Note: NorthCom’s mission is to protect the homeland. What follows is chilling. When the BBC noted the criticism of the government’s slow response, Lt. Commander Kelly explained that NorthCom was ready to go well in advance of Katrina making landfall, but suggested the president didn’t make the right call at the right time.
“Northcom started planning before the storm even hit. We were ready when it hit Florida, because, as you remember, it hit the bottom part of Florida, and then we were planning once it was pointed towards the Gulf Coast.
“So, what we did, we activated what we call ‘defense coordinating officers’ to work with the states to say, ‘OK, what do you think you will need?’ And we set up staging bases that could be started.
“We had the USS Bataan sailing almost behind the hurricane so once the hurricane made landfall, its search and rescue helicopters could be available almost immediately So, we had things ready.
“The only caveat is: we have to wait until the president authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can’t just act in this fashion; we have to wait for the president to give us permission.”
There’s no getting around how damning this information is. I’ve consumed more print on this story than I have any other in my entire life, and taking all the finger pointing into account, I was convinced up until now that the Army dragged their heels. I was wrong. This account of what happened is from a man whose career is undoubtedly over at this point. The mainstream press here in America will avoid this tape at all costs, but it may be a case where the blogsphere ensures that doesn’t happen.
Forward this to whoever you know. Rove has been battling for well over a day now, and this is one sin too many for this crew. Call me ‘anti-Bush’ all you want. After the damage he’s done to my country, I’m damned proud to agree with you on that score!
The video Be patient – it takes a while to download as the source is undoubtedly getting killed right now.
The site that I first saw this on
This is not the first time a military officer has spoken out against the administration. The three star general (John Riggs) who spoke up about troop strength in Iraq was demoted and forced to retire with 38 years under his belt. With this in mind, President Bush’s statement of reassurance that ‘the commanders on the ground tell me they have enough troops to do the job’, is very difficult to take seriously.
Thinking of his speech in San Diego, you know, the one where he compared himself with FDR while people were dying in New Orleans…what you’re about to read and see for yourself in the download link below will blow you away. A fun fact from that speech he gave that I was planning on using for an article was the fact that during WW2, the government sold maps so people could follow along as FDR went over the battle plan in his radio address. It’s fitting that on a day when he engages in blasphemy of this magnitude, the smoke and mirror operation he’s been engaged in up till now may have finally caught up with him.
This seems to be a complete load of crap once you see the established time line. Who ever this guy is he’s obviously a Democrat. Check out the timeline here:
http://www.drumwaster.com/index.php/weblog/comments/i_am_going_to_do_something_i_dont_want_to_do/
Everyone is aganst poor little Bush(voice dripping with sarcasm)
While the liberals have hysteria on their side conservatives have the facts and at the end of the day the facts are all that will be left.
And not everyone is against Bush, just a small minority of down and out liberals whose dreams of a Stalin-esqe “eutopia” have been thwarted once again. Come on Karl, you were soo close to reason a while back, you can still make it. Just throw the water cooler through the glass window and run to freedom (but don’t smother Chris with a pillow).
Right:
Your a Kesey fan? I have a whole new picture of you in tie Dye.
What do you think should happen from this point forward. At this point I think it makes sense to encourage New Orleans residents to stay and help in the rebuilding. Although, I still think that it is dbatable what should be rebuilt.
Atthis point I am going to give up holding Bush accountable, the guy cannot run again anyway.
I guess I am not the only one wondering what should be done with the city.
The Wall Street Journal front-page headline reads, “Old-Line Families / Escape Worst of Flood / And Plot the Future / Mr. O’Dwyer, at His Mansion, / Enjoys Highball With Ice; / Meeting With the Mayor.”
That is, however, just the beginning. According to the (paid-restricted) Journal, New Orleans’ wealthy white neighborhoods emerged very much intact, while black neighborhoods are swimming in toxic sludge. The Journal piece, by Christopher Cooper, reads as something torn from the pages of Fitzgerald’s iconic portrait of the roaring twenties–The Great Gatsby.
“NEW ORLEANS — On a sultry morning earlier this week,” Cooper writes, “Ashton O’Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city’s grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor’s pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.”
