streets of New
Orleans — it's secure," said Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. "Have you been to New
Orleans? Did anybody accost you?"
Hopeful signs of recovery were accompanied
by Bush's
second visit to Louisiana that exposed a continued rift between state and
federal officials over the slowness of a relief effort. The first significant
convoy of food, water and medicine didn't arrive in New Orleans until four full
days after the hurricane, and the mayor and others said some survivors died
awaiting relief.
While an exact death count remains elusive, Nagin warned on
NBC's "Today" show that
Still, The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest
newspaper, published an open letter to Bush, called for the firing of every
official at the
Federal Emergency Management Agency' name. At a stop
in Baton Rouge, Bush said all levels of the government were doing their best,
and he pledged again: "So long as any life is in danger, we've got work to do.
Where it's not going right, we're going to make it right."
Louisiana Gov.
Kathleen Blanco has refused to sign over National Guard control to the federal
government and has turned to a Clinton administration official, former Federal
Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt, to help run relief efforts.
Blanco, a Democrat, was not informed of the timing of Bush's visit, nor was
she immediately invited to meet him or travel with him. In fact, Blanco's office
didn't know when Bush was coming until told by reporters. As reporters saw the
governor sitting on the runway for a flight to Houston to visit evacuees early
Monday, her staff tracked down the details and her trip was rescheduled so that
she could meet the president.
While the New Orleans refugees were mostly
poor and black, Jefferson Parish brought the storm's destruction to a much wider
economic cross-section. The sprawling parish stretches from Grand Isle on the
Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain in the north, and includes some of the
metropolitan area's most exclusive neighborhoods.
In the enclave of Old
Metairie, the rows of palatial, six-bedroom homes sustained little structural
damage but had some of the worst flooding. Only a few windows were broken and
the live oaks survived but the water rippled up the knobs at front doors and
completely covered Mercedes-Benzes, pickup trucks and BMWs in garages.
Many
residents were happy that the storm spared their homes, but angry that the
failure of the levee system left them swamped. Some were considering a lawsuit
against the federal government for having a levee that could survive no more
than a Category 3 hurricane.
"That's what so devastating, that goddamned
levee breaking," said Bobby Patrick, a resident of neighborhood now living in
Houston. "My home didn't lose a shingle but it's got six feet of water in it."
Since the storm, rumors had swirled that looters had crossed over the parish
line and began breaking into evacuated homes in Jefferson. Many were relieved to
return home Monday to find their belongings untouched.
Walter Zehner found
his front yard full of foul-smelling floodwater and a broken lock on his door
from rescuers looking for stranded survivors, but nothing missing. "It could
have been a lot worse," he said.
Across the neighborhood, residents took
what items they could fit in a boat. One woman loaded up her boat with her
collection of cashmere sweaters, her cat and the 1957 Leica camera that belonged
to her grandfather. A man packed his pickup truck with his silverware, his
wife's clothes and a cherished animal figurine.
Unlike the poor in New
Orleans, these refugees had other places to go. And few here planned to stay
through what could be a long recovery.
With police checkpoints on ever major
streetcorner and ID checks for parish residents, even looting was not a major
concern.
Said personal trainer Rod McClave: "I'm more concerned about them
damaging my stuff just for the hell of it."

___

Bush Nominates Robertson for Chief???

This news bit surprised me. This is the first time I can remember that George Bush took the easy way out. He has taken what is a relatively controversy free nomination and has thrown it into the fire. If Bush thought that Roberton's nomination would cruise through, he now is sorely mistaken.

The Democrats will now HAMMER Robertson because of is pithy memos to Reagan and his stance against several "protected classes" in client/attorney discussions.

What disappoints me most about this appointment is Bush's lack of imagination and the fact that now everything is about politics. Bush is on the spit and he is spinning for the next three years. A colleague of mine says when it is all said and done, he will be the most hated President in history. I am not sure if that is true on the Right side of the aisle, but the Left already hate him so much they could rather die than save GW Bush in an accident.

I will be watching the process with great interest. Kit Bond (D) Conn, is already trying to delay the process. It will be an ugly, ugly couple of weeks.

Thank God it is Football season.

George Bush Hates Black People?!?

That was what one rapper said last night in a broadcast on the NBC family of networks to raise money for Hurricane victims. Kanye West appeared two-thirds through the program with Mike Meyers, he claimed "George Bush doesn't care about black people" and said America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible." Mike Myers even looked flabbergasted. The outburst forced Matt Lauer's producer to create a closing script for Lauer that acknowledgedoutburstburst yet did not condemn it.

The facts are simple. The Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana are the culprits in the slow response. The President named Louisiana a Federal Disaster Area two days before the Hurricane hit opening the opportunity for the Mayor and Governor to ask for assistance. None was requested. The delay was so long - in fact - that the National Guard was not even requested until Wednesday a full two days after the hurricane. Why did the President wait - you ask. Well, we have something called the Constitution in the US and it is based on something called State's Rights. The Governor in each state controls its own National Guard and is responsible for requesting aid. The request came very, very late.

The people who hate the poor and minority constituency in this country are among the extreme Left who have used the poor and downtrodden as political pawns since the 1960's. Their policies created this entitlement society and you saw first hand on Fox News, CNN and others what happens to a group of people who are so used to the government doing everything for them - it is clear they have forgotten how to take care of themselves.

