Hmmm… let’s round down to 550. Times about 60 seats per bus is 33,000. Even in the last 24 hours suppose there was only one round trip and one outbound trip. That’s 66,000 folk safe & sound. After the storm those buses would’ve cleared the Superdome & Convention Center in basically one fell swoop (while bringing in thousands of relief workers and supplies). So even by the Demoncrats’ own arguments there’s been a colossal, criminal failure of the local/state authorities.

Next exercise, how many flooded out tractor-trailers are there? Or city vans/panel trucks/etc.? I suspect those poor folk that were abandoned and died at that hospital would’ve gladly ridden in the back of some truck for two hours or so to get to safety. The buses are only the most obvious and easily counted mode of transportation. I’m sure some digging would uncover others…

- Eric.

Dudes, haven’t we had enough bandwidth problems this month? We’re still bussing out over 1G of static text / day.

The Mayor may not have had authority to send the buses out of the city: that’s the only defense I can think of. But the GOvernor would have such authority. Nor should people have had to be sent immediately to other states: there is high ground within the state - and I am sure there are school gyms and other places for a 1-3 day stay, which might be reached quicker than the “eight-hours each way” I’ve heard. But what we hear is “we had no drivers” - did anyone ask if any of the evacuees could drive? Or call for volunteers at all? - and complaints that “Greyhound and FEMA are not sending buses” even when FEMA resources were not being allowed in (which, BTW. explains why FEMA refused to tell volunteers where to go to help - they were not allowed to send people in, period).

Re the drivers, on Sept. 2 Gov. Blanco amended her executive order of August 31 that pressed buses into service. The amendment required that anyone driving those buses would have to have a bus operator’s license. So in answer to your question, John, Blanco was actively screening potential drivers out.

Not that it mattered. By Aug. 31, the date of the original executive order, the buses had been flooded for two days.

If someone can find a good reason for Blanco to order buses into service two days past their flooding, and then amend the order to keep some potential drivers from being able to drive whatever buses might still be useful, I’d love to hear it. It sounds to me like the original order was a tail-covering reponse to receiving knowledge that those buses were there but flooded, and the second is a response to lawyers scaring her with some kind of liability horror story.

Would somebody of impecable intellectual credential please explain to me the difference between scumbag George Soros and CRAP? By the way I could have used another four-letter expletive that is more descriptive of that perverse bastard!

“Media Matters” strategy in argumentation: If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with b.s.

You have to approach this post from their perspective. This is the key graf:

New Orleans’ combined fleet of public transit and school buses would not have had nearly enough capacity to evacuate all of those who remained in the city.

It’s the perfect expression of the socialist concept of equality — that no one can have anything that everyone else doesn’t have. Therefore, since they couldn’t evacuate everybody they couldn’t evacuate anybody.

“I choose to take the silence as a sign that Media Matters simply couldn’t find even a tiny hole in our arguments. That’s generally what silence from the left means.”

I guess I’ll have to “break the silence”.

In your NRO article, you link to your post They Had a Plan, where you argue that the government in Lousiana didn’t follow their own evacuation plan. Unfortunately, you omit key information in that post (and the NRO article) that provides evidence for why they didn’t follow parts of the plan and also demonstrates that they did follow the plan for the mandatory evacuation.

For example, you don’t talk about this article which talks about a plan where part of the RTA fleet would take people to undisclosed shelters north of Lake Pontchartrain. Unfortunately, the eye of the hurricane went north of Lake Pontchartrain. Considering the track of the hurricane, it was a excellent idea that they scrapped this plan.

In lieu of this, they followed the instructions regarding mandatory evacuation in the SE Louisiana EOP. Here’s a key part of the SE Louisiana EOP that you don’t highlight on your blog (from Part III, Section B, 3.a.):

4. Designate staging areas and other facilities as last resort refuges. People at these locations who cannot be evacuated in time to avoid the storm will remain and take refuge in the designated building.

5. Assist persons with mobility limitations to find last resort refuge. Mobilize all transportation resources and request assistance from the state as needed.

It’s clear that the plan in the mandatory evacuation phase involved using local resources to get people to shelter, and the city did an excellent job of this. They set up bus stops across the city to take people to the Dome, including using buses with special lifts for handicapped citizens. They also used police with sirens and bullhorns to exhort people to get to the Superdome.

True, in the end you may lose the buses involved in intra-city transport if they’re left in New Orleans and the city floods. But considering that these buses can make multiple round trips from points in the city to the Superdome, versus (realistically) one trip out of the city, and one can see that taking people to shelter within the city saved more lives.

The MSM has to have its own blogs. Just as Satan has to have his own religion. It is just the way things are and it needs to be pointed out to every young person who is growing up not knowing the way things happen. When a terrorist blows himself up and finds himself with all those virgins he doesn’t yet know… they are all liberal lunatics!!

No respect, I tell ya! _ Is it good or bad to be spared the attentions of the Soros Character Death Squads?

Wait, so your telling us that since the area north of Lake Pontchartrain was in dangers path, the entire plan to evacuate HAD to be scrapped? Wouldnt it make more sense to be flexible on some points, such as the primary evacuation point, and have second and third and forth choices in case circumstances rendered the primary points unsafe? That arguement makes no sense.

Another interesting concept - heard from the MSM itself. Remember the lines of folks snaking aroung the Superdome, waiting to get in just before the hurricane struck? A reporter mentioned that the Superdome, although used the previous year as a shelter from hurricane Ivan, had not been certified for 150 mile an hour winds. The folks there were lucky they only had to put up with no food, water and toilets - they might easily have had no roof!

After Ivan, the local authorities have no excuses for the piss poor evacuation prior to Katrina’s arrival. Zilch.

Wonder why they took down the public access to the New Orleans Evac plans???????

HMMMMM??? link text link text