He continues: “The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Yesterday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it’s still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.”
“The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city’s Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city’s rich — and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O’Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor’s pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.”
How do they want the city rebuilt?
“The power elite of New Orleans — whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. — insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.
“The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” he says. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”
Not every white business leader agrees, Cooper notes.
“Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper’s son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, says, “This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don’t have the money to do otherwise,” Mr. Jefferson says.
One more link that shows why the response was inadequate,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07navy.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1126202811-zc19A9BKUt52yzHaKyutng&oref=login
Republicans need to stop trying to politisize this and help:
By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News
September 8, 2005
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., asked House Speaker Dennis Hastert not to send federal disaster aid to officials in Louisiana, calling state and local government there incompetent and corrupt.
In a letter to Hastert on Wednesday, Tancredo urged the speaker to create a “bipartisan select committee” of members of Congress to oversee federal disaster spending in Louisiana.
“Given the abysmal failure of state and local officials in Louisiana to plan adequately for or respond to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, and given the long history of public corruption in Louisiana, I hope the House will refrain from directly appropriating any funds . . . to either the state of Louisiana or the city of New Orleans,” Tancredo wrote.
Tancredo lashed out at New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, both Democrats, as having “demonstrated mind-boggling incompetence in their lack of planning for and response to this disaster.”
He issued a milder rebuke to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, accusing it of “bureaucratic ineptitude.”
“It’s a shame. Instead of offering constructive advice and assistance, a United States congressman is wasting our time with stereotypes and accusations,” Brian Richardson, a spokesman for Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., told The Associated Press. “Louisiana will rebuild with or without Mr. Tancredo’s help.”
Cut and paste for the banned
The Mexican government has sent its army to help out disaster refugees.
A Mexican army convoy of nearly 200 people crossed the border into the United States on Thursday to bring aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina, becoming the first Mexican military unit to operate on U.S. soil since 1846.
Mexico’s first disaster aid mission to the United States was greeted in San Antonio by honking car horns, welcome signs and cheering people wrapped in or waving Mexican flags.
The Mexican troops are specially trained to provide such essential services as housekeeping, lettuce picking, and fast food preparation.
In all seriousness, doesn’t this signal just what an absolute goatfuck this whole operation has become since we’re accepting assistance from Mexico? What’s next? Some flood preparation experts from Bangladesh?
It is nice of mexico to help its third world neihbor, the US has come a long way in the last 5 years
HA! That’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. I think it was a sink though. Come to think of it, probably the only time I’ve ever read a book after seeing the movie without feeling like the movie sucked or I wasted my time.
Right – I read that last night, but where is the dispute of his claim from a national official?
The data dump concerning prior hurricanes doesn’t matter much to me. I see a division in terms of the catastrophe, prior planning and post-disaster response. They’re not one in the same.
A Pew research poll was just on the news that has 2/3 people saying Bush should have done more sooner. I think a sophisticated attack on how the state and city government failed will convince the listeners of conservative radio, but the non-political voter won’t be swayed by it.
Bush seems to be getting hammered in the Polls, Bush is starting to remind me of some of my friends in high school who used to get in lots of trouble. The only persons who believed them were their friends and parents. At this point anyone who is objective knows what happened.
Chris:
Did you ever read the electric kool-acid acid test? Kesey is one of my favorites, Hunter Thompson and Kesey died to young.
So much for using this to help the people effected:
From tpmcafe.com
Yep, he did it. Bush suspended Davis-Bacon , the law requiring prevailing wages for public construction contracts, under the provision allowing him to waive the law during a national emergency. Rep. George Miller and Senator Kennedy both denounced the action:
“The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities,” Miller said.
“One of the things the American people are very concerned about is shabby work and that certainly is true about the families whose houses are going to be rebuilt and buildings that are going to be restored,” Kennedy said.
So we can expect big contractor profits, bad wages and the same kind of shoddy cut-rate approach that we saw in the Bush-led preparations for Katrina.
