The failure of the Corps to recognize the destruction that the MRGO had caused and the potential hazard that it created is clearly negligent on the part of the Corps,” said U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. in his ruling. “Furthermore, the Corps not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the MRGO threatened human life … and yet it did not act in time to prevent the catastrophic disaster that ensued with the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina.”

MRGO is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and is the part of the damn system that broke under Katrina’s rains and destroyed New Orleans. If not for that breach I would suspect New Orleans would not have been so devastated.

But more importantly is the fact the danger was identified in 1988. It seems our ‘first black’ President Clinton was negligent in addressing the problem (as were other Presidents). The truth is Clinton was as responsible as Bush was – as in not at all. It was the Corps’ responsibility to prioritize their activities and make sure this situation was addressed to save lives. Clearly they failed to do so in time to advert massive loss of life and property.

Katrina was a historic storm which wiped the Gulf Coast directly in its path bare of most human structures. There was no amount of preparing that can handle this kind of devastation  - along with state and local leaders who refuse to evacuate their people or allow recovery people into the damaged area. The severe incompetence was definitely tilted towards the Democrats in Louisiana than anywhere else.

This is going to be one of those storms of the century – and this time it will really be that bad. Pray for the people in its path.

One look at Katrina covering the Gulf of Mexico one could see this storm was a monster

Gustav was never that big, and in fact was slowing down and losing its eye after hitting Cuba – Katrina crossed Florida and kept on going. I was tempted this round to predict Gustav was not going to be another Katrina, but why err on the wrong side and possibly confuse people in a dangerous situation. But this morning Gustav continued to lose energy as it hit the Gulf Coast:

According to forecasts, Gustav — which was downgraded to a Category 2 when its winds weakened to 110 mph Monday morning — is expected to skim New Orleans, which is still recovering from 2005′s Hurricane Katrina.

So the sick and warped dreams of all those out of gas liberals who thanked God for sending a killer storm to rake over Americans so they will be taught to vote Democrat are now not going to get their deepest, darkest wishes. And I seriously doubt anyone is going to console poor DNC Chair Fowler and B-Movie director Michael Moore on their disappointments.

But it looks like the prayers from the rest of us have been answered.

Global warming could reduce how many hurricanes hit the United States, according to a new federal study that clashes with other research. The new study is the latest in a contentious scientific debate over how manmade global warming may affect the intensity and number of hurricanes.

In it, researchers link warming waters, especially in the Indian and Pacific oceans, to increased vertical wind shear in the Atlantic Ocean near the United States. Wind shear — a change in wind speed or direction — makes it hard for hurricanes to form, strengthen and stay alive.

This is pretty silly stuff, which goes to show why a PhD is not a license to know anything of import. The global temperature has risen a single degree in the last 2 decades or so. And it has not budged much in the last 7 – even using the charts developed by the man-made global warming crowd.

Ignore the nice little blue line, just look at the peaks from around 1997 to 2006. All about the same. But the Hurricane patterns were not the same during those years, so how could the claim warming reduces hurricane effects? Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and that is one of the warmest years out of the last ten! Folks, these people are grasping for headlines and to get grant money to make a living.

If you look for mass markets in any sector of this country you will find cheap and simple top out. McDonald’s, paperback books, comedy films, cheap cars. The trend in BUYING is less sophistication, less “intellectual”. The truth is though, all of us buy a spectrum of products. I eat at McDonalds (it is fast and easy for me to get something reasonable once a week or so), but we also have two wireless networks, about 10 computers and a plethora of peripherals in our house. We buy these once every few years. Our high end purchases are the ones we do occassionally on long term items. In the short term, entertainment especially, we go cheap.

So if you simply looked at our purchases over 6 months (and missed our more thought out ones) we would look pretty simple minded. Trust me, we are not. We don’t chase trends much either. And we definitely see things CLEARER than the news media because we are, on average, much better educated and sophisticated in terms of the way government works than most journalists. Thanks to the family being in politics for years.

