When both the Army Corps of Engineers and New Orleans Corps of Engineers were massively short-budgeted by the feds in 03 and 04 to help subsidize Iraq;
Utah,
Maybe we should have had the cojones to ask Teddy Kennedy to give up some of his federal budget money for his Boston "Big Dig" the most expensive 7.5 miles of highway in the world. Some of that could have been allocated to New Orleans. There is always a finger to point somewhere. Did I just hear The Rev. Jesse say that Katrina was a racist plot of Repulicans to rid New Orleans of poor black people who so reliably vote democratic?
Would that liberals especially take a deep breath (you should read the sound bites coming out of DC by liberals already. Stuff happens and people screw up. One could examine the activities of the mayor and govenor in the crisis, for example. I would never want to trust the Feds to do everything right in order to save me, but maybe that's just the way I was raised. Ultimately we are better our own keepers and our brother's than the Feds (or state/local governments) are.
Just my humble $.02
Peace,
David
H20
Of course, a little financial responsibility and the money would have been there anyway. You can have my tax cut.
Sound bites are coming from all angles - so far we've heard gays and gay marriage and abortion as the reasons we've been so punished. And all those people should have had cars so they could get out. Now that the federal response has seen to be lacking, the fingers are pointed at the victims themselves. Whatever.
Looking back over pictures of damage done by Isabel (just a tropical storm then) to the Chesapeake Bay area, I can't fathom the destruction from this storm. I suspect that the pictures don't tell the whole story. It's easy for the rest of us to look at it from afar and armchair quarterback it and put our own political spin on it. To say you just need to rely on yourself in these circumstances... Say that to the local gov't whose entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Even at the state level, the ability to handle these sorts of disasters, when your own state is the one devastated, is limited. I pride ourselves on being a nation that can do just about anything, and that is due to our resourcefulness and teamwork. And teamwork means we should be able to rely on each other when the shi* hits the fan.
To hear some people, you'd think that what happened was a complete surprise. Who expected a levee to fail? Only anybody who had paid attention, those predictions were not exactly secret. The hospital ship is leaving Baltimore for there. I'm proud we have that resource as a nation, it's not something Biloxi could do for themselves. It will take awhile to get there. It should have already been underway.
