Free Republic

JACKSON, Miss. — Thanh Nguyen will soon give up the cramped travel trailer that's been her home for more than four years, pack her belongings into an old Toyota Corolla and rely on the kindness of others for a place to live. She has no choice: The government is taking back the trailer. "I'm going to pack everything I have in a car and go to my friends' houses and move on and on until I find something I can afford," the Vietnamese immigrant said through a translator. "It's for however long they allow me to stay." Nguyen is one...

Moorehead,MN Strangers come to help couple fill sand bags to save their home.

Did a search and didn't find this. Chocolate City Mayor Ray Nagin's home in Frisco,Texas is being auctioned to satisfy a $1500 HOA lien. This is an upscale townhome development in Frisco, a Northern Dallas suburb. Remember the Nagin's moved there after Katrina because New Orleans was too messy for them? The documents are .pdf and I don't know how to copy them to FR. The first one is a list of several notices, scroll down to page 6 to see Nagin's. The second one is the lien. Not a legal scholar so correct me if I've misinterpreted the documents....

The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is urging President Obama to stay away from flood areas in North Dakota and Minnesota ... for now. While the President might want so survey the region first hand, Napolitano told reporters on a conference call Friday that she would advise the president to wait, given the "extraordinary circumstances" facing the area. "The focus needs to be on taking care of the residents of Fargo, [N.D.,] Moorhead [Minn.,] all those surrounding communities through the most serious part of this flood," she said. "And then we can begin to work on the issues...

Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to President Obama and his man under the microscope Timothy Geithner and her reaction to President Bush and his once FEMA Chief Michael Brown offers a fascinating case study in party politics. In the days following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used the event as a means to attack President Bush and the federal government's response. In the aftermath of the storm, governments at all levels were scrambling to react to the most devastating, widespread and costly natural disaster in the nation’s history. Over 1800 people died dwarfing the totals of all...

A spokeswoman for Bobby Jindal says the Louisiana governor didn't imply that an anecdote about battling bureaucrats during Katrina directly involved the governor or took place during the heat of a fight to release rescue boats. The spokeswoman, Melissa Sellers, said the story Jindal told in his response to Obama actually took place some days later in Lee's office -- though still in Katrina's chaotic aftermath -- as Lee was "recounting" his frustrations with the bureaucracy to someone else on the telephone. Liberal critics have raised questions about the story, which Jindal told this way: During Katrina, I visited Sheriff...

VIDEO PROOF the Left Is Lying About Bobby Jindal During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!' I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were...

In discussing Hurricane Katrina, people never tire of maintaining there was “enough blame to go around.” Every sensitive American knows to cite “the failure of local, state, and federal governments to respond more effectively.” Which means, in real terms, that New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin, should have gotten citizens out of the city and kept police in; Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco should have immediately asked for National Guard troops; and President Bush should have . . . not been photographed looking out of an airplane window? There’s a story today highlighting that the federal government not only saved the day...

WASHINGTON (AP) — FEMA is investigating allegations of cronyism and other misconduct at its hurricane recovery office in New Orleans.

<p>President Barack Obama said Friday that residents of the US Gulf Coast still are trying to rebuild three years after Hurricane Katrina and have not received the support they deserve from Washington.</p> <p>His words amounted to sharp, though indirect, criticism of former President George W. Bush's oversight of the Katrina recovery efforts. Katrina was blamed for more than 1,600 deaths and $41 billion in property damage.</p>

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there's not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina. And there's no outrage about it. Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) temporary housing program for Katrina and Rita individuals and families may, at the request of a state, be extended for an additional 60 days until May 1, 2009. The Katrina/Rita direct housing mission is currently scheduled to end on March 1, 2009. "We understand the importance of helping states smoothly transition families into a better long-term living environment. Given that, I am authorizing states a 60-day extension, where needed, to provide additional time to successfully coordinate and manage this transition," said Secretary Napolitano....

VIENNA (AP) -- A pastor who created a controversy by suggesting that God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina because of the city's sins said he will ask the pope to rescind his promotion. Pope Benedict XVI's recent appointment of the conservative Rev. Gerhard Maria Wagner, 54, to auxiliary bishop in Linz, Austria's third largest city, sparked an outcry among Catholics who warned it could prompt people to leave the church.

