Meanwhile, volunteers are *begging* FEMA not to shut down camps in Louisiana. sm

I begged him to let me continue, said Perlmutter, who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. People were dying, and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers. Two patients died in front of me.

I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and finally gave up. I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die so the government wouldn't be sued, but he would not back down. I had to leave.

FEMA issued a formal response to Perlmutter's story, acknowledging that the agency does not use voluntary physicians.

We have a cadre of physicians of our own, FEMA spokesman Kim Pease said Thursday. They are the National Disaster Medical Team. ... The voluntary doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law enforcement rules in a disaster area.

Perlmutter, Dr. Clark Gerhart and medical student Alison Torrens flew into Baton Rouge on a private jet loaned by a Pennsylvania businessman several days after Katrina hit. They brought medicine and supplies with them. They stayed the first night in Baton Rouge and persuaded an Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot to fly them into New Orleans the next day.

I was going to make it happen, the orthopedic surgeon said. I was at Ground Zero too, and I had to lie to get in there.

At the triage area in the New Orleans airport, Perlmutter was successful in getting FEMA to accept the insulin and morphine he had brought. The pharmacist told us they were completely out of insulin and our donation would save numerous lives. Still, I felt we were the most-valuable resource, and we were sent away.

Gerhart said the scene they confronted at the airport was one of hundreds of people lying on the ground, many soaked in their own urine and feces, some coding (dying) before our eyes. FEMA workers initially seemed glad for help and asked Gerhart to work inside the terminal and Perlmutter to work out on the tarmac. They were told only a single obstetrician had been on call at the site for the past 24 hours.

Then, the Coast Guard official informed the group that he could not credential them or guarantee tort coverage and that they should return to Baton Rouge. That shocked me, that those would be his concerns in a time of emergency, Gerhart said.

Transported back to Baton Rouge, Perlmutter's frustrated group went to state health officials who finally got them certified -- a simple process that took only a few seconds.

I found numerous other doctors in Baton Rouge waiting to be assigned and others who were sent away, and there was no shortage of need, he said.

Perlmutter spent some time at the Department of Health and Hospital's operational center at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries before moving to the makeshift Kmart Hospital doctors established at an abandoned store to care for patients. After organizing an orthopedics room and setting up ventilators there, Perlmutter went back to the Swaggart Center and then to the LSU Pete Maravich Assembly Center's field hospital to care for patients being flown in from the New Orleans area.

We saw elderly patients who had been off their medicine for days, diabetics without insulin going into shock, uncontrolled hypertension, patients with psychosis and other mental disorders, lots of diarrhea, dehydration and things you would expect. I slept on a patient cot there every night until I came home.

Gerhart said he felt the experience overall was successful and rewarding, although frustrating at times. You don't expect catastrophes to be well organized. A lot of people, both private citizens and government officials, were working very hard.

Perlmutter did not return home empty-handed. He brought a family of four evacuees back with him and is still working with Baton Rouge volunteer Hollis Barry to facilitate the relocation of additional hurricane victims to Pennsylvania.

He also returned with a sense of outrage. I have been trying to call Sen. Arlen Specter (of Pennsylvania) to let him know of our experience.

I have been going to Ecuador and Mexico (on medical missions) for 14 years. I was at ground zero. I've seen hundreds of people die. This was different because we knew the hurricane was coming. FEMA showed up late and then rejected help for the sake of organization. They put form before function, and people died.

Both FEMA and the Coast Guard operate under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which has been widely criticized for its disjointed, slow response to the devastation caused by Katrina. Federal officials are urging medical personnel who want to volunteer to help with disaster relief to contact the Medical Reserve Corps or the American Red Cross for registration, training and organization.

Porn star and Baton Rouge native Stormy Daniels said Monday that she wants to give voters a voice by starting a �listening tour� in Louisiana.

However, Daniels said she doubts she will actually seek public office despite an Internet drive aimed at persuading her to run against first-term Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter next year.

Daniels said her work as an actress, writer, director and dancer pays the bills more than a stint as a senator would.

But an Internet-based campaign to �Draft Stormy� to challenge Vitter has attracted national attention.

CNN.com, for instance, featured an interview with Daniels on Monday. The congressional newspaper �The Hill� also noted the push to turn the porn star into a politician.

