<p>I just want it on the record so that if that’s what they decide to do you don’t come back and second guess it.</p>
<p>
Excuse the terrible pun, but now I KNOW I am getting saturated with all the Hurricane Disaster info. , collections of supplies, etc. When scanning this thread, I first read the above abbreviation as “TOILET PAPER” having useful info, rather than the Times-Picayune! Oops!!</p>
<p>“I just want it on the record so that if that’s what they decide to do you don’t come back and second guess it.”</p>
<p>Who’s “they”? Do you mean the failed Arabian horseshow organizer that my President believes is the best man in the country to assist your family and mine in case of biological, chemical, or nuclear attack?</p>
<p>Yep. Brown seriously needs to be fired, like, today.</p>
<p>Such an easy head to roll. Why do they delay?</p>
<p>Love to know the back story…again, LOL.</p>
<p>Cause they need to promote him to another job, like in rebuilding Iraq or something- maybe like the Rail System or Social Security Management</p>
<p>Private sector here he comes, my guess, a Halliburton Company</p>
<p>Gee, I was a failed waiter once but went on to bigger and better things too. But yes, “they” is it. BTW after his stint with the horses he did spend several years heading relief efforts for dozens of major disasters. But don’t let that get in the way of a good line…</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.fema.gov/about/bios/brown.shtm[/url]”>http://www.fema.gov/about/bios/brown.shtm</a></p>
<p>“as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight and as a city councilman.”</p>
<p>Besides that, all his experience as a emergency service manager type person was under Bush, so how do we really now what kind of job he did? We all knew he worked for FEMA before he was the boss, that was no secret.</p>
<p>When did he do the relief efforts and the horses at the same time?</p>
<p>From his resume, I must have missed something</p>
<p>I see his experience in the Bush Adminstration and Law and what I quoted above</p>
<p>And, sorry, but for all his years of experience, he still didn’t do a stellar job, but thats just from what I saw and heard him say</p>
<p>“Gee, I was a failed waiter once but went on to bigger and better things too. But yes, “they” is it. BTW after his stint with the horses he did spend several years heading relief efforts for dozens of major disasters. But don’t let that get in the way of a good line.”</p>
<p>Do you honestly think he is best man in the country to protect your family? If you do, I’d have no beef with him either. If not, don’t you think there is something at least a little problematical about the man who appointed him?</p>
<p>I do believe that he did the best job he knew how. That’s even more worrisome.</p>
<p>Does anyone know–did people show up at the Greyhound or Amtrak stations on Sunday and were some non-car owning residents able to evacuate this way?</p>
<p>The warnings prior to Katrina occurred at the end of the month…low income folks could have had funds from Fed/State advanced into their accounts prior to the end of the month. I have heard no request of this sort having been made…could more folks have purchased bus tickets and perhaps afforded a hotel room if their funds had been made available early? As I recall some time ago in FL after several storms close together the funds were deposited to direct deposit accounts early…enabling folks to leave to hotels.</p>
<p>“Does anyone know–did people show up at the Greyhound or Amtrak stations on Sunday and were some non-car owning residents able to evacuate this way?”</p>
<p>I don’t know about Sunday. I do know that the buses to Baton Rouge were packed on Saturday night. (The other problem is that many folks had no place to go, even if they could afforded the bus ticket - and, taking the example of my friend, a household of a woman on a vent, woman with Alzheimers, a pregnant woman, a brain-impaired adult man, a daughter with 3 young children, and herself, exactly how could she get to the bus station, assuming she had the money, and where was she going?)</p>
<p>“The Times-Picayune did an absolutely outstanding job serving the public throughout Hurricane Katrina. Their effort to keep reporters in the city and publish a continual news source electronically was amazing.”</p>
<p>I concur, Interesteddad. While all of the national focus was on the downtown disaster and debacle, those of us with interests in other parts of the town depended on the NOLA.com site with the TP pictures and articles to help keep balance. Something which was not available on the cable news networks. At this point, a good portion of the people in America think NO was and still is mostly underwater. Although 80-90% of the city saw water, some was no more that a very few feet deep. The shooting and looting did not occur all over town as was hinted at on cable news shows. The incidences in uptown were VERY limited in number and scope. Student blogs tell of Fox News showing scenes of water on St. Charles downtown that must have been 2-3 days old because they drove down a mostly dry street that day - and pumping hadn’t started yet.</p>