So if the media looks to discern its audience from the massive, quick hit type traffic as opposed to what is really going on (we listen to CNN because it is on in hotels and airports, not for any other reason) they come up with the idea they can LEAD the news and twist it. Which of course is all a huge mistake based on their mistaken conclusions on their customers based on a simple minded view of economics.

The same misread by the media has caused them to fail in making their messages stick in the public eye. They failed in Iraq because the news was happening on the ground, out of their control, in spite of their lame attempts to change it, shape it, and they have failed in Lousiana as well:

WHEN it comes to the business of elections, Louisiana likes to confound conventional wisdom. While most of its Southern neighbours were busy electing Republicans during the early 2000s, Louisiana stubbornly returned a Democrat, Mary Landrieu, to the Senate in 2002, and put another one, Kathleen Blanco, in the governor’s mansion in 2003. Now, as Republican fortunes have sagged across the nation—in no small part because of the Bush administration’s failure to cope with Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana’s coast in 2005—the party is having a banner year in the state.

Atop the scorecard is the Republicans’ reclamation of the governorship, in a rare primary-election victory by the 36-year-old Bobby Jindal on October 20th. Unusually, Louisiana holds a combined primary for all candidates, Democrat and Republican, with the top two vote-winners going forward to a run-off. Even more unusual is for a candidate to win outright on the first round, which is what Mr Jindal managed, polling an impressive 54% of the primary vote. Perhaps most remarkable of all is that Mr Jindal, who is Indian-American as well as very young, has overturned what had been supposed to be deep-seated prejudice. Four years ago, his defeat by Ms Blanco was widely viewed as proof that the state’s “Bubbas”—rednecks uncomfortable with politicians who don’t look like them—had not evolved.

Only a self-centered Ivy league journalist ignoramous would confuse a simple life (redneck, bubba) with a simple mind. You would think Jeff Foxworthy would have opened the elitist eyes for them! But they don’t get the joke. Us southern rednecks don’t laugh at Foxworthy because he describes us so well. We laugh because he describes so well how the elitist idiots see us. It’s like are slow drawal accents. People assume it is because we think slow, when actually it gives us more time to enjoy the frustration of those who cannot handle a paced conversation.

If the media mythology abouty Katrina was being taken seriously by the people of Louisiana, then the GOP would be on the skids there. Clearly no one in that fine state has fed into the BS from the NY and DC media propagandists. LOL! And why would they???

(1) Bush pleaded and begged Nagin and Blanco for days to evacuate New Orleans, which they did too late to meet the requirements established in the New Orleans disaster plan.

(2) Nagin and Blanco tossed out their hurricane/flood disaster plan that they submitted and coordinated with FEAM, throwing the entire response effort into a shoot-from-the-hip scamper. This should be a criminal act on the part of state authorities because the Feds pre-position supplies and resources in accordance with the established plans.

(3) Nagin and Blanco did not want to use their local resources to assist their people (like school buses) instead the tried to get things done on the cheap by asking the Feds – who were dealing with hundreds of miles of coastline and tens of thousands of people – to get them air conditioned busses throught the storm ravaged areas.

(4) When the levies broke the day after the storm came through Nagin and Blanco did not react during the 24 hours the city SLOWLY flooded. That left thousands of people stranded in the center of New Orleans and it left Red Cross supplies a few miles away without authorization to come into the city.

(5) The levies that failed were on canals inside the city and these levies were the responsibility of New Orleans and Louisianna – not the Feds. The levies failed because, like the entire region, New Orleans is sinking. The city and state have known about this sinking problem for decades. Therefore they city and state should have been surveying the levies to make sure they were still at the same height relative to sea level required to deal with a hurrican surge. They were not, and that is not Bush’s fault, that is the fault of local governments who get millions of dollars in flood control support every year and couldn’t afford a simple surveying effort.

If you remember these five established facts, all media’s biased and uneducated reporting will come into sharp focus. Because they will not report all these facts together. It paints too strong a picture against Nagin and Blanco and his too helpful to Bush’s image. This is not about saving lives, this is about propaganda.

