Nice! You are kidding about the 'being banned.?...nm

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Shockingly unprepared

The countless questions about the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf states are all variations on a simple theme: This disaster was all but scripted; why wasn't the response?

News reports from the region have shown the situation getting worse, not better.

This inability to regain control, or at least to rally against the disaster, has shocked the country's sense of itself. Predictably, recriminations mounted Thursday, even as federal officials delivered more aid. State and local officials in Louisiana were particularly critical of the response from Washington, complaining that the feds were slow to provide the help needed to feed and evacuate survivors and halt criminals.

Defenders of the Bush administration said it was doing everything it could. They're facing problems that nobody could foresee: breaking of the levees and the whole dome thing over in New Orleans coming apart, former President George H.W. Bush said Thursday on CNN. People couldn't foresee that.

In fact, emergency planners have been thinking about a catastrophic levee breach for years. Many saw it as an inevitable consequence of a high-powered hurricane such as Katrina hitting the city. And in early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that one of the three most likely disasters to strike the U.S. was a catastrophic flood triggered by a hurricane hitting New Orleans. (The other two: a terrorist attack on New York and a major earthquake in San Francisco.)

It's certainly true that by the time forecasters knew that Katrina was a threat, it was too late to shore up the levees. And by the time they knew Katrina was going to come ashore near New Orleans, there was not enough time to evacuate the city completely.

Still, much of what happened this week in New Orleans had been foreseen by federal and state emergency planners, as the city's newspaper, the Times-Picayune, laid out extensively three years ago. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days, one story predicted with eerie accuracy.

That's why the complaints from Louisiana about the official response are so troubling. Why did it take so long to evacuate the poor, the elderly and the tourists unlucky enough to be caught with no way out of town? Where was the food and water? Why were the police left to choose between rescuing people from the floods and saving them from predators?

Critics of the administration, including former FEMA officials, say Washington's focus since late 2001 on potential terrorist targets has come at the expense of its ability to respond to natural disasters in other parts of the country. FEMA no longer helps prepare communities for disasters � it just responds to them. Other critics have pointed out that the administration diverted money from a levee project in New Orleans to fund priorities within the Department of Homeland Security.

One lesson of Hurricane Katrina, though, is that preparedness and response go hand in hand, whether the disaster is natural or man-made. Washington's response to Katrina is likely to gear up notably in the days to come, but the question of why it took so long will linger longer than the floodwaters

GOOD FOR THEM!!!! LOL. We need to do the same thing. I can think of 2 right off the top of my head. How about Hannity and O'Really?

Number one, you THRIVE on this. You thrive on spouting your drivel, fighting and spreading your venom. You need it like a fish needs water. You can't survive unless you spread your evil hatefulnes all over this board. You're not satisfied with a respectful, reasonable debate. You're not happy unless you're personally stomping someone who disagrees with you into the ground.

Number two, the entire issue involved with this thread IS "FACTS." An increasing number of Americans want to know what the truth is, and they're bright enough to realize they've been fed a bunch of lies by the idiot in the White House. You people are so adverse to the truth, you wouldn't be able to identify a fact if it hit you between the eyes.

I realize that you're energized and

over the fact that you've got a fight going here.

You have no compelling point of view. All you know how to do is insult and call people names. You don't have the ability to intelligently debate any issue. You're nothing more than message board thugs. I personally am very uncomfortable stooping that low, and from now on, I refuse to read and/or respond to any of your posts, and I would urge the thoughtful, respectful, intelligent people who frequent this board to do the same and NOT give you the conflict that you thrive on.

Take it back to the cesspool you call home: The Conservative Board. Isn't that what you've repeatedly promised to do, anyway, LEAVE?? Once again, your word has just as much value and credibility as Bush's. It's easy to see why you worship him. You share the same "values."

Those comments the other night weren't particularly disturbing. They were a bit crass at times, and the John Willkes Booth comment was a bit coarse and probably a bit over the top.....but overall they were quite amusing. I even saved one posting because it was HILARIOUS. Okay, probably not hilarious to the conservative board, I do realize that. But after watching these dreadful playground bullies beat up on everyone on that board that didn't spew their propaganda there was some sort of justice in those posts that appeared. Sort of a karmic get-even thing. I am so glad that I got to read all of them that particular evening.

Reading the other board is kind of like passing a gruesome car accident. You don't want to look, but yet you can't resist.....and you never know how awful it's going to be. Human nature, I guess.

Spreading false rumors - I thought junior high was over with!

Besides, it's far more probable that the Palin had the baby due to her age, rather than her young daughter.

Grow up, would ya?

From BF's own mouth when Greenspan and the republicans were trying to regulate FMFM, he said there was no problem. Know why? They would find out he and a bunch of others were skimming the profits.

This started before Bush. There were warnings but the dems did not heed them. Why? Because the republicans wanted this regulation and we all know NOW that the dems won't do anything for the better of the people if it means voting for something the repubs try to put in place, no matter how good the legislation is.

It would be nice to write off the current crisis on Wall Street and global financial markets as something that only matters to the investor class.

