I wasn't kidding. I don't remember a disaster like Katrina during the Clinton sm

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the classic Good Samaritan scenario in high def. The government failed but the true enlightened souls stepped up. Bless em all.

They should pull themselves up by their soaking wet boot straps and the federal government had no responsibility who do they think they are expecting help nobody ever gave me welfare I worked all my life but if anyone is to blame it is the local DEMOCRATS because what were they doing besides floating around on rafts the whole time anyway. Everybody knows this it is a plain as the dumb look on my face.

The Post-Katrina Era

It is impossible for me, as it is for most Americans, to watch the horror and suffering from Hurricane Katrina and not feel physically sore, pained, bereft, empty, heart-broken. And angry.

The Katrina Tragedy should become a watershed in American politics. This was when the usually invisible people suddenly appeared in all the anguish of their lives � the impoverished, the old, the infirm, the kids, and the low-wage workers with no cars, no tvs, no credit cards.

The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only common good is the sum of individual goods.

It�s the difference between We�re-all-in-this-together and You�re-on-your-own-buddy.

It�s the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You�re only entitled to what you can afford.

It�s the difference between connection and separation.

It is this difference in moral and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina.

This was not just incompetence (though there was plenty of it), not just a natural disaster (though nature played its part), not just Bush (though he is accountable). This is a failure of moral and political philosophy � a deadly failure. That is the deep truth behind this human tragedy humanly caused.

It is a truth that needs to be told starting now � over and over. There can be no delay. The Bush administration is busy framing it in it�s own way: bad things just happen, it�s no one�s fault; the federal government did the best it could � the problem was at the state and local level; we�ll rebuild and everything will be okay; the people being shipped out will have better lives elsewhere, and jobs in WalMart! Unless the real truth is told starting now, the American people will accept it for lack of an alternative.

Remember where Dubya was when New Orleans was drowning? Having his picture taken while eating cake with John McCain. Now we have Gustav. What interesting timing. Perhaps Palin was selected because she is a good baker .... ? ? ? ....

McCain Katrina

In New Orleans on 4/24/08, McCain said: �I would�ve landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally.� But as Newsweek notes, on Aug. 29, 2005, when Katrina had just hit New Orleans, McCain was posing with President Bush for his 69th birthday.

McCain aggressively sought the endorsement of conservative evaneglical leader John Hagee, who said repeatedly that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to New Orleans.

McCain told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president. "That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do -rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is," he said.

Transplanted Texan writes,

I guess it's no surprise. McCain has opposed the creation of an independent 9/11-style commission to investigate the failure of the levees, voted against a 2006 bill that included $28 billion in hurricane relief, and opposed Medicaid and unemployment benefits for Katrina victims.

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job.

If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses � because that goes straight to the bottom line � then I hope I can help the country in some way, Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.

Brown said officials need to take inventory of what's going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, critics complained about Brown's lack of formal emergency management experience and e-mails that later surfaced showed him as out of touch with the extent of the devastation.

The lawyer admits that while he was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency mistakes were made in the response to Katrina. He also said he had been planning to quit before the hurricane hit.

Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is, he said.

Brown said companies already have expressed interested in his consulting business, Michael D. Brown LLC. He plans to run it from the Boulder area, where he lived before joining the Bush administration in 2001.

I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients, Brown said. My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.

A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.

My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.

Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.

That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy.

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection.

He goes on, There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide. In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming. He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina. King contended that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming.

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'

An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,�there is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation�can be made.

Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: Reliable data�since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased.

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts. Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

I wasn't kidding. I don't remember a disaster like Katrina during the Clinton sm

The Post-Katrina Era

McCain Katrina

Katrina Pushes Bush Down Further

Last Katrina child goes home

A mother and her missing daughter are reunited seven months after a hurricane devastated New Orleans