Houston ping
Don't kid yourself. Houston has it's graft and poverty just like any other large city. It's also home to Sheila Don't-you-know-who-I-am Jackson-Lee.
Houston has become the oil capital of the world, and one has to wonder if the oil companies still remaining in New Orleans will take this opportunity to permanently relocate.
Yeah, I just like hearing that.
Houston flooded in part because of poor planning a few years ago (2001) and had an incompetent mayor.
We have close to one party rule here as well as corruption that focuses civic dollars in the hands of a few connected developers.
They partnered with Ken Lay to get a 51% victory on the stadium referendum.
The same puppet master, Mayor Bob, who got run out by term limits has chosen his next two successors, both Clinton cronies.
Houston's only daily paper serves these interests and waited until after Mayor Lee P. Brown entered his final term to dump criticism on him and basically ask "how did this fool get elected three times?"
Tom DeLay is the AntiChrist to the Comical and they spare no opportunity to vilify him. In part this stems from his opposition to federal funding of their death train trolly.
New Orleans was a rotten place but Houston isn't heaven.
"The reason New Orleans slid so quickly from civilization into Third World conditions was that it was pretty much a Third World city already..."
Exactly right!
I don't know if New Orleans will survive as a city, let alone as an important port ... I suppose it could if it is artificially propped up by the federal government ... but I doubt very much that its stature as a desirable tourist destination will survive. Its ugly underbelly has been exposed. The New Orleans of Louis Armstrong, jazz, and goodhearted fun has decayed into the New Orleans of decadence, corruption, and crime. Thanks, but no thanks.
If it wasn't for Texas...
bttt
As much as I loathed and still loathe unindicted rapist William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, I did not want America to fail. I did not want more soldiers to die in Bosnia. I did not want the stock market or economy to tank. I did not root for natural disasters. It is a shame that those on the political left hate America and want bad things to happen unless their guy is in charge.
This writer has clearly never been to Houston's Third Ward.
Houston is to be commended for its generosity. But if a disaster similar to Katrina had hit there, or any other major city, the outcome wouldn't have been a whole lot different. Nobody is prepared for something like this. Katrina was an order of magnitude greater than anything the US has encountered in at least a century. It's easy and comforting to point fingers; it's a way of convincing ourselves it can't happen to OUR community. But it can and at some point will.
That's why we had better be figuring out how we can do things a LOT better and quit looking for scapegoats on the other side of the political fence...and that comment is directed to BOTH maor political parties. Al Quada is looking at what happened in New Orleans and salivating. Blanco may have dropped the ball, but plenty of things went wrong, and continue to go wrong, with the federal response. We had better correct them ASAP, because we're going to get a chance to run this exercise again, and maybe sooner rather than later.