Hurricane Katrina - 10th Anniversary Of A "Manmade Disaster"

Hurricane Katrina, a category 3 hurricane, devastated New Orleans and the southern Gulf coast 10 years ago today.  What was initially a terrible natural disaster quickly morphed into a manmade disaster when the storm surge overwhelmed the levees and government, most egregiously the Bush administration, failed in their response to the flooding and human misery.  One of the lessons that remains to be learned is expressed in this long but riveting clip from "The Rachel Maddow Show" last week:  we should not rely on people who don't believe in government to run the government.  The clip (with closed captioning) reminds us of those days and what still, 10 years later, remains to be done.

GAO to Report Surge Failing

The AP is reporting that 13 of 18 Bush Assministration military and political benchmarks to measure the surge (escalation) in Baghdad have not been met. While the Assministration is asking for $50 billion more in Iraq funding, Dumbya is doing photo ops in Louisiana and Mississippi two years after Katrina, making sure to stand in front of the few facades that've been rebuilt and bypassing the blight that constitutes the areas most impacted by Katrina.

Heckuva Job

Two years ago today, the most devastating hurricane to strike the U.S. came ashore, causing widespread destruction to New Orleans and the Louisiana/Mississippi coast. Two years later, much remains to be done, despite Preznit Chimpy's promises from two years ago. Fraud, corruption, mismanagement and bureaucratic delays have hampered most of the reconstruction of New Orleans. Families displaced by the flood are still living in trailers, hoping to get their lives back. But Chimpy has had other priorities. The families will just have to wait.

Maybe he'll bring his fishing gear when he drops in on the Gulf region today for a photo op.

Blamin' the Victims...

...or what passes for thought, CPAC-style. Newtie Gingrich, wingnut intellectual emeritus and mini-government proponent, demonstrated his non-compassionate conservative thinkin' at the recent CPAC gaffe-fest, pontificatin' about the Katrina catastrophe thusly: "How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

Newtie-boy. Let's focus on the uneducated and unprepared folks at FEMA and in the Oval Office who to this day, a year-and-a-half after Katrina, still don't have the faintest, foggiest notion how to help - or at least get out of the way - in the rebuilding and revitalizing of New Orleans. That's the real outrage, and where a "deep investigation" should focus.