<p>My point here is that there was no national venue for citizen photographs and staff photos showing NO neighborhoods still mostly in tact with minimal flooding. Nothing that would draw more water than an airboat or canoe was seen because the water was not deep enough. Instead of making people feel hopeless about NO, maybe it would be in everyone’s best interest to make the public feel it can be built back better because some of the infrastructure and social issues will have been addressed.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know about Greyhound and Amtrak, but the nations airlines deserve to be publicly humiliated for their unconsionable corporate greed in the 48 hours leading up to the hurricane.</p>
<p>The New Orleans airport was open and perfectly safe for operations all day Sunday before the hurricane, but it was a ghost-town. Why? Because beginning Saturday evening, the airlines cancelled all their flights. Not because they couldn’t fly, but because they didn’t want to fly empty planes TO New Orleans to pick up desperate passengers for the scheduled flights OUT of New Orleans.</p>
<p>A huge reason the hotels were full of tourists and places like Xavier University were full of stranded students was that even people with tickets were stranded due to flight cancellations. Over the course of a 24 hours period, that’s thousands and thousands of people, just from cancellations of regularly scheduled flights. Imagine if the airlines had actually gone the extra mile and ADDED flights? I can’t imagine how many folk would have been thrilled to get to the airports in Dallas or Atlanta and figure out how to proceed from there.</p>
<p>I would like to see the President of United States summon the CEOs of every airline serving New Orleans to the White House for a public press conference and tongue-lashing, singling them out by name. Later in the day, he could hold an event for the CEOs of the nation’s oil companies. These are the men taking home multi-million dollar sweetheart bonuses. I think these are the men that need to be held accountable for their failure to serve the national interest.</p>
<p>I am all for free-market capitalism, but it seems to me that a generation of corporate leaders has become so focused on making a killing in mergers and acquistions that they have forgotten the responsibility to their country in a time of need. </p>
<p>Next time we approach this kind of situation, maybe the Vice-President could be assigned the task of calling these corporate leaders at home on Saturday and “reminding” them that the nation will be holding them accountable for decisions to cancel their flight schedules.</p>
<p>ID, I had not heard about the inbound flight cancellations… interesting. Here is a relevant email I received today:</p>
<p>**Subject: PICAYUNE: Your word of the day from <a href=“http://www.yourdictionary.com%5B/url%5D”>www.yourdictionary.com</a> **</p>
<p>Reply-To: <a href="mailto:info@yourdictionary.com">info@yourdictionary.com</a></p>
<p>Today’s Word: Picayune (Adjective)</p>
<p>Pronunciation: [pik-</p>
<p>So mini, the power to force evacuation is a state power that must be implemented locally & not a federal power? So that the states must enact it first & feds cannot step over them to order it?</p>
<p>And then the free-wheeling outside aid agents can countervene it.</p>
<p>"At this point we have no intention of forcing people to go, but ultimately that may happen, Maj Pons says, noting that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, and the Louisiana state governor, Kathleen Blanco, have said they want to empty New Orleans in order to put it back on its feet. </p>
<p>Local radio cited officials as saying that those who insist on staying behind will not continue to receive food supplies.</p>
<p>Workers of the Salvation Army charity greeted these warnings with derision, saying they could sow panic. They insisted they would continue to distribute food and water from their mobile units to anyone who asked"</p>
<p>“So mini, the power to force evacuation is a state power that must be implemented locally & not a federal power? So that the states must enact it first & feds cannot step over them to order it?”</p>
<p>It has always been the case that “protection of health and safety” has been a power of the states, rather than the federal government. It is usually (but not always) the case that states delegate some or all of these powers to local municipalities.</p>
<p>However, under the federal power grab that is the Patriot Act (and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security), it would seem that the feds have in fact claimed an entire series of powers previously belonging to the states. The constitutional use of such powers has yet to be tested in the courts (my guess is that, in this climate, the courts would find in favor of the feds.) In other words, the feds probably could have done whatever they wanted, but there might have been a big fuss, so the best thing would have been to do what their mandate called for - to “lead”, and to manage the coordination of local, state, and federal resources.</p>
<p>I don’t think I was entirely clear: the emergency powers of the state were in fact ceded to feds on Friday, August 26th, and accepted by the feds on August 27th as follows:</p>
<p>“The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe … Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”</p>