MERGED==> The politics of Katrina + Trent Lott + Michael Moore

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
verte76 said:
The City of New Orleans is claiming that the flooding is the federal government's fault. It's crazy. They weren't prepared. There's never been a storm like this, this is worse than Camille. And we didn't start to really get hit like this in Birmingham until Ivan less than a year ago.



glad to see you back online!

:up:
 
That's for the gawker link Judah. They seemed to have added on to the coverage:

"The latest on Condoleezza Rice’s Manhattan vacation, courtesy of a reader:

Secret service is all over Seventh Avenue. That f---ing worthless b---- is shopping in showrooms right now."

Ok, first, as Sec. of State, you should be talking to foreign leaders about getting aid here, not buying shoes. And second, if you're going to be this dumb, DON'T do it in a town in which 85% of the people voted for Kerry.

I can't wait to see the Post's headlines on this one tomorrow because you KNOW they are going to eat this stuff up.
 
And you thought Bush's impression of Nero was bad. Here he is pretending to be Marie Antoinette. Let them eat cake!!!! I never thought a modern world leader could possibly be this dumb.

20050829-5_p082905pm-0125-515h.jpg


President George W. Bush joins Arizona Senator John McCain in a small celebration of McCain's 69th birthday Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, after the President's arrival at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix. The President later spoke about Medicare to 400 guests at the Pueblo El Mirage RV Resort and Country Club in nearby El Mirage. White House photo by Paul Morse
 
This is honestly ridiculous.

I don't remember the Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka, Thailand, and their officials shopping for shoes, playing the banjo and so on after the tsunami.

Is this man completely without class and tact?

ETA:

The entire thing is shameful, IMO. What I don't understand is how all of congress can be gathered in a matter of hours and how W can fly back from vacation in the dead of night for one barely alive corpse in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years (!!!) but when this happens, he's off on vacation and Condoleeza is looking for a pair of Manolos. :huh:
 
Last edited:
I am honestly not a fan of either W or Condi, however what are they suppose to do? Bail water out of N.O.? Nowadays you can get as much work done at home or on the go as you can sitting in an office.....they're pretty much useless anyway.

As for getting help to those suffering in those areas affected by the hurricane - it does take time to get people and supplies to the area when the airports and roads have been washed out. If the Red Cross had more people there "just in case" the need would arise, then those individuals would have been victims as well. FEMA and the Red Cross have thousands of people and units either already there by now or on their way to assist.

They (FEMA and Red Cross) are trying to keep it as organized as possible and of course would take local or neighboring professionals before utilizing those from other countries. I've assisted in FEMA operations myself and have friends and family who have assisted in several disasters as well. Those who can't help physically can help financially as well as pray for those who are suffering in that area.
 
MsGiggles said:
I am honestly not a fan of either W or Condi, however what are they suppose to do? Bail water out of N.O.? Nowadays you can get as much work done at home or on the go as you can sitting in an office.....they're pretty much useless anyway.

They certainly would not be much help bailing water, but from from a purely PR standpoint, what the two of them did couldn't have been worse. Shopping for shoes when your own citizens are considered refugees? Come on now, that's just stuff you don't do. Given the ineffective manner in which matters have been handled so far, their shopping trips and banjo lessons are going to bring them even more heat.

If you want to be useless, do it behind closed doors and not in a public setting.
 
Exactly.

Does she need to be on Fifth Avenue trying on $1000/pair Manolos while people shoot each other over a bag of ice in New Orleans?

Come on. It is about appearances. And this looks mighty awful.
 
Yeah. I wonder of the special session of Congress being convened tomorrow would have been happening if Katrina didn't damage oil production capacity.....
 
randhail said:


They certainly would not be much help bailing water, but from from a purely PR standpoint, what the two of them did couldn't have been worse. Shopping for shoes when your own citizens are considered refugees? Come on now, that's just stuff you don't do. Given the ineffective manner in which matters have been handled so far, their shopping trips and banjo lessons are going to bring them even more heat.