(HOUSTON) - Linda L. Johnson, 27, of New Orleans, La., has pleaded guilty to making false statements to obtain FEMA disaster assistance benefits following Hurricane Katrina, acting United States Attorney Tim Johnson announced today. Johnson pleaded guilty at a hearing on Feb. 10, 2009 , before United States District Judge Nancy Atlas. Sentencing has been set for April 27, 2009. Johnson altered an Entergy utility bill as proof she resided at a residence on Metropolitan Street in New Orleans, the address she listed as her primary residence in her claim for Hurricane Katrina disaster assistance, when in fact she did...

The Obama administration is giving a temporary reprieve to the estimated 31,000 families that are scheduled to lose their rental subsidies Feb. 28 under the federal Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said Tuesday that he has decided that there must be a transition period, the details of which are still being worked out, because the agency won't be able to process housing vouchers for all eligible families. As of last week, the Housing Authority of New Orleans had processed only a few hundred vouchers even though more than 4,000 had been allotted for renters...

As a longstanding disaster rent subsidy ends this month, thousands of families might be unable to pay their March rent.Among them is a nursing assistant from Algiers who just got laid off, a Gentilly homeowner who works with the homeless and now fears he could join their ranks, and a disabled St. Bernard Parish man who worked with oil for decades until the fumes scrambled his nervous system. The federal Disaster Housing Assistance Program, known as DHAP, will no longer pay rent for nearly 15,000 New Orleans-area households and thousands of other families displaced by Katrina, including more than 5,000...

Link only - Obama declares disaster in Kentucky ice storm

BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) - Some of the guests at the Crestwood Suites Hotel, where an alleged meth lab exploded Wednesday morning, currently receive FEMA housing benefits. Shockingly, some of those benefits go all the way back to Hurricane Katrina, which hit Louisiana on August 29, 2005. "They have kids here," said one resident. "They got people that really live here. It's a hotel that people stay at every night. They got people that actually live here, kids that ride the bus every morning from here." FEMA reports 136 families are currently receiving federal assistance to use motels and hotels...

Media: Katrina crashes into New Orleans, FEMA responds feebly and President Bush is blamed for the loss of life and limb. Winter smacks middle America, killing 55, FEMA's late again, but President Obama gets a pass.Last week's winter storm, paying no attention to Al Gore's warnings about global warming, has left a trail of dead and broken bodies and wrecked property from the Plains to the East Coast. Of the 55 deaths, 24 have been in hard-hit Kentucky. Throughout the region, hundreds of thousands are still without power and some survivors have had to resort to using melted snow for...

Last week a massive ice storm struck the heartland of America, leaving at least 42 dead and millions without power or water. Days later there are still over a million people in Kentucky who have no power, no water, and no communications. They could have to survive this way for weeks! The conditions are dire and getting worse, with some storm survivors carrying pails of water from creeks. Thousands more are living in shelters with no timetable for returning home. FEMA is nowhere to be found. Amid this catastrophe, where is President Barack Obama? While millions are struggling were struggling...

My heart goes out to the people of Kentucky. A week ago, they suffered a massive ice storm, and they are still trying to dig themselves out and rebuild. The problem with ice storms is magnitude. They cover vast areas, and the damage is systemic. They can wreak havoc on electric grids. Utilities can find themselves having to deal with thousands of broken lines and hundreds of broken poles. Fortunately, American utilities have a mutual assistance pact, which results in repair crews from all over the country rushing to afflicted areas as soon as they can safely get to work.

Maybe President Obama is busy dealing with the stimulus package from the warmth of The White House, but it would appear his diss of hundreds of thousands of people without power (and heat) may not only show hypocrisy when it comes to his criticism of George W. Bush and the Katrina aftermath, but contempt for the people of the mid-South.

Where is Barack Obama? What if George Bush was partying at the White House watching football while 1 million people were freezing? We all know what the response would be from the media. Well, while Barack Obama is eating his $100 per pound steak, people are freezing to death in Kentucky.

With nearly 1.5 million people in the mid-west without power during a cold snap, what other possible reason is there that this new "competent" administration and FEMA would be failing so spectacularly in helping in this natural disaster? It's got to be that Obama hates white people and wants them to die! Of course, I am just aping what lefty blogs were saying about Bush less than 24 hours after Katrina's hurricane winds stopped blowing. But AP is reporting that Midwest disaster relief people are none too pleased with our new president's FEMA. In Kentucky's Grayson County, there are 25...