The Mayor of New Orleans knew almost 100,000 people in the central district of the city and in the 9th Ward had no cars. In that area, almost the same number are on complete social assistance - from rent to wage and welfare. This is the same area where the snipers and thugs are coming from. The same area created by entitlement programs that have turned active members of society, men who can survive, into children of the state. This is a group of people in the scenarios run by the government and signed off on by the Governor as expendable.


So is George Bush a racist? The simple and plain answer is no. His leadership team since he was Governor of Texas has had a greater percentage of Blacks and Hispanics than anyone in history. He has had two consecutive Secretaries of State who are African American. "They're not really Black" some critics say. Say what? What makes Condoleza Rice less Black than Jesse Jackson? Nothing. How about Colin PowIsl? is he any less black than Chris Rock? No. But that's not the case if you ask Rock.

This double standard is amazing. Everything is politicized. President Bush has stayed above the frey and is doing what has to be done in the Gulf Coast and in the Middle East for that matter. I am not a big Bush booster, but I am sick and tired of what I see as dirty tricks politics rather than substitive debate. The Left hate Bush so much they will blame anything and everything on him. Even and act of God.

In hurricane Katrina, the failure goes back to 1927 and in administration after administration. Despite every effort by CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC to get an "expert" to say that the levy problems and breeches were Bush's fault because he reallocated some funding to a study program in 2002 to support the War on Terror, no one says he's to blame. One the contrary, the former Director of the Army Corps of Engineers blames the GAO and Congress for the problems because the money was originally allocated in 1967 during the last weeks of the Johnson administration but has been re-allocated for nearly 40 years.

As for the tragedy, many experts cite lackadaisicalcical attitudes by everyone in Louisiana and decades of hoping for the best. Unfortunately in this case, that .5% of a chance happened. It didn't have anything to do with race, or socioeconomic factors, it had to do with hundreds of thousands of folks living below sea level on borrowed time. Their time ran out and now the government is blamed and left picking up the pieces. How the administration handles this will reflect how much change there will be in 15 months.

What do do about Gas?

This week is certainly not like last. New Orleans is gone and gas is $3.25 a gallon and moving up. The Feds made positive moves Thursday and Friday releasing crude from the reserve and accepting foreign help, but more needs to be done.

The oil companies have collected record profits this year and in my opinion they need to do a couple of things:

1. Fix the price of gas until January at $2.50 a gallon nation wide either voluntarily or by Presidential decree and then remove the EPA restrictions.
2. Begin building new refineries or reactivate refineries that have been mothballed.
3. Open the Alaska reserves for drilling
4. Open the restrictions for coastal drilling in California and the gulf.
5. Force the release of the hybrid vehicles on the drawing board including the vehicles which run on hydrogen.

Some will help immediately and others will help in a year or two. All will certainly ease the burden. Regardless, the days of .99 Cent gas is over forever.

Katrina Fallout

It's been a tragic week. The worst natural event in US history. Here is what I have assessed so far:

• The Louisiana culture is "les bonton rolles" - and it is not conducive to dealing with authority and an evacuation.
• The 9th District was as bad as Somalia before the hurricane and it is worse now. That communication was never passed along to the rescuers or the military. FEMA acknowledges they were surprised by the lawlessness.
• Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin should step up in a line of blame that stretches back to 1927. These folks knew there was a potential "worst case scenario" out there. Blanco signed off on a study less than three years ago that acknowledged there were 10's of thousands of New Orleanians who did not have cars in the inner city, there was no way to evacuate the inner city in the event of flooding and the levy surrounding the city would not survive a category four or five storm. She knew there would be thousands of deaths, yet did nothing to set up a disaster plan. They were unprepared and now are trying to blame the Feds. Haley Barbor of Mississippi had no issues. He asked for help. So did Alabama and Florida.
• Blanco was at grave fault for not asking for federal assistance from the National Guard until Wednesday - a full two-days after the hurricane.
• Mayor Nagin is as crazed as the refugees in the Convention Center. he says he is not a drug addict like some of those displaced - he sounds like one.
• Even in America, if you remove social assistance and expect those who have been trained to rely on the Federal Government for everything to survive you will have anarchy.
• CNN and especially Aaron Brown hate America. He revels in the destruction and his ability to attack the President.
• The Senate can move quickly if there is political pressure.

This is indeed a tragic situation. Unfortunately President Bush will be blamed. This was not a Federal issue - this is an issue brought on by a culture of people in Louisiana who thought it would not happen to them. What happened was the result of a strong storm and a 70 year old problem. We all knew about it. We hoped for the best. There was no planning like in Mississippi and Alabama this is chaos and it lays at the feet of those in charge in Louisiana.

I have the utmost respect for those folks who went in to rescue the displaced despite the danger from the contaminated water and the snipers. I respect the doctors and nurses who have been at Charity Hospital in NO since the hurricane and are at the end of their rope. I respect them all - all but the criminals who looted, the criminals who raped and the criminals who are trying to take control of that city like an African warlord. I hope they perish in the flood and the Lord makes them pay for thier chaos.