From the Dailykos diary of BarbinMD

With Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast, John McCain is playing President Wannabe in Mississippi today, showing just how darned concerned and presidential he is. Which makes this a good time to remind people of what he was doing three years ago when Hurricane Katrina was devastating the Gulf Coast. Of course no one can forget that on the day that New Orleans was drowning, John McCain was busy having cake with George Bush, but what was his reaction a week later, as the scope of the humanitarian disaster was still playing out day after day, as a horrified nation looked on and as an incompetent administration sat on its hands?

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has occasionally been a thorn in the side of the White House. However, he warns against “premature judgments” about the government’s response, noting that “we were all surprised” by Katrina’s scope, ferocity and damage. McCain does not provide any specifics, but he signals a willingness to follow Bush’s lead on investigating any shortcomings. “Just as the president said this morning, we need to find out what we did right and what we did wrong. I agree with him.”

No, we were not “all surprised” by Katrina. In fact, three years ago, while McCain’s birthday cake was baking, Darksyde wrote:

Urgent Warning Thread: Hurricane Katrina Strength Unprecedented

Anyone who was paying attention to the news instead of planning their birthday party knew what Katrina was. And in the days that followed, as we watched bodies floating in the streets of a major American city and saw thousands of stranded, starving Americans waiting for help, John McCain was willing to wait and to follow George Bush’s lead. Just as he is following George Bush’s lead today with his politically motivated photo-op visit to Mississippi, and just as he has followed George Bush’s lead for the past eight years. And we’re still waiting for that investigation

Update: This video says it all

Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner for Best Documentary, Trouble the Water, is currently in limited release. Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, residents of New Orleans’ lower 9th Ward, were there when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Kimberly got a video camera shortly before, and she documented what happened to them. I just saw the film, and it’s powerful stuff. Here’s the trailer:
Read more »

We can put men on the moon but we can’t repair a damn levee? Didn’t the Dutch offer to share their expertise with us?

Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city’s flood defenses.

Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.

The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion set aside by Congress to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area’s hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside experts said the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.

“It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one - really - our cost is going to increase significantly,” said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.

More at Yahoo News

Ya gotta laugh when the presidential candidates run around blaming the “government” for it’s failures when they are indeed part of that government. New Orleans is still a mess. The Gulf coast is still a mess. You’re in the Senate McFriendy….. have you done anything to fix that thus far? I don’t think so……….

Sen. John McCain on Thursday blasted the Bush administration and all levels of government for the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

“We know we didn’t have the right kind of leadership … where government agencies were getting information from watching cable television rather than have a flow of information,” McCain said during an event at Xavier University in New Orleans.

“It was not only a perfect storm as far as its physical impact … it was a perfect storm as far as the federal, state and local governments’ inability.”

“Never again will there be a mismanaged natural disaster,” he said, later assuring the crowd that “it will never happen again in this country, you have my commitment and my promise.”

More at CNN

Talk about incompetence. That we can’t even help our own after one of the largest natural disasters of all-time is just so wrong. No wonder Paulison is quitting.

Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, nearly 40,000 families still are living in vulnerable mobile homes and trailers across the U.S. Gulf Coast with another hurricane season just two months away, the top U.S. disaster official said on Wednesday.

The number is down from about 100,000 families, or some 300,000 people, in April 2006. At one point following the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency was housing 143,000 families in mobile homes and trailers.

FEMA Administrator David Paulison said the agency, which was heavily criticized for its hapless response when Katrina swamped New Orleans, is moving about 800 families a week into hotels, motels or apartments.

The families are either living at group sites or in trailers in the driveways of their homes as they rebuild.

The six-month Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. Forecasters are expecting above-average storm activity.

“As far as rebuilding, I did expect it to take this long,” Paulison told a small group of reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. “But as far as housing people, I did not foresee that they would be there almost three years later.”

More at Yahoo News

Is New Orleans an incompetency magnet or what?!

Ripped from their homes from a destructive hurricane and a shoddy levee system, forced to survive on their own with little to no help. FEMA finally shows up with their massive incompetency and their toxic death-trap trailers… and now this:

Katrina Victims May Have to Repay Money

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars. [...]

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle “approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort.”

The bid invitation said: “The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000.”

Katrina is all but forgotten in the minds of Americans. A country that donates billions of dollars to victims of natural disasters elsewhere in the world and we neglect to take care of our own. It’s mindboggling to me. And I’m not speaking of just our government. Individuals. My own Mother said to me that she thought Orlando went downhill when victims of Katrina came there and never went back. I said well God help you if you ever get displaced and are left homeless and helpless. I must say, I have no doubt she got this “talking point” from my heartless Republican sister, who I refer to as Bethzilla. But I’m sure many other Americans feel that way. How did we come to be like this? Something else, while I’m on the subject. With the economy in the dumper the way it is, I asked my Mom if there was alot of crime during the depression. If people stole from one another due to desperation. If the crime rate went up drastically. She said…..no, people helped one another. What do you think would become of us if we suffered a depression in this day and age? I think it would be quite ugly. Just my opinion.

A United Nations official who has toured parts of Louisiana and Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina says the thousands of victims of the storm resemble poor people displaced by natural disasters in other parts of the world.

“Whether you’re displaced in a rich country or a poor country, what remains the same is you need to get the help, the assistance of the authorities, of the communities, to be able to restart a normal life, and the people I have met are not there yet,” said Walter Kalin, the UN secretary general’s representative on the human rights of internally displaced persons.