Davis-Bacon is hurts those people who couldn’t earn the minimum set by the goverment, in the free market. Just like minimum wage, those people who earn less than a new minimum wage will be the first to loose their jobs, and those already at a new minimum wage will keep theirs. Government influence in free markets are a bad idea, it probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to maintain up to date formulas for Davis-Bacon pay calculations.
http://www.theunionleader.com/business_showa.html?article=59094
“When Chicago decided to repair the Cabrini Green housing project, people who lived in the project assumed such a big job would provide work for the unemployed young men who grew up there. But because of Davis Bacon, every contractor had to pay high salaries — even for the simplest jobs. So contractors, locked into paying high salaries, were not about to take a chance on beginners. They hired the most experienced union workers they could find. They used workers who would “normally never come near our neighborhood,” said aspiring construction worker John King. “I think it’s wrong that they do that. We want to provide. We’re not just derelicts and drug dealers and thugs.”
If it weren’t for Davis Bacon, people like King could have competed for jobs by being willing to accept a lower wage. If you’ve got a choice between inexpensive, inexperienced workers and expensive experts, it often makes sense to hire at least some of the new people. Their work isn’t as valuable, but since their pay is lower, it may be a better deal for the money — and if you hire a few old hands, too, the beginners can learn from them, making their labor more valuable to you and putting them in a position to charge more on their next job.
But if the law forces you to pay top-scale wages no matter whom you hire, there’s no benefit to hiring the inexperienced people. For expert’s pay, you can get expert’s work, so that’s what you do. The would-be beginner doesn’t get a start. He’s just not worth what you’d have to pay him.”
Micheal:
What you say makes sense, I would like to see the people who live there now given first crack at the jobs, and I think they should do what they can to insure that.
It will be interesting to see how the rebuilding is handled, it really can be an opportunity to help a lot of people or an opportunity to increase the bottom line of a few companies, again it comes down to wht kind of country do we want to be.
Thiis is an article about whether to rebuild or not, I seem to come down closer to the Republican side. I blame right thinker for this.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050909/ap_on_re_us/katrina_ap_poll_hk1;_ylt=AmiPoY641ZWv5HT5LwCYXcMDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
There are plenty of tasks incorporated in construction work that requires manual laborers, not necessarily ‘experts’. The Army engineers are doing grunt work down there that can be done as well by locals. While trading this morning I read the list of companies that were given contracts already, and it’s seperated along the lines of design/raw materials/construction/etc. Halliburton and Bechtel are going to get theirs, which pisses me off as Halliburton has raked taxpayers over the coals in Iraq with price gouging – – – and Bechtel…well if anyone is familiar with the Big Dig here in Boston, handing them another contract for a large project is a mistake in my opinion.
Oh yea – that one and Bonfire of the Vanities. I’ve had ‘A Man in Full’ (Wolfe) and ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’ (Kesey) for a few years now, but haven’t gotten around to them yet. I loved the kool-aid acid test…reading an account of Neal Cassidy from someone other than Kerouac is really special to me. I was really sad when Kesey died, but having lived out in central Cali for a year…spending a good amount of time in Big Sur…it’s really one of those things that happened and that’s that. Hunter writes about it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas like, ‘a great wave that broke and rolled back to the sea’ – and that was in the 70s. I’ve got some stories about my search for the ghosts of Neal and that whole trip, but for another day. Still trying to make sense of it all.
The short version is that I’ve captured that spirit in bits and splatters, but then it washes off and it’s suddenly ‘life’ once more. Sometimes it’s at a show, sometimes it’s reading a book in the woods, but these adults had an unequivocal sense of that youthful idealism and how strage it made them appear to the rest of the world. I recall reading and seeing documentaries about the days following LBJ’s presidency and how he spiraled – how Hunter decided enough was enough – King, JFK, Robert all dead, Ali alive from the neck down…it was a tough pill for certain people to swallow, the truths these people had for the eyes and ears of Americans. The glorious difference as I see it, between these people and the Pranksters/Heads, is the Heads knew it was time to ‘get weird’…and that’s EXACTALLY what they did! Brilliant stuff, all of it!
Here’s something on the President’s executive order on reconstruction wages:
Fear and lothing was a great book, in eighth grade everybody in my school had to do a book report, it could be any book, I picked fear and loathing. I got reamed on the grade because I did not talk about what was wrong with the man. I think that is how times have changed, now everything is supposed to be a moral lesson, it can’t just be about entertainment.