After a hundred years or so the lack of silt has caused New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana to slowly sink. Again, this is not new and has been known for years (as I reported here back in August 2005). What is new is recent satellite data shows that the New Orleans levees had been in areas sinking much faster than realized, and it was this sinking that made the TOO LOW to stop a breach:

For example, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, built more than three decades ago, has sunk by more than 3 feet since its construction, Dixon said, explaining why water poured over the levee and part of it failed.

“The people in St. Bernard got wiped out because the levee was too low,” said co-author Roy Dokka, director of the Louisiana Spatial Center at Louisiana State University. “It’s as simple as that.”

The subsidence “is making the land more vulnerable; it’s also screwed up our ability to figure out where the land is,” Dokka said. And it means some evacuation roads, hospitals and shelters are further below sea level than emergency planners thought.

Will this be reported by the finger pointing media? Don’t count on it. Until they can figure out how to blame Bush for this it will go unreported.

I have found the need by pundits, left and right, to jump on Michael Brown as the reason the Katrina response was ‘not adequate’ to be the the epitomy of arrogance.

…

To Congress, media and bloggers alike – if you want my respect on this subject you better come equipped with some hands on experience of your own. Armchairing is easy – so easy it becomes an addiction.

…

Hindsight is wonderful, but scapegoating with hindsight is disgusting. So while so many stick their noses up at Brown for not being experienced enough, I remind them he is much more qualified than they are on this subject. He is more qualified than I am.

We are not “Insta-experts” in all things because we have readership or viewership. A lesson to keep in mind. Repeat offenders of drive by misfires should especially take note. False alarms will reduce your credibility faster than you could ever imagine.

Today we have two stories out highlighting the culpability of Governor Blanco, while Mayor Nagin begs people to come back into a city unable to sustain life normally.

The NY Times runs a stunning article on how poorly Blanco’s office responded. Remember, Louisiana is the lead for relief because all the emergency responders work for the state, they know were the supplies and relief centers are, they have the eyes on the ground and the communications infrastructure. The state directs FEMA, the Red Cross and their National Guard were to go, with what supplies, and what to do when they get there. So keep this in your mind as you read through these emails from the clueless.

Number one item on the minds of Blanco’s team the Thursday after the storm while thousands were stranded:

“Bush’s numbers are low, and they are getting pummeled by the media for their inept response to Katrina and are actively working to make us the scapegoats,” Bob Mann, Ms. Blanco’s communications director, wrote in an e-mail message that afternoon, outlining plans by Washington Democrats to help turn the blame back onto President Bush.

Partisan survival. Yep. That was priority number one it seems. Why? Well let’s look at the emails on the response effort:

“This is absolutely the worst-case situation we have long feared,” Andy Kopplin, the governor’s chief of staff, wrote in an e-mail message to the Blanco administration’s top aides the day before the storm hit New Orleans. “Pray for Louisiana citizens as this storm nears.”

And so one has to ask, why did the state not head the pleas from the Feds and others to order the evacuation?

“Whoever is in charge needs to get control of the situation regarding the thousands of people (including elderly, babies, infirmed, etc.) up on I-10 in New Orleans,” according to one e-mail message a Blanco aide received from his cousin on Aug. 31, two days after the storm hit. “They need food and water to start with. They seem to be in need of specific direction from the ‘powers that be,’ at the very least.”

The response of another Blanco aide to this plea was similarly exasperated. “I am getting these calls too, and I have buses and water but can’t get word on where and how to send,” wrote Kim Hunter Reed, director of policy and planning.

Blanco’s government was paralyzed – sort of . They knew how to respond politically:

“We need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts – that the federal response was anemic and had been shortchanged by budget cuts and avoiding responsibilities like protecting Louisiana levees and wetlands,” Mr. Kopplin wrote in one e-mail message a week after the storm hit.

“The governor needs to stay on message, and that is getting people out of New Orleans, provide stability for them and rebuild,” Mr. Anderson wrote on Sept. 1. “The governor must look like the leader at all times.”

