Nagin is a bullsh*tting, incompetent punk [adjective: Slang: Of poor quality; inferior] whose only qualifications for the job is that he’s as corrupt as the rest of the local government.

Blanco is a bullsh*tting, incompetent punkess [adjective: Slang: Of poor quality; inferior] whose only qualifications for the job was the (D) next to her name on the ballot.

I lived in the Gulfport/Biloxi area for four years from 2000-2004. I’m more then familiar with that whole area and New Orleans as well.

New Orleans is a turd bowl reeking of sh*t, piss, vomit and decay. Oh… did I mention this was before the hurricane.

The corruption of New Orleans local government and police force rivals the best (worst??) that Mexico has to offer (I lived on the Mexican border as well for 5 years).

I am all for spending federal funds (our tax dollars) to help in the aftermath, whatever it takes. However, I don’t want one thin dime of my taxes going towards any rebuilding of that turd bowl city. Not one dime.

Common sense says don’t build below sea level in hurricane prone areas. By the way, don’t forget to thank the French for New Orleans (and also thank them for the couple of tents and cots their donating now).

I applaud House Speaker Dennis Hastert for having the gonads to say publicly what I and many others feel about rebuilding that turd bowl city.

It would take many Billions of dollars, possibly 100’s of Billions to rebuild. It would surpass the Big Dig in Boston for the amount of corruption, scams, cost overruns, thievery and once again, incompetence.

And after all that waste of money the following week could bring another Cat 4 or Cat 5 hurricane. I say NO!

Give the Big Easy the Big “Final” Rest.

I’m getting tired of helping people rebuild in the same damned area that they were in before. I say that if they want federal money to rebuild in the same place, a condition of it is that the recipients pay for market-rate disaster insurance. And put it on their their property tax bill so they couldn’t just drop it after a year.

Are the buses in question the same buses that bus the people in question to the polls on election day? Sucks that there wasn’t some sort of election going on that weekend!

Sometimes “visually arresting” pictures can be misleading if you don’t understand the context.

Carrying out an evacuation of a large city requires a massive commitment of logistics, human resources, and infrastructure. It’s not just a matter of deploying buses — unless you are in a science fiction movie, buses don’t drive themselves. You need trained drivers (you could use volunteers, but that creates the risk of major traffic accidents, which would disrupt contraflow), you must be able to organize residents into pickup points and keep those areas safe and well-organized, you need to organize transportation routes to go to places safely out of the range of the hurricane, you need to provide places on the route for riders to get water and go to the bathroom, you need personnel to accompany buses in order to respond to medical emergencies, etc. New Orleans is a city that (1) has tremendously concentrated poverty and (2)is in dire fiscal straits. Just to give one example, the city could only afford to maintain a police force of 1600 people in a city the size of 450,000 people. Indeed, New Orleans officials made clear that they lacked the capabilities to organize a mass evacucation for those 100,000 residents without the means to leave New Orleans by themselves. That was one of the reasons the city would distribute DVD’s - so that people would make their own arrangements for evacuating.

FEMA was well aware of the fact that New Orleans could not evacuate huge numbers of residents. Let me excerpt the opening sentences from the now-infamous article by Bruce Nolan in the 7/24/2005 edition of the Times-Picayune:

“City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.”

What city officials did in preparation before the hurricane was to concentrate their very limited resources on improving contraflow so that cars could get out, retrofitting the Superdome so it could survive a hurrricane, and using the busdrivers he had to transport people to the Superdome. By choosing to move people to a safe site, the City was able to reach far more residents than if it had tried to evacuate people out of the City.

You can disagree with the choices the Mayor made regarding the evacuation (as well as with plenty of his other decisions) but you should at least recognize the terrible trade-offs he faced.

Also, I think it’s noteworthy that the local press has been highly praiseworthy of Nagin’s leadership:

Link

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Peter said: “Also, I think it’s noteworthy that the local press has been highly praiseworthy of Nagin’s leadership”

LMAO.…. the local press highly praising Nagin. All I can say is look at the source. The corrupt praising the corrupt. The Times-Picayun… the same paper that published the “You’re on your own..” statement in July and then blaming Bush for not being in the turd bowl the day after the hurricane pulling babies out of the water. Just plain funny.

Peter;

I have not seen anywhere that any buses were used to move anyone, even people to the Superdome. Do you have evidence for that?

But even if what you say is true, then I just have a couple question:

• If the buses were used to take people to the Superdome, why weren’t they parked on high ground nearby for after the hurricane? They must have had drivers then.
• You say that one problem with using the buses is that you need to have gathering points. Yet you then point out that the city did exactly that (see previous item). As for water and supplies, the Red Cross had those just outside New Orleans.

I’m still not seeing why using some buses to help evacuate the Superdome / Convention Center after the hurricane was so logistically difficult, especially since it was part of the disaster handling plans by the city.

I have not seen anywhere that any buses were used to move anyone, even people to the Superdome. Do you have evidence for that?

http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWL082705nagin.b7724856.html

Nagin orders mandatory evacuation in face of Katrina 10:11 AM CDT on Sunday, August 28, 2005

… He also opened the Louisiana Superdome as a shelter of last resort that would begin accepting people around Noon. He said the Dome would have few supplies and that people were expected to bring food and other necessary items. RTA buses were going to be sent to pick up those going to shelters at designated pickup points. ____

You say that one problem with using the buses is that you need to have gathering points. Yet you then point out that the city did exactly that (see previous item). As for water and supplies, the Red Cross had those just outside New Orleans.

I’m hardly an expert in emergency management, but I would think that the logistics of busing people to the Superdome is much simpler than busing them to shelters outside the range of Katrina.

If the buses were used to take people to the Superdome, why weren’t they parked on high ground nearby for after the hurricane? They must have had drivers then.

I don’t know what New Orleans did with the city buses used to transport people to emegency shelters (as opposed to the unused buses that were wiped out by flooding). If the buses weren’t taken to high ground, that’s something that Nagin has to explain. Like I said, I’m not defending everything he did

Peter you’re in massive denial. Of course it’s difficult to do. That’s why nobody bothered to try and contraflow was never even used until last year. It was a conspiracy of willful blindness because 50-100K people are “acceptable numbers” on paper. They were strangely more concerned about buildings than people.