I've always wondered the true family ties here

• Obama's grandmother and the media coverage - sm
  • I've always wondered the true family ties here - nm
  • Exactly my thoughts...... - not so easily fooled...........nm
    • You're overlooking a race more important than 2008 election. - Here's a hint....sm
      • You don't like the post, talk to the poster above - who posted it.............NM
        • BTDT. This is an equally offensive opportunity. - Stand by my original response to YP. nm
          • What really bothers you? The post or that someone - agreed with the post?
          • Whatever floats your boat - nm
  • In your rush to judgment, - did it every occur to you that....sm
    • I didn't rush my judgment, I have had - sm
      • As many of us have. So the scenario described in the OP - Would sound more plausible...sm
        • So you can't acknowledge there may have been - family considerations? Fine by me. nm
          • Family considerations? What, they're schedules - are too busy, too??
            • I meant their (I was wording it differently and then - edited) nm
        • I would feel the same about it either way. - nm
  • for 3 days he's been fixing to get there? - JoePlumberforPrez
    • This confirms our worst suspicions. Certain pubs factions - really are invaders from outer space...sm
  • I believe he did drop everything and go - gourdpainter
  • I don't know the whole situation, so won't judge his decision nm - nm
  • I agree with you. - Chele

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so give it all a rest would you. 

Predictably, falling right in line with Tony Snow and his *2,500 is a number* statement on June 15, followed one day later by the fiercely *patriotic* Rush *I'dLoveToServeMyCountryButCan'tBecauseOfThisPimpleOnMyButt* Limbaugh, reminding them that aborted fetuses are more important than murdered American soldiers (as was posted on the *other* board on June 16), all the while publicly declaring that all liberals who post on this board don't care about our troops.  *Profound* indeed.

http://www.prospect.org/horsesmouth/2006/06/post_134.html#002858 

September 7, 2005

Women were Being Raped, Babies were Being Killed, Alligators were Eating People, But Where the Hell was the National Guard?
How We Survived the Flood
By CHARMAINE NEVILLE

  This is a transcription of an interview Charmaine Neville, of New Orleans's legendary Neville family, gave to local media outlets on Monday, September 5.

I was in my house when everything first started. When the hurricane came, it blew all the left side of my house off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents.

I had my neighbor, an elderly man, and myself, in the house with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was coming in too fast. So we ended up having to leave the house.

We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door on the roof of the school to help people on the roof.

Later on we found a flat boat, and we went around the neighborhood in a flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school.

We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad.

By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food and no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming in our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters going across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us Hi! and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food or any water, or nothing.

Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water.

We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes. I tried to get the police to help us, but I realized they were in the same straits we were. We rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the 5th district police station. The guy who was in the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places so they could be saved.

We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.

Finally it got to be too much, I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, that I rowed them from down there in that nightmare to the French Quarters, and I went back and got more people.

There were groups of us, there were about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarter because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and that there wasn't any water. And they were right, there were phones, but we couldn't get through to anyone.

I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys, not from the neighborhood where we were, they were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and they started killing, and I don't know who these people were. I'm not gonna tell you I know, because I don't.

But what I want people to understand is that, if we hadn't been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn't have resources to get out, we had no way to leave.

When they gave the evacuation order, if we could've left, we would have left.

There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their homes in the downtown area. When we finally did get into the 9th ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th ward, there were a lot of people still trapped down there... old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping them.

And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. We would make SOS on the flashlights, we'd do everything, and it really did come to a point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire they will stop then. But that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.

Finally, I got to Canal St. with all of my people I had saved from back there.

I don't want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus, too.

Charmaine Neville is a member of the third generation of New Orleans's legendary Neville musical family. She fronts the Charmaine Neville Band.

I remember the nightly news on Vietnam with all the photos of stretchers and wounded and ongoing battles.  It made all of us think, "golly, we have to stop this." 

But the thing that really bothers me is the lack of major non-TV news coverage on Iraq.  If I didn't know better, up until the 14 marines getting killed recently and thus lots of coverage, I would have thought no one had been killed or wounded in Iraq in quite a while.  RARELY does Iraq even get mentioned on the major internet news sites I follow.  If my relative were killed over there and it didn't even warrant mention I'd be angered.  I surely do wish we could find out why the war is so poorly covered!!!  Anyone know?

the US doesn't teach a secondary language in schools.  I remember having some high school kids come to my elementary and teach us colors and numbers in Spanish and I still remember that to this day.  However, when I took Spanish for two years in high school, I barely remember a thing at all.  They really need to start with the young kids and continue it all the way through school.  I mean, we have English class every year of school and that is the language we speak and yet they expect us to speak fluent English or French by two years of class in high school.  I don't think so.  I truly wish I could speak another language.  I would particularly like to learn Spanish fluently and sign language.

If I went to live in another country, I would learn their language.  So in that respect, I think people coming to the US should learn English as well as.