Leadership was simple to demonstrate. All they had to do was execute an emergency response plan and direct resources to those in need.

Here is the stunner. When things are dire and resources must be moved and people must be saved, this is what the democrats wasted time on:

The struggle with Washington and questions of who was in charge – the state or federal government – emerge frequently in the correspondence. It is also clear that Democrats in Washington recognized that the federal response to the storm provided an opportunity to win some political points.

Aides to Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, called Mr. Mann to discuss strategy, a conversation that indirectly included Mike McCurry, the former press secretary to President Clinton, according to one e-mail message.

“By the weekend, the Bush administration will have a full blown PR disaster/scandal on their hands because of the late response to needs in New Orleans,” Mr. Mann wrote on Sept. 1, the Thursday after the storm, attributing that observation to Mr. McCurry. The same day, Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans gave an emotional radio interview in which he criticized Mr. Bush for having merely flown over the city in Air Force One.

In the documents, Ms. Blanco and her advisers, as well as some outside allies, defended her decision to reject a request by the Bush administration to take control of the National Guard.

“If Bush and FEMA couldn’t deliver meals after 5 days how could LA expect them to take over our Natl Guard and do better job????” John B. Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who is now a Washington lawyer, wrote in an e-mail message to Mr. Mann.

Simple, remove Blanco as the head of indecision. FEMA acts on orders from Blanco. It makes one wonder how much of the delay became a political opportunity verses an emergency challenge to tackle? Either way it is clear who was in charge of the response – Louisiana. And they need to answer for this:

And there were many calls from New Orleans residents trapped in attics or on rooftops, after floodwaters rose around their homes.

“We have got to get there,” Ms. Reed wrote about St. Bernard, the flooded parish east of New Orleans. “My hubby just came in and said they are getting calls that half the people on the courthouse roof may have died. They have been calling for two days for help, and I personally have taken these calls.”

Blanco and the Federal level democrats were wasting precious time and energy plotting their political gains while New Orleans flooded and people died. People died! When is the cold, calculating, inhuman liberal media going to wake up and see the carnage? Is it only visible when Republicans are in positions of responsibility? Are the people only worth saving and protecting when Republicans are in office?

If so, then I have never heard a better argument for voting republican since the war on terror.

For more Louisiana idiocy, check out this Washington Post story about Nagin pleading for people to come back to a battered, and unlivable, New Orleans. He needs minions to be Mayor over it seems. [hat tip Mac Ranger]

Barbara Bonseigneur looked to her hometown mayor Saturday for a reason to return to New Orleans and help rebuild the battered city and home she fled ahead of Hurricane Katrina. She didn’t get one.

“There is nowhere to buy food or get gas. It’s chaotic,” said Bonseigneur, 50. “Bringing us back to living in poverty is not a new beginning. How can a city that’s broke help New Orleans rebuild?”
…
“The Big Easy is not very easy right now,” he said, predicting that citizens who return would be in for six months of hard work before the city experiences a five or 10 year construction boom.
…
To James Anthony, New Orleans has looked like a ghost town the three times he has gone back to visit his home in New Orleans East. Splitting two rooms with his wife, two children and two grandchildren in Atlanta is better than going back, he said.

“I feel like he’s coming down here to say he’s doing something,” he said of Nagin, “but this is more of a ploy to get the workers to come back.”

UPDATE:

Adding this to the Carnival of The Insanities. Drop by and read all the insanities – they are insane.

More here at Washington Post

And now we learn Blanco is responsible for one of the cruelest screw ups – how the dead were treated. Michael Brown relied on Nagin and Blanco to follow the disaster plans they had established and rehearsed with the Feds. But because Blanco and Nagin ‘winged it’ Brown was made to be the fall guy. Some in Congress lambasted him for not pretending to be Emporer and taking control from the state!

But he never did this.

Bodies of people killed by Hurricane Katrina went uncollected for more than a week in the New Orleans area as the federal government waited for Louisiana’s governor to decide what to do with them, according to memos released Thursday by a Republican-led House committee.

