Photoshop the New Orleans bus pics

I've seen a lot of great Photoshops of the buses from New Orleans, and thought it would be fun to consolidate them on one thread. Besides, it looks like it's been a while since there was a Photoshop thread.

I just got this in an email

Katrina; More Fuel For Bush Bashers and Media Bias

by Techniguy - 09-04-2005

Nine months into President Bush's first term, he had to deal with the
worst disaster in the history of the United States, Democrats tried to
blame it on him. Now, nine months into his second term, President Bush
again has to deal with the worst disaster in the History of the United
States, and again, Democrats are trying to blame it on him. I've had
enough of this finger pointing, Bush blame game by partisan Democrats
who are not above outright lying through their liberal media's teeth to
promote their hate for our President and try to undermine his
administration. It's time for elected Republicans to take a lesson from
the "new media" and take the gloves off to condemn these distortions of
reality and history before it's too late. It's time for elected
Republican wimps in the Congress to stand up and defend America from
these dishonest liberals who are destroying our country with lies and
distortions, and socialism.
The federal government is the largest bureaucracy in the country but it
should be the smallest as the framers intended. The fathers of our
country wanted the country to grow on freedom, liberty, and free
enterprise so they purposely wrote the constitution with restrictions on
the size of federal government, those restrictions mostly ignored today.
The larger the federal government, the more socialist a country becomes,
and the more some people want to depend on it. The founders intended for
the people and individual states to hold most of the power, authority,
and responsibility in America, not the Federal Government.
If you expect the Federal Government to take care of you and come
immediately to your rescue, then you're living in the wrong country and
will be deeply disappointed. You need to relocate yourself to a
socialist country where you can have the kind of government control over
your life that you so desire. Americans do provide a taxpayer funded
safety net for those who need it but no one expects people to make it a
way of life as far too many have. But it's not just an income that some
depend on the federal government for, they also expect the Feds to
provide them with healthcare and come to their rescue for every need and
know little of the difference between state and federal jurisdiction and
responsibility, let alone "personal responsibility". Such is the case in
New Orleans with the Katrina disaster.
It was the local and state responsibility to get those people out and
safe, not the federal governments', yet we have been seeing the media
doing nothing but blaming the Feds and the Bush Administration for the
problems with the refugees. There is such a thing as state sovereignty
and responsibility in this country and it was only after the State of
Louisiana failed in their responsibility to it's citizens that the feds
had to take over. They knew this was going to happen long in advance and
should have prepared for it, but instead they had no leadership, no
plan, sat on their asses and did nothing to protect the people from the
inevitable and predicted flood. Even National Geographic Channel did a
special program on this inevitable threat just last year but as usual,
it was ignored by the Democrat controlled and corrupt government of
Louisiana. This was not Bush's doing, it was the fault of the Democrats
running Louisiana just being the miserable failures they have been for
years and years and now we are seeing the results on our tv sets, but
not hearing it from the reporters.
Then we have Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson and the usual racist suspects
implying that Bush is racist and didn't help because the victims were
black. The real racists here are Sharpton and Jackson themselves and
others like them, and that should be clear to all by now. The president
did all he could to try to get Louisiana to show some degree of
leadership and responsibility, they failed miserably and in more ways
than one. According to the Associated Press; "Working from his Texas
ranch, Bush participated via videoconference in a large meeting of
federal, state and local disaster management officials preparing for the
storm's onslaught. Separately, he spoke by phone with the governors of
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida." This was on Saturday
before the storm came ashore.
This country has been fooled by a lying liberal media long enough and
needs to know the truth. And that truth starts with a miserable lack of
leadership on the part of the Louisiana and New Orleans officials who
are responsible for this whole mess. Thank God President Bush came to
the rescue as soon as he did. You can't mobilize an army and get them
into a disaster area over night. Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) didn't request
federal help until Wednesday when she finally had to admit she was in
over her head and couldn't deal with the problem. The federal government
has now had to push the state and local governments aside and take over
completely to do the job of the failed Louisiana officials who are
typical of today's Democrat leaders lacking in leadership. Thank God
John Kerry lost the election or those people would still be there and
die there while waiting to be rescued.
The media has been saying there was no federal help for the disaster
victims or that it was carelessly, or intentionally delayed. That's
simply not true, and in fact FEMA was there the first day with relief
and 10,000 National Guard troops had been dispatched across the Gulf
Coast on the Friday before. They just couldn't get to all the people who
were stranded in different places in the city. For one thing, they
didn't even know where they were. In the second place, they couldn't get
to them because of the flooding, compounded by the uncontrolled crime.