If you want to be useless, do it behind closed doors and not in a public setting.

True but Pres. Clinton was critisized for not "doing anything" or "not enough" after the 1993 (the first) bombing of the WTC. He pretty much continued his normal routine and didn't stay "behind closed doors".

Maybe politicians know they're pretty much useless......and really don't care where they are or who sees them :censored:
 
MsGiggles said:


True but Pres. Clinton was critisized for not "doing anything" or "not enough" after the 1993 (the first) bombing of the WTC. He pretty much continued his normal routine and didn't stay "behind closed doors".

Maybe politicians know they're pretty much useless......and really don't care where they are or who sees them :censored:


While I can appreciate the need to maintain a normal routine, some changes need to happen. Burying your head in the sand does not do any good. I do not specifically know what Clinton did in '93, I would be surprised if he picked up his saxophone and made for a public photo op.

I'm willing to overlook what W. did with the banjo. He was at the base for a good reason. However, Condi's actions are downright callous. She is a figurehead and an ambassador to the world on this country's behalf. She needs to show some concern for the people in New Orleans, which is not done by shopping on fifth ave. I would be surprised if other countries did not see her actions as further proof of this administration's complete lack of compassion and good judgment.
 
Last edited:
randhail said:


Condi's actions are downright callous. She is a figurehead and am ambassador to the world on this country's behalf. She needs to show some concern for the people in New Orleans, which is not done by shopping on fifth ave.

You're so right - this isn't the first time she's had somebody "removed" for saying something negative to her. Whatever happened to "freedom of speech"????
 
Kuwaiti: 'The terrorist Katrina' is a soldier of Allah'

Special to World Tribune.com

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center, published an article titled "The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda."(1) the Aug. 31 edition of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa. Following are excerpts:

"...As I watched the horrible sights of this wondrous storm, I was reminded of the Hadith of the Messenger of Allah [in the compilations] of Al-Bukhari and Abu Daoud. The Hadith says: 'The wind is of the wind of Allah, it comes from mercy or for the sake of torment. When you see it, do not curse it, [but rather] ask Allah for the good that is in it, and ask Allah for shelter from its evil.'

"When the satellite channels reported on the scope of the terrifying destruction in America [caused by] this wind, I was reminded of the words of [Prophet Muhammad]: 'The wind sends torment to one group of people, and sends mercy to others.' I do not think — and only Allah [really] knows — that this wind, which completely wiped out American cities in these days, is a wind of mercy and blessing. It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire.

"But I began to ask myself: Doesn't this country [the U.S.] claim to aspire to establish justice, freedom, and equality amongst the people? Isn't this country claiming that everything it did in Afghanistan and Iraq was for truth and justice? How can it be that these American claims are untrue, when we see how good prevails in the streets of Afghanistan, and how it became an oasis of security with America's entrance there? How can these American claims in the matter of Iraq be untrue, when we see that Iraq has become the most tranquil and secure country in the world?"

"But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America's] cities to shreds? Have the storms joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

"How sad I am for America. Here it is, poor thing, trying with all its might to lower oil prices which have reached heights unprecedented in all history. Along with America's phenomenal efforts to lower the price of oil in order to salvage its declining economy and its currency — that is still falling due to the 'smart' policy America is implementing in the world — comes this storm, the fruit of Allah's planning, so that [the price of] a barrel of oil will increase further still. By Allah, this is not schadenfreude.

"Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year... and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

"But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R'ad ['The Thunder' chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: 'The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.' [Koran 13:31]."
 
Editorial from Salon makes some interesting points.

Flushing out the ugly truth
The horror in New Orleans has exposed the nation's dirty secrets of race and poverty. Americans are ready to help. Will our leaders show the way?

Joan Walsh
Sept. 1, 2005

The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city's African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome -– rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country, it's excruciating to watch. But I'm especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical.

