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In this post about Ellsworth I argued, amongst other things, that in the name of economic development conservatives must not fall into a reflexive anti-government stance. Here's an example of a conservative Republican foolishly willing to drive the anti-government bandwagon...

Headline: Troops Arrive in New Orleans With Shoot-To-Kill Orders: Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco says that the guardsmen are allowed to open fire on hoodlums taking advantage of from the devastation by Hurricane Katrina. These troops are fresh back from Iraq,...

H/T to Maha Rushi who had this on his show today. The OpEd here from the SanFran Chronicle (not a stronghold of the VRWC) describes a mental odyssey that took the writer out of the left, into the world of reality:

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

Nice bit of writing and thinking here - the writer also called and discussed this some more with Rush also. Pretty good nerve for still living in SanFran - possibly the ultimate center of the moonbat habitat.

From Pat Buchanan: Katrina has exposed the limits of federal power and the absence of a serious set of national priorities. In New Orleans, those who relied on government ? the New Orleans police, the mayor, Gov. Blanco, FEMA ?...

From Burt Prelutsky: The people I could not begin to fathom were those like Robert Kennedy Jr., the self-proclaimed energy conservationist who flies hither and thither in private jets, who blamed President Bush for the disaster. If only he had...

Regarding John Thune and Ellsworth I used a quarterback analogy. The quarterback gets too much blame when the team loses and too much credit when the team wins. I guess the same goes for presidents. Bush is getting more blame...

Kaus has it about right: Sure, the Bushies are using the federalism issue, and Louisiana's potentially bruised feelings, as an excuse--especially when they talk about how "it would have been perceived" if Bush had seized control of the relief effort...

Gone with the Water

From an article in the October 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine:

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however?the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

Sound familiar? Read on:

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

Fortunately the casualty rate doesn't seem to be this high for NOLA, but the rest sounds spot on.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't?yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

Pretty good for a year in advance. Imagine what would have happened if the Louisiana state government, and the City of New Orleans had made some realistic emergency plans based on this sort of projection.

Like it should have been their priority, since they're the ones directly on the scene - right? As it turned out, wrong!

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