In the third place, LA authorities didn't even have satellite phones to
communicate with in case regular phone service went down which it did.
Much of the areas shown on tv were declared off limits to relief workers
by the N.O.P.D. because of the criminals rampaging through the city with
guns.
It was a matter of priorities, rescue those who were dying or trapped by
the flood and those about to die without help, before turning their
attention to the living ones at the shelters. What people don't realize,
and what the media isn't telling you is that there was no delay in
relief operations, that is a myth. Fire companies from as far away as
Los Angeles were there on scene by Thursday after driving across the
country. They had every resource available at the scene almost
immediately but the needs were so massive that there was no way everyone
could be taken care of right a way, so many had to wait. There was no
plan to deal with this scope of disaster in New Orleans. Not local, not
state, and not federal. It was the primary responsibility of the city
and state to plan for this and they failed miserably. President Bush
declared the area a disaster area even before the storm hit and started
the ball rolling for relief with FEMA at that time, there was no delay.
It just took that much time because of the scope and nature of the
disaster and difficulty in getting to the people. Congress was on
vacation and it took time for them to pass legislation to pay for the
relief effort. The media is not telling you the whole story as usual and
wants you to believe that the victims were neglected by the Bush
Administration instead.
New Orleans Mayor, C. Ray Nagin (D), put his disaster plan into effect.
The people were sent to the Convention Center and the Superdome but had
no plan or provisions there to take care of them. The city had no plan
to evacuate anyone out of the city itself and in the midst of it all,
Mayor Nagin froze all the available school busses in place at the city
depot where they sat for days. The president called Gov. Blanco and
urged the governor to declare a MANDATORY EVACUATION OF THE CITY two
days before the hurricane hit shore, she didn't. (Interesting that the
article containing this piece of information has been replaced on the
CNN website at that url with another similar article that doesn't
mention it. Obviously, CNN doesn't want you to know). Instead, less than
24 hours before Katrina made landfall, she ordered a VOLUNTARY
EVACUATION but had no plan for evacuating the poor with no
transportation.
That same day, Mayor Nagin ordered mandatory evacuation of New Orleans
but provided bus service only to the local shelters, not out of the
city, so there the people sat with no food or water until President Bush
and the army came to the rescue on Saturday, 5 days after Katrina hit
and 4 days after the flood. Those who chose not to leave their homes
died or had to be rescued and taken to the shelters. At the same time,
Mayor Nagin opened the local jail doors and released all the prisoners
into the streets, lacking any plan to relocate them, where they joined
with others in breaking into gun shops and stealing every weapon they
could find which were then turned on other citizens, police, and rescue
helicopters. Those rescue operations, hampered by the rampaging
criminals and looters tied up relief personnel for days who would have
otherwise been providing aid to those at the shelters.
When it became clear that Katrina flood victims would need to be
relocated from the temporary shelters, the Feds sent out requests all
over the country for places to receive the refugees, few responded and
those who did, didn't respond until 2 days later. Where were they going
to evacuate all those people to when the media was screaming into the
cameras about it? They had to put them somewhere, didn't they? It wasn't
until Friday that they found places to evacuate them to and those
evacuations are going to cause big problems for the communities who
accepted them. My point is that dealing with this problem is just not as
easy as the media would have you believe. There was no foot dragging,
racism, or intentional delays on the part of the Bush Administration,
the problem was logistics and coordination in dealing with a disaster of
this magnitude. No one, and especially Democrats, could have done things
any faster, it just couldn't be done.
By Friday, Fox News reporter, Shepard Smith, had been living on the
bridge over the Convention Center in New Orleans for 4 days along with
the refugees who were stranded there. He appeared tired and visibly
upset that these people had had no food or water or sanitation since
being rescued and dropped off there. He was understandably concerned for
this group of about 500 people, some of whom were dying in the street.
He adamantly complained about emergency vehicles passing by without
stopping and wondered why were these people being ignored. They all had
been rescued by boat from their flooded homes and brought to dry land
and just left there, but not told where to go from there. Smith said
they had been told help was on the way but had no answer as to when they
would arrive. His desperation showed a feeling that they had all been
forgotten there and would never receive help. You can just imagine the
desperation that the refugees must have been feeling.
Below him, Geraldo Rivera was with a group of some four to five thousand
people taking refuge at the Convention Center. Like the people on the
bridge above, they had no food or water or sanitation. Geraldo, nearly
in tears, would hold up babies to the camera to make his emotional plea.
A group of police officers surrounded Rivera to protect him from the
more violent members of the crowd. Reports of shootings and killings,
rapes in the bathrooms, lawlessness and people with guns running things
were common. Geraldo wanted to make the point that National Guard
personnel had been stationed at the entrance to the highway to prevent
people from leaving the area. On the verge of tears, he shouted into the
camera "Let these people go! Let them walk out of here and walk to the