Kalin spoke Wednesday, a day when he also saw hard-hit areas of the two states. He met Tuesday with evacuees in Houston.

The United Nations’ human rights committee has been critical of the Bush administration’s efforts to help people displaced by Katrina, particularly those without the financial means to rebuild.

More at Yahoo

60,000 families. What’s wrong with this picture? 2 years later, and 60,000 (probably more) are still living in FEMA trailers. Trailers with cancer-causing formaldehyde. What a country!!! What a government!! I wonder how much these cancer-causing trailers cost us. And I wonder why Chertoff still has a job. Way to take care of our own!!!

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced yesterday that it will allow 60,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina and now living in FEMA-provided trailers on the Gulf Coast to move into hotel or motel rooms if they are concerned about formaldehyde gas in their trailers.

The policy shift, made two weeks ago but not widely publicized until now, follows a House committee finding in July that FEMA leaders had suppressed warnings about the presence of high levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde, apparently to avoid legal liability.

The announcement brings full circle FEMA’s costly and troubled housing response to the Katrina disaster. The agency hastily ordered $2.7 billion in manufactured housing, mostly through no-bid contracts, only to discover later that FEMA rules prevented the use of a third of the purchases in flood zones, where most victims lived, and that local communities would refuse to host large trailer encampments.

More at the Washington Post

from The Center for American Progress
by Angela Glover Blackwell

Red Tape, Uneven Recovery in New Orleans

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is coming back-but not for everyone. It’s true, the French Quarter is back. The city’s population has returned to two-thirds of its pre-Katrina’s size. The unemployment rate is down. Student test scores appear to be improving. Progress is blossoming.

But alongside that progress is the real risk that we are reinventing the past by recreating a city rife with the same racial and economic inequalities that were laid bare on the world’s front pages two years ago. Governing regulations and unwieldy paperwork are slowing up the recovery process for many of the least advantaged citizens. It’s clear that the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act isn-t providing its intended orderly and systematic process for disaster relief.

When President George W. Bush stood in the ethereal light of Jackson Square 17 days after the storm, he shared his vision of a new New Orleans: “When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm. …So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”

The federal government promised to turn this tragedy into an opportunity to address the pernicious history of racial and economic injustice in the Crescent City. Instead, that “legacy of inequality” is coming back in full force. We are in danger of rebuilding a divided city.

Much of the progress we have seen in New Orleans has been made by those who had resources before the storm: homeowners, business people, and private schools. For those without resources such as renters, low-wage workers, and public school students, the rebuilding effort has been far slower and more grueling. Just getting back to New Orleans has been a challenge for these people. More than 40,000 New Orleans families are still displaced outside of Louisiana, and though many of those families want to return home, high rents and poor job prospects have made that step impossible.

Read more »

From Welcome to Pottersville:

Light finally dawned on Marble Head.

After two long years, 1800 deaths and a billion dollars officially wasted, our Preznit who’s more synonymous with corpses (despite never going to the funeral of an Iraq war casualty), rubble and general, run-of-the-mill devastation than any other is at last getting the hang of this hurricane season thingie. Because days before Hurricane Dean even hit the Gulf Coast, George Bush declared a state of emergency for 32 Texas counties, proving to a worried America that, no Virginia, pre-emptive compassionate conservatism isn-t quite dead.

What a change from two years ago, when Bush was spanked by the three furies named Katrina, Rita and Wilma as he licked cake frosting off his hand and learned his first redneck guitar chord (the more bitter wags among us may venture “Walking on Sunshine.”).

And, to our enduring shame, no one wanted to risk a dirty look or a rude, premature exit courtesy of the Secret Service to whisper in the birthday’suited emperor’s ear, “Psst. People are drowning and FEMA’s scarcer than Osama bin Laden. What the fuck are you doing here?”

Continue reading here

I’ll never forget this, either. I know I’m probably overloading on Hurricane Katrina today, but I think for many people it was the first time they actually got a good look at the Bush family and how they operate. Everything they do is to benefit…..THEM. Unfortunately, many people have forgotten the Gulf coast, and the horrendous incompetence of the Bush administration in handling the crisis. I have to wonder, though…..is it incompetence, or is it that they really just don’t give a shit about these Americans? Maybe both……

From the Houston Chronicle, March 23, 2006

Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.

Since then, the Ignite Learning program has been given to eight area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

“Mrs. Bush wanted to do something specifically for education and specifically for the thousands of students flooding into the Houston schools,” said Jean Becker, former President Bush’s chief of staff. “She knew that HISD was using this software program, and she’s very excited about this program, so she wanted to make it possible for them to expand the use of this program.”

The former first lady plans to visit a Houston Independent School District campus using the Ignite program today to call on local business leaders to support schools and education.

Who could forget Barbara Bush’s comments about the Katrina victims who were brought to Houston.

Stupid or uncaring…..or both?

Anderson Cooper bitchslapping Mary Landrieu. I thought I liked her, but since have decided she needs to go. I don’t like her voting record AT ALL.

From the Youtube user jasonmicron:

A video recorded before the Katrina victims were evacuated from New Orleans to the Astrodome. At this time the people that chose to stay were still at the Superdome and the convention center.

Before the flaming starts, let me say that I really lean right and I really don’t like Cooper that much but it was just awesome to see someone bitch out a leader for their lack of concern over those victims.

I will never forget Shepard Smith and Geraldo reporting from New Orleans. There was just no denying the fuck up of the federal government’s response. As much as Sean Hannity probably would have liked to, it just wasn’t possible.