Unfortunately, the effects are already being felt in lower-income communities around the United States. Worst-case scenarios for what spins out from the U.S. mortgage meltdown are truly frightening -- a severe world recession is a distinct possibility.

Whether such worst-case scenarios can be averted, or softened -- and preventing the recurrence of similar crises in the future -- depends on abandoning the laissez-faire financial regulatory regime entrenched over the last decade.

The current crisis is the predictable (and predicted) result of a massive U.S. housing bubble, which itself can be traced in part to global economic imbalances that could have been prevented.

Regulatory Failure Number One: Failure to Manage the U.S. Trade Deficit. The housing bubble (as well as the surge in leveraged buyouts of publicly traded companies ("private equity")) was fueled by cheap credit -- low interest rates. One reason for the cheap credit was an influx of capital into the United States from China. China's capital surplus was the mirror image of the U.S. trade deficit -- U.S. corporations were sending lots of dollars to China in exchange for the cheap stuff sold to U.S. consumers.

Regulatory Failure Number Two: Failure to Intervene to Pop the Housing Bubble. Along with an influx of capital, Federal Reserve policy kept interest rates very low. There were good reasons for the Fed Policy, but that did not mean the Fed was helpless to prevent the housing bubble. As economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research insisted at the time, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan simply by identifying the bubble -- and adjusting public perception of the future of the housing market -- could have prevented or at least contained the bubble. He declined, and even denied the existence of a bubble.

Regulatory Failure Number Three: Financial Deregulation and Unchecked Financial "Innovation." A key reason that mortgages were made available so widely and with such little review of recipients' qualifications was a shift in which institutions hold the mortgages. Traditionally, banks made mortgages and held them. In the new era, banks and non-bank mortgage lenders made loans, but then sold the loans to others. Investment banks packaged lots of mortgage loans into "Collateralized Debt Obligations" (CDOs) and then sold them on Wall Street, with a promise of a steady stream of revenue from interest payments. These operations were pretty much unregulated. Despite the supposed sophistication of the investors involved, no one took account of how shoddy the loans were or -- more fundamentally -- the certainty that huge numbers would go bad if and when the housing bubble popped.

Regulatory Failure Number Four: Private Regulatory Failure. It was the job of ratings agencies (like Standard and Poor's, and Moody's) to assess the CDOs and give investors guidance on how risky they were. They failed totally, likely in part because they wanted to maintain good relations with the investment banks issuing the CDOs.

Regulatory Failure Number Five: No Controls Over Predatory Lenders. The toxic stew of financial deregulation and the housing bubble created the circumstances in which aggressive lenders were nearly certain to abuse vulnerable borrowers. The terms of your loan don't matter, they effectively purred to borrowers, so long as the value of your house is going up. Lenders duped borrowers into conditions they could not possibly satisfy, making the current rash of foreclosures on subprime loans inevitable. Effective regulation of lending practices could have prevented the abusive loans, but none was to be found.

Unfortunately, the consequences of the mortgage meltdown go far beyond the foreclosure epidemic, as horrible a toll as that is taking. The entanglement of the financial sector with mortgage instruments, and the ripple effects of the housing bubble, has made lenders uncertain of who even among large corporations and financial institutions is credit worthy. The resulting credit crunch endangers the functioning of the global economy. Financial markets are guessing wildly about the prospects of banks, insurers and other financial corporations, and the plunging value of stocks poses immediate dangers to the real global economy.

Less acute, but probably more profoundly, the popping of the housing bubble is driving down home prices. U.S. consumer demand over the last five years has been driven by consumers borrowing against the increased value of their homes; with housing values falling, that process is working in reverse. The depressed housing market is also ravaging the construction sector, a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy. A serious recession looms as a real possibility.

Mitigating these harms and preventing the worst now depends on active and interventionist government -- a government stimulus plan, and aggressive efforts to force lenders to adjust mortgage terms and let people stay in their homes. Preventing financial panics of the kind now underway require new standards of transparency and regulation for high finance. The coming days and months will tell whether any lessons have been learned.

FYI, I'm not talking about O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Greta VanSustern, etc. I'm talking about the regular news. --- Ummm, they are the regular news...LOL. So about what percentage of Fox News do you think is appropriate?

I guess you don't like it because its more fair in its reporting and not one-sided.

No, it's definitely one-sided, just like MSNBC is one-sided. Unfortunately, I think most people get their news from one main source. If you don't ever look around at the other side, then you can never realize just how biased your side may be. This is true for both sides. Personally I actually watch alot of them including MSNBC, CCN, Fox, BBC, Link TV, and read a lot online. I think that if you expose yourself to both sides, you have a better basis for forming an opinion of your own.

The right wingers have produced more organized boycotts of advertisers than anyone in history that I can recall. Below are just two of the sites that describe this.

As far as Ann Coulter is concerned, I personally prefer to hear her voice when her jaw is wired shut; however, I want to see more, more, MORE of her. In fact, I think they should give her her own show! Coulter and Chip Saltsman are great for the Democratic party.