neighboring towns where they can get food and water!". Rivera couldn't
understand why all these people were being kept there and prevented from
leaving. In his emotional tirade, Geraldo was being foolish and naïve
and thinking with his emotions and not with his head.
Geraldo never stopped to think about the welfare and the struggle of
people outside the group he was with. The small communities near New
Orleans were also suffering from severe storm damage and had their own
problems to deal with. What would be the effect of over 4000 homeless
and penniless people from the Convention Center, plus over 20,000 from
the Superdome stampeding through small nearby towns, some carrying guns
and weapons? What would they do once they got there? Those towns would
also be destroyed by break-ins, looting, murder, rape, and all the crime
that took place in New Orleans. The reason for keeping refugees where
they were is clear. Surrounding communities had to be protected from
further damage and lawlessness, and authorities had to be able to find
the refugees when transportation to better shelters arrived.
New Orleans wasn't the only place devastated by the storm, but it gets
90% of the tv coverage. Gulf Port-LA, Long Beach-MS, and Biloxi-MS were
also destroyed by Katrina but not only did they not suffer from
flooding, they also didn't suffer from the out of control crime that
took place in New Orleans. But then crime is nothing new to New Orleans,
the liberal, anything goes, city has tolerated it for decades. As a
result, the New Orleans murder and rape and other crime rates are twice
the national average. Or is it because the majority of victims in the
other towns devastated by Katrina were not black, and not blaming Bush
for their problems, that the media doesn't want to give them fair
coverage?
An entire community of Vietnamese in Biloxi who had already once lost
everything they had and migrated to America to build a new life, have
now lost their homes and everything they owned once again. They get an
honorable mention on the news. The millions of previously wealthy, or
just middle class white Americans in the disaster area who have now lost
everything as well, get no mention in the media at all. By watching tv
news coverage, you would think that the only victims of the hurricane
were black, and that's the impression the media wants you to get in
order to promote their false claims that the black lower class has a
lower priority for life in the Bush Administration. Anyone who would
believe that doesn't know George W. Bush and has to be a very poor judge
of character. This kind of racist rhetoric is appalling and disgusting
and should not be tolerated, much less promoted by the media yet, there
it is. What has our news media turned into in recent years? They seem
more concerned with their left wing political agenda and Bush bashing
than they do with the news, and so we get this distorted view of the
country from them. What used to be a respected profession and industry
has become a distrusted source of left wing Socialist, Communist, and
anti-American propaganda.
People who expect a federal relief effort to be on the ground
immediately, have no sense of the scope of this disaster. Millions of
people across the Gulf Coast have been left homeless, it's not just New
Orleans that the Feds have to deal with. Organizing a relief effort of
this magnitude with personnel, huge quantities of food and water for
millions, transportation for refugees out of the flood area, temporary
shelters in other states, all takes time. You can just jump in there
with no supplies and no place to take the refugees when you pick them
up. Congress was on vacation and took 2 days to reconvene after the
disaster struck. Legislation had to be passed by the Senate to finance
the relief effort. Mobilizing troops takes time. National Guard
personnel had to be called in from their civilian jobs, gather equipment
and relief supplies together, plus travel time to the site. Fire engines
came from as far away as Los Angeles and arrived on Thursday after
driving across the country. How did they get there so fast unless they
left days earlier as requested by President Bush's Administration?
Governor Blanco did not ask for 10,000 National Guard troops to be
pre-positioned before the hurricane, President Bush did. In fact,
Governor Blanco did not even request assistance from the federal
government for additional troops from outside Louisiana until Wednesday.
Louisiana officials failed to even have satellite phones to communicate
with themselves and federal officials in case of land line and cellphone
communications failures. They had no way to get critical information to
the rescue and relief personnel when they arrived.
On Saturday morning, The US Army arrived with all their class and power,
sent by President Bush, to rescue Louisiana from it's failed
governmental incompetence. By the end of the day, all of the tens of
thousands of refugees from the Superdome and Convention Center area had
been evacuated to shelters in Texas including the Astrodome where they
are being well taken care of by Texans. Thank you Texas for taking on
this huge burden to your citizens and government. Now in Texas, most of
the refugees from Louisiana will be relocated to shelter throughout the
United States. Minneapolis/ St. Paul as offered to take several
thousand, Boston has made space for 4000, other cities are now calling
in to offer their space and services.
But what do the refugees do now? They can't go back home and those who
had jobs no longer do. How will they live and provide for their
families, those lucky enough to still have them? Many don't even know
the fate of there family members, where they are, or if they're even
still alive. They had their good times and fun while it lasted in New
Orleans, but now they have to face the realities of the hardships of
life and try to survive somehow. With luck, maybe this will be the break
that pulls them out of poverty and opens the door to opportunities to
make something good out of their lives. I hope those who are capable
will certainly try.

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