Ever since the first looting photos made cable news I've felt sick, like here we go again, we're going to have a new round in the culture war about the poor. Are they victims, or barbarians? If Sean Hannity's attacking them, well, I sure as hell have to defend them. When right-wing blogger Boortz is saying shoot them on sight, somebody has to say that's sick and crazy, right? Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. If looting Wal-Mart was the worst of it, I thought, we should consider ourselves lucky.

But it wasn't. Thursday we saw people shooting at rescue helicopters (with guns they stole from Wal-Mart, perhaps?), at hospital supply trucks, at workers trying to evacuate the sick from hospitals, the horrifying next chapter in an already awful story. I started to feel like my indifference to yesterday's looting was morally lazy, a reflexive shrug at having to really think about the poor, who they are, why they are. What a crazy, depraved way to treat people who are trying to help. But having said that, we're not absolved from trying to understand and reckon with the chaos. Like it or not, this crisis is going to be with us for a long time, because it's been coming for a long time -– we're going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we've long chosen to ignore.

As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the '60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who've been further dispossessed -- do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome -- abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park -- to fare much better? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium -- we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.

As if to make sure we didn't miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush. But let's be fair: John Kerry barely mentioned the poor last year. And while President Clinton's booming 1990s lifted some boats, and his welfare reform at least muted the ideological sniping about whether poor folks were victims or freeloaders, nobody's bothered lately to pay much attention to whether welfare reform made people's lives better, whether it paved a path out of poverty or just moved its subjects into the vast ranks of the working poor.

Then came Katrina, and we're forced to pay attention. We're forced to look at New Orleans, to really see it -- one of the nation's great party cities and also one of its poorest. If you go for Mardi Gras or the annual Jazz Heritage Festival, really if you go any old time, you know its majority black population is mostly hidden from white tourists. Beyond the gorgeous French Quarter and Garden District it's long been a crime-plagued, gang-ridden, corruption-befouled city. But as long as you stuck to Fodor's, you didn't have to care.

Now you do. Before Katrina, we were warned of coffins floating out of cemeteries, but instead we got poor black people flushed out of slums, and to some people they're apparently just as scary. But they're not going back any time soon. They're our responsibility now. They always were; we just ignored it.

Maybe we can't anymore. On cable news, our normally buttoned-down blow-dried correspondents, almost all of them white, are cracking under the strain of bearing witness to the suffering and even death of the people who weren't looting, who did the right thing and headed to the Superdome, only to find a worse hell awaited them. They've dropped their script and they're asking tough questions. CNN's Chris Lawrence was clearly shaken describing what he saw: "We talked to mothers holding babies, some of these babies 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions ...These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at some of these mothers your heart just breaks ... People need to see this ... what it's really like here. We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the convention center, and there's no one to come get them."

Later, Anderson Cooper was even harsher, challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu for thanking President Bush for his efforts to aid her state. "Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting," he said. "For the last four days I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi ... You know, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them them wrong way right now. Because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours and there's not enough facilities to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out here?"

Of course, it's unfair to blame the president for an act of nature like Katrina. And yet it's irrefutable that this administration's backward policies and politics made this disaster worse than it had to be, and its belated response will do nothing to address the problems that have suddenly been flushed out into the open. The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty and neglect to match the war on terror launched after al-Qaida struck -- and if we did, I doubt it would be any more effective. The president, who continued his vacation while Katrina raged, just the way he kept reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11, is headed for the Gulf on Friday. I'd like him to bring some answers, but I don't expect him to.

What I'd really like is to see him head today for the Superdome, bring his dad, and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry and Howard Dean -- any Democrat or Republican who cares, really –- and go to work, feeding and comforting the refugees and finding out what they need. Then I'd like to see them put people to work, rebuilding the amazing historic city we've apparently lost.