The ice storm in Kentucky has proven to be a massive disaster. Scores of deaths in winter without heat, electricity, water, and so on. The utility company says it is the largest outage in history. Where's the President? Dunno. He's not spoken a word. After all, they're white crackers, not real people. They didn't vote for him, so... why help them? Why be concerned, when a few voters for the "other" party might die?

"Where is the Money?" Where is the Outrage?? by: Tom McClusky The Washington Post today has an article on how protestors are currently in Washington to protest that the federal government isn't providing the victims enough money (presumably because they believe President Bush created the storm with his weather controlling machine.)  The Post article certainly romanticizes the protestors: "They came to Washington yesterday from temporary housing, from apartments in Houston, hotel rooms in Dallas and spare bedrooms in cousins' homes. They came to say that the only place they really want to go is home."  What the Post fails to mention is...

MARION, Ky. – In some parts of rural Kentucky, they're getting water the old-fashioned way — with pails from a creek. There's not room for one more sleeping bag on the shelter floor. The creative are flushing their toilets with melted snow. At least 42 people have died, including 11 in Kentucky, and conditions are worsening in many places days after an ice storm knocked out power to 1.3 million customers from the Plains to the East Coast. And with no hope that the lights will come back on soon, small communities are frantically struggling to help their residents.

MARION, Ky. – A crippling winter storm has plunged about a million customers into the dark from the Midwest to the East Coast, and thousands of people in ice-caked Kentucky have sought refuge in motels and shelters. Dozens of deaths have been reported and many people are pleading for a faster response to the power outages. Some in rural Kentucky ran short of food and bottled water, and resorted to dipping buckets in a creek.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men,...

This is impossible!

Classy.

One can’t reflect upon the recent changing of the guard in Washington, without recalling the previous one. And in this instance, one can’t judge the previous guard without bringing up Hurricane Katrina.

Here we are, a week into Obama's presidency. Three days ago, a MAJOR ice storm crippled states in the south, midwest, and east. Over a million people are still without power. Just today, Obama, our "dear leader," finally declared some of the affected parts of our country "disaster areas." This is exactly the same amount of time (if not more), than it took President George W. Bush to declare following Hurricane Katrina. So where is the outrage? Why isn't the White House doing more to solve this tragedy?Where are the FEMA trailers?Why weren't residents warned and evacuated sooner?Why wasn't there...

My husband, two friends and I went to DC for the National March for Life, arriving the day after the Inauguration and staying until Saturday. On Friday we toured the Capitol, the Capitol Visitors' Center ("CVC") and the House Gallery. We were treated to repeated metal detectors at the CVC and at the Rayburn House offices when we visited our Congressman's office. However, there were several additional levels of security when we were being escorted to the Gallery. My purse was searched we went through a couple of more metal detectors, and all of our phones, cameras, and other "electronics"...

Prior to Katrina, George W. Bush was a relevant President, with decent approval ratings, a Republican majority in Congress and at least a limited legislative agenda. Post-Katrina, Bush was a failed President, unpopular with the voters, incapable of passing legislation in a Congress controlled by the opposition party. After the incompetent response to Katrina and the public relations debacle shown on national television, President Bush clearly lost not only his stride, but his support. Regardless of what the President said in his final news conference, the federal response was slow and inadequate. The coordination between the various levels of government...

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips...

Katrina President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more...

Editorial writers around the world have been taking their final printed whacks at George W. Bush, accusing the president of tarnishing America's standing with what many saw as arrogant and incompetent leadership. Some newspaper editorials, for all their criticism, suggested historians might just be kinder later on than those now writing first drafts of history. A success often cited by those seeking a silver lining was the United States' freedom from further homeland attacks following September 11. Bush's successor, Barack Obama, will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday. "A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in...

The story Much of President Bush's news conference today was a defense of the many controversial decisions of his presidency, it was also reflective, with the president showing a willingness to admit and talk about the serious mistakes made by this administration. But on one topic in particular, he seemed almost entirely disconnected from what really happened: Hurricane Katrina. As someone who spent many days in New Orleans, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina, I was taken aback listening to the president talk about the government's response.