The families of the victims should be rightfully outraged. And all Americans should be outraged at what the acts of a few idiotic elected officials have done to our reputations.

So why is Brown out of a job and Nagin and Blanco still in their jobs (along with a US Congress that whines everytime it is shown they screwed up too)? Elected officials are not accountable! They find scape goats to cover themselves. And we buy into the game time after time.

Though experts had warned it would take 48 hours to evacuate New Orleans, Blanco did not order a mandatory evacuation that Saturday.

“We’re going to pray that the impact will soften,” she said.

Blanco and the mayor waited until Sunday, Aug. 28 — only 20 hours before Katrina came ashore — to order a mandatory evacuation, the first of what disaster experts and Louisiana insiders say were serious mistakes by the governor.
…
Another key mistake, experts say, was Blanco’s lateness in getting the Louisiana National Guard, which she commands, on the streets to try to establish security.

There’s more, and this is not Micheal Brown’s or FEMA’s fault.

The slogan “New Orleans: Imagine it Clean” graces the sides of garbage cans in the French Quarter, a reminder that the city’s government once implored residents to pick up after themselves.

Now, residents are becoming increasingly frustrated by the city’s own failure to collect the growing mounds of fly-infested garbage that have lined the streets since Hurricane Katrina struck six weeks ago.

“It’s getting to be ridiculous,” said Michael Brown, 54, as he stood beside a pile of refrigerators, used clothes, ruined furniture, and trash cans buzzing with flies outside his home in New Orleans’ Irish Channel neighborhood.
…
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday told a meeting of his “Bring Back New Orleans” commission that the city was working toward putting a once-a-week garbage collection schedule in place, but did not say when that might happen.

Nagin is an idiot.

UPDATE:

A Blog For All sums it up better: Nagin is dumber than a bag of hammers. Damn that is funny!

Nagin called for evacuations way too late and did not full evacuate people beyond the Superdome even after the levees began to fail and would take nearly 24 hours to crest. No one needs to mention the infamous busses and the idiotic decision to let them be swamped instead of used.

Blanco disallowed Red Cross supplies getting to the Superdome before the levees failed in fear people would overstay their welcome. She too did not change her position after the levees began to fail and it was clear 30,000-50,000 people were going to get stranded in the center of New Orleans.

This was not Michael Brown’s or FEMA’s fault. But the media-formally-known-as-mainstream had the intention of laying Katrina on Bush. Now we find out the bus fiasco was even worse than anyone initially thought. Wizbang (via The Anchoress) has this stunning revelation on another group of busses at Nagin’s disposal, high and dry and minutes from the Superdome:

On the right is the OTHER Orleans Parish bus barn (the Algiers Bus Barn at 801 Patterson Ave. [Document Link]), less than 5 miles from the Superdome. These buses never flooded and the route from there to the Convention Center and the Superdome was open the whole time.

This is criminal. Nagin and Blanco had hundreds of busses at two locations at their disposal prior to the hurricane to get people out of harms way. Those busses were still available for use once the levees broke. And this new fleet of busses was ALWAYS available. Nagin should be brought up on charges of criminal negligence. While the death tool is under 1,000, many of those could have been saved if people had not been stranded in the Superdome and Convention Center.

And the principle of a cascading failure still applies. When Nagin and Blanco screwed up and needed help dealing with 50,000 stranded people they took resources from other areas hit by Katrina. Their mistakes rippled through out the Katrina effort.

And then you have the Nagin idiocy of asking people to come into an unsafe, unhealthy city. A city now with half the cityu workers it once had to pick up the trash, police the streets, man the fire stations, and process aid….

Somebody needs to get Nagin out of New Orleans before he finishes off what Katrina started

UPDATE:

Check out Rusty’s excellent sleuthing on this, which shows the busses evacuating people from the area they were stored, only to be parked and unused while people suffered in the Superdome.

I see MacRanger and I find ourselves on the same side of an issue again. I couldn’t be in better company.