The only way New Orleans is going to get rebuilt in a good way is if people get together and shame people like Bush into doing a good job, and not just rewarding his cronies.
Have you ever read All the Kings men? It is losely about Huey Long and it shows what corruption does, and argues that any malfeasence eventually corrupts the entire project. The Haliburton contracts seem like they are showing the same thing.
I haven’t – sounds like it would be right up my alley! The contracts are troubling indeed. The silver lining though is that when he turns a tragedy into gold for his friends like he did in Iraq, it only makes the public more aware of it happening. This could be the last boondoggle for a long long time. I certainly hope it is!
You used Fear and Loathing in LV for a high school book report? That’s hillarious! I learned most of what I first knew about politics from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. I’ll probably ask to be buried with that book…that one, Sidhartha and The Dharma Bums.
I will have to go pick those books up
I hope you are right about this being the last boondoggle
Chris: Here’s something on the President’s executive order on reconstruction wages
The good representative must not have looked at the data.
Educate yourself, and try not to quote a politician (career liars) as fact on a well-documented system.
Notice the “In parts of the Gulf Coast,” comment, well, lets just be specific here Representative Miller. What is it in New Orleans and Biloxi?
Actual wages for New Orleans County under Davis-Bacon range from the cheapest, and only rate under $10, a mason, to the average $14-15, and the high $22, an electrician.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=Davis-Bacon&docid=LA20030014
Actual wages for Harrison County aka Biloxi are mainly above $10, with unskilled laborers pulling $8.21.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=Davis-Bacon&docid=MS20030056
But besides that point…the Miller states that they will make less than the prevailing wages, yes, they will…but they will be with a job. So his opinion is that only person’s who can earn the prevailing wage in the free market should be allowed to rebuild their town, and if the needs aren’t met, get some more skilled construction workers to come in from Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, or Florida? Free markets work like this, you can do a job for less and I’m willing to take a chance on you, to save money on labor, then you get the job, if I have to pay top dollar for whoever is doing the job, I’m going to get the most out of my money. Congratulations Mr. Miller, you have advocated outsourcing! Why you gotta pick on the poor and unskilled?
This is the worst excuse for government ‘Do-Gooding’ I’ve seen in a while. Thanks for pointing it out…until you guys tossed flames at Bush on this one, I didn’t know how extremely retarded it was. Liberals mean well, but they fail to see that the way they go about helping people only hurts them, except, this is assuredly an appeasement law passed for labor unions. Why do I say that you ask? From the first link again…
http://www.theunionleader.com/business_showa.html?article=59094
“Unions claim Davis Bacon is necessary “to make sure government buildings are well-built.” Without first-class union labor, unions say, the buildings might not be safe. That might sound reasonable if you didn’t stop to consider that most buildings are not government buildings, and they’re safe.
There are some in Congress who realize this and want to repeal the Davis Bacon Act. There is almost no chance that they will succeed. The people who like the law make good money from it and lobby well. The people Davis Bacon hurts are less organized. When you’re trying to learn a trade and become a productive citizen, you don’t have much time to lobby your congressman. “
Micheal:
You say that some people would like to repeal Davis Bacon, but apparentely most do not. What is bothersome is that Bush is using a disaster as an excuse to push through an unpopular idea.
I have read your arguments about repeal and you make a persuasive case, but even then disasters should not be used to circumvent the legislative process.
Karl:You say that some people would like to repeal Davis Bacon, but apparentely most do not. What is bothersome is that Bush is using a disaster as an excuse to push through an unpopular idea.
It’s not being repealed..just suspended, it should however be repealed.
Karl: I have read your arguments about repeal and you make a persuasive case, but even then disasters should not be used to circumvent the legislative process.
It’s John Stossel’s argument, I just happen to agree with it. When their is a state of emergency the president has the power to suspend some laws and protections, but this is only a suspension, Davis-Bacon will return, hopefully those who would normally loose their jobs because of the increased cost to their boss, will have gained enough skills to be kept.
Given the anount of profit that companies are going to make from this disasster this is probably not the time to suspend Davis-Bacon.