NEW ORLEANS – President George W. Bush can defend the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. But to Gertrude LeBlanc, the view from her home in the city's Lower 9th Ward is all the evidence she needs to believe it was a failure. A row of concrete foundations is all that's left where her neighbors' houses once stood. "Bush didn't give a damn what we got," said the 73-year-old, who says she rebuilt her bright yellow house with the neat yard with help from a church group and the "little bit" in federal aid she got from the state-run program...

Cape Girardeau County emergency management director Dick Knaup and three volunteers took advantage of Tuesday's good weather... "We took the pieces of the antenna damaged by the storm off the tower and installed one new antenna and one old one," said Phil Nash, who volunteers for emergency management duties ... Amateur radio operators — nicknamed "hams" — are critical members of the communications process during an emergency. They are able to set up and operate off generators when telephones and other devices are not functioning. Knaup said amateur radio operators have a reputation for finding ingenious ways of creating a...

Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust. The comparison is inappropriate, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla. “Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed,” Miller told the survivors. “They died from abject neglect,” retorted community activist Leah Hodges. “We left body bags behind... The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die.” Angry evacuees described being trapped in temporary shelters where one New Orleans resident said...

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800, leaving New Orleans a shell of its former self. Now two former advisers to President Bush are saying the deadly hurricane also derailed Bush's presidency, according to Vanity Fair's "oral history" of Bush's perceived missteps. Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin." Bartlett, once a trusted Bush adviser, has spoken out in recent years against some administration policies. A year after the hurricane, he told The Post that it "was a setback at...

WASHINGTON – Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster. "Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives?...

New Orleans, La. – General Douglas O'Dell, Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding, today helped U.S. Secretary Housing and Urban Development, Steve Preston, and other local officials and stakeholders break ground for the new Columbia Citi Residences at Bayou District in New Orleans, calling it a sign of good rebuilding progress. This multi-use facility in Orleans Parish will include 1,326 rental and homeownership units; 346 of the units will be used for public housing. The complex features the first public housing units to be built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. "There's a lot of progress in building and rebuilding...

Two large land tracts that had been eyed as possible locations for temporary mobile home communities for those displaced by Hurricane Ike look to be off the table. County commissioners Wednesday deferred considering a plan for the federal government to conduct a detailed assessment of property in front of the County Criminal Justice Center in Galveston and on Monday, the city of Hitchcock rejected a plan to put a community at Jack Brooks Park. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had eyed those two locations to place mobile homes for 319 of the estimated 1,000 people eligible for temporary housing in...

Rules called unfair to black homeowners Fair-housing advocates and black homeowners in New Orleans filed a federal class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the Louisiana Recovery Authority and U.S. Housing and Urban Development, claiming the Road Home grant calculation formula is discriminatory. The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and the National Fair Housing Alliance on behalf of five black New Orleans homeowner applicants to the state's recovery grant program. The plaintiffs seek to represent a class of about 20,000 black families in Orleans Parish who decided to rebuild...

.O. Woman Gets New Gun To Replace One Taken During Katrina By The confiscated gun has yet to be returned, says Cong. Steve Scalise and the Gun Owners of America Wednesday, October 22, 2008 A New Orleans woman whose gun was confiscated by law enforcement officers in the days after Katrina, and who was injured during the incident at her home, got a brand new 38-caliber revolver Wednesday, courtesy of the Gun Owners of America. 61-year-old Patricia Konie says getting a new gun is a great idea because now she's more afraid of police than she was before. Konie says...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   Pennsylvania: Emergency Powers Bill Approved by House and Senate!   Wednesday, October 08, 2008   Please Contact the Governor Today!Today, House Bill 1845, an omnibus legislative package passed the State House and State Senate and is on the way to Governor Ed Rendell (D).  This legislation contained a number of pro-gun provisions for Pennsylvania gun owners.  Among the provisions was an “Emergency Powers” provision prohibiting any government agency from arbitrarily confiscating firearms during a state of emergency, such as occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.Other important provisions include:·         Establishing lawful...

Agreeing to settle a lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association, the city of New Orleans promised this week to return hundreds of firearms seized by police from law-abiding citizens during the chaotic days that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Gun-rights groups took the city to task after National Guard soldiers and police officers confiscated weapons without a warrant or probable cause during the storm's aftermath. U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier hasn't signed the agreement yet, and no monetary award is in the settlement. The city agreed to give back the guns to their rightful owners via its Web...