Department Of Homeland Security Inaction At the Top

You're generous enough to assume that New Orleans has a bus seat for every student in a NO school? Apparently you don't understand what kind of place NO is.Look, we know from their own records how many buses the New Orleans Parish School system owns, from their own records: 324, in 2003, the most recent number avaliable. Not almost 3000. Now, I've seen New Orleans schools. Have you? I saw buildings that couldn't afford to fix broken windows or have air conditioning during days that top 100 degrees or more; I don't think that the parish bought 2500 school buses in the last two years, do you?That plus the public buses owned by New Orleans RTA comes to 688. 688 *40 is 27,000 or so. Assuming that every single bus was usable, which we know was not the case - many people did leave in buses both before and after so those buses aren't avaliable for the public evacuation. Plus about 70 were apparently non-working.Before the hurricane, the Times-Picayune investigated the use of public buses to evacuate the city; their investigation concluded the New Orleans had enough buses to evacuate only 22,000 people.There were not 2,000 buses. There were not 2800 buses. There were less than 700. Many of the buses were used to evacuate city residents, as many of the surviors can attest. But mobilizing the city's buses in a coordinated effort to rescue people in streets becoming rapidly impassable to vehicles likely would have entailed a cost in manpower not commensurate with the benefit.Did the mayor do everything he could have? No, I don't believe he did. But criticisms of his actions should be grounded in provable fact, in the truth, and not in the ravings of the right-wingers in full-on "blame anybody but Bush" mode. It doesn't do anybody any good to concoct a story to make it look like Nagin held the salvation of the city in the palm of his hand and threw it away when he did no such thing.

No, I did cite a source - the New Orleans Parish school district.But I did mean to be a little more forthcoming than I was. Here's the source: No webpage found at provided URL: http://mediamatters.org/items/200509120005Well, wait now, there's a big difference between 28,000 - actually 22,000 was the figure, which I guess you forgot - and 70,000. And you're asserting that none of the buses wound up being used at all, which I already told you wasn't true.Negligent? I don't know. Using those buses was part of the plan, so presumably there's could be a reason that part of the plan wasn't followed. Or maybe not. And remember too that those buses were used - to ferry people to the Superdome.Now, using the Superdome as an overweather site isn't the stupidest idea in the world, but throwing those people in there without enough officers to keep order was. We're only beginning to appreciate the horror that place became. I fully support the idea that we need to look into why officers weren't there; did Nagin have the forces to deploy in that area? If not then the responsibility moves up the chain. In streets that you couldn't drive a bus through, in a city totally cut off from the highways. I'm sorry but I don't see the case for negligence, yet. And I don't see that making up numbers about nonexistent buses solves anything. Maybe you'd like to try to defend your behavior in that regard?

C'mon. I've driven to New Orleans myself in about 6 hours. You're telling me that getting thousands of troops who already have their own transportation from three or four states away across an interstate highway build for that express purpose takes longer than, say, three times what it would take me to drive there myself in normal conditions? If you can't get a National Guardsman from here to there in under 18 hours then either we've suffered a nuclear attack by Soviet Russia or someone dropped the ball.

Yeah, and then she would have proposed legislation to... no, wait. She would have gotten on her syndicated national talk show and - wait, that's not right, either. I guess she would have written a column in her widely-circulated newspaper about - no, still not right. Perhaps she would have published a peer-reviewed article in... no, she doesn't do that either.What exactly does she do, precisely, that causes you to put her forth as someone who's opinion I should give a fuck about? Or did the President, along with suspending the prevaling wage, suddenly suspend people's First Amendment rights to shoot their mouths off and say stupid shit?

She's shooting her mouth off and acting stupid. But you still haven't answered my question.

That may be true. But that doesn't refute legitimate criticism of his actions. And perhaps the reason that he's so roundly censured is because his actions are usually so completely wrongheaded.And, predictably, I notice that, just like the rest of the right, you had no particular refutation against any of Sheehan's arguments; in regards to the Iraq war she's leveled specific and supportable charges against the conduct of the president that deserved to be answered. In response Republicans attacked her personally, exactly as you have done. But that's just the latest example of Republican's time-worn technique of personal attacks to preserve the president's image at all costs.But, you know, whatever. If calling a grieving war mom names floats your boat and makes you feel better about your guy in the White House, knock yourself out.

You just can't keep a good stooge down...

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(CBS) ” CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina.

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from the CBS News blog.Prediction: "Rathergate" reference from FEMA/Bush defenders in three, two, one...

I was going for a "toilet bowl" reference, myself. When Brown left the first time I think it was a blogger or something who said it best: "Bush squeezes out a Brownie."