Katrina Take III
Some catchup on Katrina:
Ray Nagin tried to get people to come back to New Orleans, which is a fantastic idea, considering that public utilities are spotty and there is little infrastructure to support them and, oh, there’s another big storm coming that way. How would these people get back to New Orleans? Buses maybe? Funny how Nagin is so quick to bus his constituents into harms way, but couldn’t really be bothered when he had a chance to move them out. It took pressure from Bush for Nagin to finally say “hey, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” Once again, Louisiana needs Bush to burp them and put them down for their nap. At least this time, they let him, instead of waiting five days (thank you, Kathleen Blanco).
It is becoming more and more obvious that the levees were way overfunded by the Federal government, but Louisiana has this nasty habit of spending money on other things than what the money is meant for, or an even worse habit of stealing the money. Anyone else feeling nervous about pumping tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in through those people? Katrina was the best thing to ever happen to these scumbags.
Remember that guy on MSNBC crying talking about a colleague’s mother who drowned in a nursing home, blaming the Feds for not getting there in time? Apparently, he lied.
Death toll for Louisiana, so far: 736. It’s not good, but it’s also more than an order of magnitude smaller than the “10,000″ number that was touted. It remains to be seen if any on the left are going to complain that the number would have been higher if our medical technology weren’t so good, like they do when they look at the low number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes… damn those people for not dying to make your point.
Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam suggests that Whitey blew up the levees in order to flood the black neighborhoods and spare the white ones. I hereby sentence Mr. Farrakhan to be Pat Robertson’s bunkmate in hell.
The “nature over people” folks over at the Sierra Club blocked strengthening of the New Orleans levees in 1996 with a lawsuit. On September 5th, Al Gore gave a speech blaming Bush for the levee’s failures. The speech was given to… the Sierra Club, naturally. One has to wonder if the applause Gore received was meant to say “yes, we agree, it is Bush’s fault” or “death to all humans who defy Mother Nature by encroaching on wetlands!”
A new poll says that 54% of Americans think New Orleans should be abandoned and rebuilt somewhere else (you know, somewhere that isn’t normally underwater.)
This response is great:
Early reports of the survey results prompted angry phone calls from displaced residents of New Orleans. Among them was a tearful Mary Dawn Pugh.
“My first reaction is, where? Where would you move it? There’s water everywhere,” said the recent law school graduate whose New Orleans home is submerged.
Something tells me that if your house is currently submerged, you couldn’t very well do worse anywhere you moved it. It’s no wonder that Ms. Pugh thinks that the is water “everywhere.” Living on the bottom of the ocean rather skews one’s perspective on these things.
Pugh complained about public reaction to recent TV coverage of the worst moments of a city known worldwide for its romance and charm.
“I’ve heard so much hatred spewed about New Orleans, people talking about what they’ve seen,” said Pugh, who questioned whose opinions are measured in the poll. “It could be backwoods Minnesota people thinking how their tax dollars are going to be spent.”
Yeah, how dare those silly backwards-thinking people be apprehensive about paying for Ms. Pugh’s freaking underwater sea-lab?