Americans are ready to do the right thing. Americans want to help their neighbors -- even when those neighbors are people they don't know, who are poor and have different colored skin. If you close your eyes, you can imagine a silver lining. Inspired by a president who got down in the water himself and started bailing, America could find the will and the resources to put people to work building a country, not destroying one the way we're doing in Iraq. But that is just a dream. In the real world, the water is likely to keep rising. Still, I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong.

Original article here
 
Good for you Anderson Copper, I missed this but it sounds like he was justified. Politicians shouldn't be patting each other on the backs when there's so much work to be done. She seems like a good person, but give me a break

Cooper to Landrieu: Americans Want Answers

An emotional exchange just took place between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu. Cooper introduced Landrieu and immediately asked, “Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now? Should they apologize for what is happening now?” Landrieu told him “there will be be plenty of time to discuss those issues,” and proceeded to begin thanking various government officials for their disaster relief support.

Finally, Cooper interrupted her:

Senator, I’m sorry… for the last four days, I have been seeing dead bodies here in the streets of Mississippi and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other — I have to tell you, there are people here who are very upset and angry, and when they hear politicians thanking one another, it just, you know, it cuts them the wrong way right now, because there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman has been laying in the street for 48 hours, and there is not enough facilities to get her up. Do you understand that anger?

LANDRIEU: I have the anger inside of me. Most of the homes in my family have been destroyed. I understand that, and I know all the details, and the President —

COOPER: Well, who are you angry at?

LANDRIEU: I’m not angry at anyone. It is so important for everyone in this nation to pull together, for all military assets to be brought to bare in this situation. I have every confidence this country is great and strong as we can be do to that, and that effort is under way. That effort is under way.

COOPER: Well, I mean, there are a lot of people here who are kind of ashamed of what is happening in this country right now, what is — ashamed of what is happening in your state. And that’s not to blame the people that are there, it is a terrible situation, but you know, who — no one seems to be taking responsibility. I know you say there’s a time and a place for kind of, you know, looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. There are people that want answers, and people want someone to stand up and say: we should have done more.
 
It's nice to know that if a disaster hits where I live, I will have to wait 4-5 or more days for food and water to arrive.
 
"The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty"

Tjaha... there you go.

Good article.
 
sharky said:
Where is the president when his oil buddies are doing this? This photo is NOT Photoshopped.

gas2.jpg
One thing that the president needs to do is set a temporary cap on gas prices. To inform the free-market conservative, Nixon had to do it in the seventies, and the oil industry is the closest thing we have to a monopoly. Is there price gauging? Of course. I don't support it, I feel that it's no different than the looting that's been going on.
 
Last edited:
KING: Anderson Cooper in Biloxi, Mississippi and you were an angry man today, Anderson at what?

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn't say I'm angry, you know. I think I'm tired of hearing the politicians say that, you know, they understand the frustration of people down here. To me, you know, it's not frustration. It's not that people are frustrated.

It's that people are dying. I mean there are people dying. They're drowning to death and they drown in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned and there are corpses in the street being eaten by rats and this is the United States of America.
 
If this doesn't wake Americans up to the fact that we need better government, then we deserve whatever happens to us.

I'm dead serious.
 
come on now, i'm sure a bike ride with lance armstrong will soothe our president so he can go on with his life.
 
pax said:
If this doesn't wake Americans up to the fact that we need better government, then we deserve whatever happens to us.

I'm dead serious.


No fucking kidding. This is completely ridiculous.


We're supposed to be the best country in the world and we have people living like fucking animals, dying in the streets and shooting each other for water and diapers for their children, and our government is nowhere to be found.
 
My aunt has a bumper stucker that says "Where Is the Outrage?", which she's had since not long after 9/11, I think.

Well, Aunt Suzanne, I think we finally found it.
 
I feel sick. I'm over here in the middle of freaking Africa and I'm watching all this happen and I'm thinking that, wait a minute, this looks like it could be happening over HERE! The complete lack of coordination, the poverty, the lawlessness, the desperation, the poverty, the black faces crying out for help. It's just...I don't even know what to say. :sad:
 
Back
Top Bottom