Mostly Cajun has posted a most wonderful (and last) rant on Katrina:
Final word on New Orleans and Katrina
All over the news - All over the blogs - The story that President Bush was told about the inadequacies of the New Orleans levees only days before Hurricane Katrina
I will add my voice to the many: Any person with half a brain KNEW that New Orleans was in trouble before Katrina. You only need to know that water runs downhill to know that New Orleans was in trouble. Still is. At least a lot of it. the OLD part of the city was built on the high ground. The rest is in trouble. Build a wall? Walls fail. Eventually. Always.
The truth of the matter is that Katrina only side-swiped New Orleans. MISSISSIPPI took the BIG HIT! You won't see it on the mainstream media because the governor of Mississippi is a Republican and he's not into Bush-bashing, and the people of the Mississippi coast are like the people of southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas after Katrina: They got back to ruins and started sorting out their lives without resorting to rape and pillage.
The fact is this: New Orleans is mostly a disaster because of decades of neglect. It isn't a lack of money. Enough money has gone through New Orleans to encapsulate the city, but after being siphoned off by corruption and being diluted by silly spending on frivolities meant to buy votes, the money wasn't spent on levees, and instead of intelligence in city planning, construction was allowed on ever lower 'land', land kept dry only by the forces of man. And with Katrina, man's forces failed.
Go and read the rest -- it is spot on... Like I said before, the four levels of support are:
- Personal
- Municipal
- State
- Federal
This is the way it's set up in our government (Heh - spell checking I found I had typed "givernment" - maybe I should leave it at that) and this is what should have happened for New Orleans. Instead, Bush had to fly down to persuade Blanco to accept Federal aid (she refused to ask for 48 hours after the storm).