UPDATE II:

Seems Powerline is joining us who see no value in pretending FEMA was (a) something it wasn’t and (b) listening to armchair pretend experts.

END UPDATE

I have found the need by pundits, left and right, to jump on Michael Brown as the reason the Katrina response was ‘not adequate’ to be the the epitomy of arrogance. I site this statement from the recent hearings with Michael Brown as a warning to armchair critiques acting as if they are instant experts:

“I’ve overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I’m doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it,” he said.

To Congress, media and bloggers alike – if you want my respect on this subject you better come equipped with some hands on experience of your own. Armchairing is easy – so easy it becomes an addiction. I fear to be struck with this affliction constantly. In his NY Times interview he mentioned one day where he gave directions and then set out to survey the situation first hand. The survey is necessary so he can comprehend the scope of the situation, the layout of where problems lie and access points, etc. He returns to find what he wanted done not done. Somehow this is Brown’s fault???

Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done.

“I am just screaming at my F.C.O., ‘Where are the helicopters?’” he recalled. “‘Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?’”

For some reason Michelle left out the part about what he was doing during that time. Why? Who knows. But it is important for context. The scope of destruction from Katrina covered an area the size of Great Britain! Do you think you can survey the situation by helicopter in a single day when you are dealing with an impact zone that large?

I have no doubt he was screaming at his FCO. I would be too. Also we have this comment:

When he arrived in Baton Rouge on Sunday evening, Mr. Brown said, he was concerned about the lack of coordinated response from Governor Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard.

“What do you need? Help me help you,” Mr. Brown said he asked them. “The response was like, ‘Let us find out,’ and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing.”

Michelle’s comment:

This incident does not inspire confidence that FEMA would have been able to fulfill Blanco’s requests had she produced the itemized list that Brown says FEMA required.

Pure, unadulterated and biased speculation. This incident proves nothing of the kind. We do know quite a few things:

(1) Blanco withheld Red Cross supplies to the Superdome before and after the storm hit – fearing enticements for people to stay there. A decision she never rescinded once the levies failed a few hours afterwards.

(2) Nagin did not use his buses to transport people from the Superdome to safety, for whatever dumb reason he can think of. A decision he did not reverse once the levies broke.

(3) Nagin and Blanco did not follow their disaster plans.

You cannot blame FEMA for coming in expecting to execute Plan A and then be stumped when Plan A is not being executed and Nagin and Blanco are ‘winging it’. FEMA needs direction where to place resources. That is why they ‘coordinate’ resources for the state. The state cannot call on these resources, but FEMA can. But what is someone to do when the local officials are making political decisions instead of running a response plan?

Hindsight is wonderful, but scapegoating with hindsight is disgusting. So while so many stick their noses up at Brown for not being experienced enough, I remind them he is much more qualified than they are on this subject. He is more qualified than I am.

It reminds me of when Wolf Blitzer was trying to pull off one of those classic media ‘gotcha’ moments by asking a responder why they were not bringing in the large wildfire planes and helicopters to deal with the fires in downtown New Orleans. The question was dripping with the arrogance of a pretend expert. The real expert looked pained as he explained the amount of water those systems delivered was enough to crush a group of houses and possibly kill people nearby.

I think all pundits should tread lightly when they are discussing something outside their field of expertise. Listening to some people on this subject sounds like auto mechanics lecturing doctors on medicine. If you think I exaggerate here is the Blanco Administration response:

In Baton Rouge, La., Blanco’s press secretary, Denise Bottcher, ridiculed Brown’s line of attack. “Mike Brown wasn’t engaged then, and he surely isn’t now. He should have been watching CNN instead of the Disney Channel,” Bottcher said.

How pathetically childish. How illuminating as well. They have no response to the obvious fact Blanco made mistakes. We know she did. They just get down and dirty. Since they cannot handle a little criticism professionally, what makes anyone think they could handle the largest national disaster our country ever faced?

BTW, the FEMA response to Katrina was the best response in history. It moved more material, to more places, quicker than at any time prior. That was Michael Brown’s responsibility.