Vitter apologized in 2007 for what he called a �very serious sin� after his phone number showed up during an investigation of the escort service operated by Deborah Palfrey, the so-called �D.C. Madam� who was convicted of running a prostitution ring and later committed suicide. He was not charged in the Palfrey case.

Since his apology, Vitter has refused to answer any questions about the incident.

Aaron Baer, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Louisiana, dismissed Daniels� possible candidacy as a publicity stunt.

�Voters in Louisiana are concerned about real issues that require serious leadership,� he said.

University of New Orleans student Zach Hudson said the �Draft Stormy� campaign is legitimate.

�It�s not a stunt,� he said. �We have every intention of successfully drafting her.�

Daniels, 29, hired a publicist to respond to inquiries about her interest in the Senate race.

She said she will play along to bring attention to certain issues and to remove Vitter from office.

Daniels is critical of Vitter�s response to his phone number being found on a Washington prostitution ring�s client list.

�I might be a slut and a whore,� Daniels said. �� but I�m not a criminal, and I�ve never been a hypocrite.�

Daniels will be in Baton Rouge in early May to dance at the Gold Club and possibly film a movie in New Orleans. She said she is open to touring the state to hear what people have to say.

Daniels is a 1997 graduate of Scotlandville Magnet High School. She said she is registered to vote in California.

Her work in the adult entertainment industry includes writing and directing films as well as starring in them.

Hudson, who has volunteered for the campaigns of several Democratic candidates but said he is not affiliated with the Democratic Party or any other party, said Daniels is a leader in a multibillion-dollar industry.

Daniels said she is hesitant to enter the race because she is concerned about making a mockery of government.

Daniels said she wants to bring awareness to issues such as child pornography, safe sex and the need for Internet controls to limit what children see on the Web. She has her own Web site that sells pornographic images.

She made an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last year to push a �Restricted to Adults� label for adult Internet sites.

Political commentator and former Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown said Daniels would be just one more entry in the state�s colorful political history.

He said she might attract �a pretty good protest vote� even if she isn�t destined to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Baton Rouge pollster Bernie Pinsonat said the likelihood of Vitter being defeated is diminishing by the day.

The negative publicity that President Barack Obama is receiving on the economic package is giving Vitter a good platform, he said.

�I thought Vitter would have a tough time getting re-elected, but right now, Obama is sent from heaven,� he said.

Katrina & Recovery

Woes at Embattled FEMA Spur Employee Exits

by Laura Sullivan

Enlarge

Tim Sloan

The FEMA command center in Washington, D.C., Aug. 30, 2005, shortly after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. AFP/Getty Images

Mark Wolfe

Bill Carwile, in an October 2005 photo taken before he retired from FEMA. Days after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the head of hurricane response in Mississippi e-mailed FEMA headquarters: System appears broken. FEMA

All Things Considered, January 13, 2006 � FEMA is having trouble holding on to its best people. Several FEMA staffers have told NPR that people are leaving because the agency is in trouble and no one appears to be addressing the problems. These departures are raising concerns about FEMA's ability to respond to the next disaster.

Leo Bosner, a union chief and manager of the emergency operations desk at FEMA, says morale was bad Katrina, but it's only gotten worse. He notes there have been several retirement parties at the agency in recent weeks.

They're getting out not because they're tired and want to work in the garden but because they're just sickened by the agency's failure -- very public failure -- and just sickened to see nobody doing anything to lift a finger to fix the problems, Bosner says of the departing employees.

According to half a dozen other current or former FEMA managers who did not want their name used for fear of retribution, more than 50 people have left FEMA in the past four months. One official inside FEMA who has seen the agency's attrition data says 56 people have left in the past five weeks alone.

But FEMA says only 20 people have left. FEMA spokesman Nicole Andrews says the information Bosner and other employees shared with NPR is either incomplete or imprecise. She says there's an influx of applications to work for the agency, adding, To suggest that there is any sort of a trend related to Katrina and attrition would be absolutely false.

One recent retiree is Bill Carwile, a 10-year veteran of FEMA and former Army colonel who left in November. Carwile led FEMA's hurricane response in Mississippi.

Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. Three days into Katrina recovery operations in Hancock County, Miss., Carwile couldn't get any food, water or even body bags. System appears broken, he wrote in an e-mail to FEMA headquarters. Carwile says it was the worst moment of his FEMA career.

The exhaustion frustration he felt in Mississippi wasn't the only thing pushing him to retire. Carwile says he was upset watching FEMA's training programs get cut year after year, leaving his teams unprepared.

Depending on what your definition of concentration camp is, the U.S. probably has a lot more than the article states. If you look at Guantanamo (not sure on the spelling), it's really quite clear that the U.S. is running at least ONE concentration camp. I'm curious if the U.N. will ever make any headway regarding that.

They're a place to house unruly American citizens in the event martial law is declared due to, say, a crash in the economy, another terror attack, pandemics, biological terror attack -- all the things that Bush mentioned in his "Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-21," most recently updated on October 18, 2007 (I believe was the last revision).

The U.S. military has also been stationed within the United States for a little more than a month now.

I'm still wondering if any of this will happen before Obama takes his oath of office.

Maybe used for Martial Law down the road. Here is a video of some of the camps and one in Indiana.

The article below is about 800 camps in the US and executive orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights such as electricity, news media, farms and food, etc.

Maybe Sam is in between jobs. Maybe she works 2 hours a day. Maybe she is on vacation. Maybe she types twice as fast as the rest of us. Maybe she is the world's fastest Transcriptionist EVER.

No matter. She can post all she likes and you can argue all you like. Back and forth until the cows come home. It doesn't mean she never gets any work done. I would venture to say with her drive and energy and passion, she gets a lot more done than most of us. I would also bet that she does it really well.

while you and your kind try to undo the hard work of civil rights workers who sacrificed so much to end overt racism in my country.

September 8th, 2005 11:18 am
Bush family Katrina comments draw scrutiny

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush is not the only member of his prominent political family to be drawing criticism for public utterances about Hurricane Katrina: His mother has raised eyebrows too.

In widely reported comments after visting evacuees at a Texas sports arena, former first lady Barbara Bush on Monday seemed to suggest a silver lining for the underprivileged forced from their flooded homes in New Orleans.

What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, she said in a radio interview from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them, she said.

I think that the observation is based on someone or some people that were talking to her that were in need of a lot of assistance, people that have gone through a lot of trauma and been through a very difficult and trying time, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday.

And all of a sudden, they are now getting great help in the state of Texas from some of the shelters, he said.

Her son, the president, has faced criticism for saying on September 1 that no one anticipated that New Orleans' levees would break -- even though various federal and state agencies had warned of that scenario.

In his first tour of the devastated region, Bush also praised Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief Michael Brown, saying: Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.

Brown has become a lightning rod for criticism over Washington's sluggish response to Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States, and opposition Democrats have stepped up calls for Bush to fire him.

The president has also come under fire for paying tribute to ravaged New Orleans as a place he used to visit years ago to enjoy myself -- occasionally too much, an apparent reference to the days before he quit drinking.

In an effort to raise the spirits of the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes, Bush promised to rebuild devastated areas better than they were before, but at one point focused on the home of a powerful lawmaker.

Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch, he said on a tour of the region Friday, drawing nervous laughter.

Some Republicans winced, including one disbelieving congressional aide who told AFP: Lott? He's focusing on Lott? Surrounded by poor people, he talks about a sitting senator?

There have also been echoes of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when Bush urged Americans to go shopping and live their lives as normally as possible.

In some of her first remarks after the hurricane, First Lady Laura Bush told Gulf Coast evacuees: It's very important to get your children in school. It gives children a sense of normalcy.

The White House later put together a plan to help students and school districts affected by the hurricane.

Barbara Bush had raised eyebrows two days before US troops invaded Iraq, when she told ABC television that she was not interested in media commentators' concerns about the war's potential human toll.

Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? she said. It's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

because for some people....they just cannot seem to post anything worthwhile. All they do is repeat the same stuff and call people names. If you have nothing of value to bring to the table....please feel free to shut your trap as well. I know what our country is facing and I stand by my decision of picking John McCain. I believe him, what he stands for, and what he says. I do not believe Obama. If you differ in that opinion....that is your God given right. But bring something to the table other than insults.