You make up your own mind!

In case you aren't familiar with how our government is SUPPOSED to work: The chain of responsibility for the protection of the citizens in New Orleans is:

1. The Mayor 2. The New Orleans director of Homeland Security (a political appointee of the Governor who reports to the Governor) 3. The Governor 4. The Head of Homeland Security 5. The President

1. The mayor, with 5 days advance, waited until 2 days before he announced a mandatory evacuation (at the behest of the President). The he failed to provide transportation for those without transport even though he had hundreds of buses at his disposal.

2. The New Orleans director of Homeland Security failed to have any plan for a contingency that has been talked about for 50 years. Then he blames the Feds for not doing what he should have done. (So much for political appointees)

3. The Governor, despite a declaration of disaster by the President 2 DAYS BEFORE the storm hit, failed to take advantage of the offer of Federal troops and aid. Until 2 DAYS AFTER the storm hit.

4. The Director of Homeland Security positioned assets in the area to be ready when the Governor called for them

5. The President urged a mandatory evacuation, and even declared a disaster State of Emergency, freeing up millions of dollars of federal assistance, should the Governor decide to use it.

Oh and by the way, the levees that broke were the responsibility of the local landowners and the local levee board to maintain, NOT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

The disaster in New Orleans is what you get after decades of corrupt government going all the way back to Huey Long.

Funds for disaster protection and relief have been flowing into this city for decades, and where has it gone, but into the pockets of the politicos and their friends.

Decades of socialist government in New Orleans has sapped all self reliance from the community, and made them dependent upon government for every little thing.

Political correctness and a lack of will to fight crime have created the single most corrupt police force in the country, and has permitted gang violence to flourish.

The sad thing is that there are many poor folks who have suffered and died needlessly because those that they voted into office failed them.

For those who missed item 5 (where the President's level of accountability is discussed), it is made more clear in a New Orleans Times-Picayune article dated August 28:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.

Acknowledging that large numbers of people, many of them stranded tourists, would be unable to leave, the city set up 10 places of last resort for people to go, including the Superdome.

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding. (emphasis mine)

The ball was placed in Mayor Nagin's court to carry out the evacuation order. With a 5-day heads-up, he had the authority to use any and all services to evacuate all residents from the city, as documented in a city emergency preparedness plan. By waiting until the last minute, and failing to make full use of resources available within city limits, Nagin and his administration fouled up.

Mayor Nagin and his emergency sidekick Terry Ebbert have displayed lethal, mind boggling incompetence before, during and after Katrina.

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city's government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns is capable of giving them.

If you're keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans-in one trip-get ruined in the floods. Whatever plan these guys had, it was a dud. Or it probably would have been if they'd bothered to follow it.

As for all the race-baiting rhetoric and Bush-bashing coming from prominent blacks on the left, don't expect Ray Nagin to be called out on the carpet for falling short. You want to know why? Here's why:

It's more convenient to blame a white president for what went wrong than to hold a black mayor and his administration accountable for gross negligence and failing to fully carry out an established emergency preparedness plan.

To hold Nagin and his administration accountable for dropping the ball amounts to letting loose the shouts and cries of "Racism!". It's sad, it's wrong, but it's standard operating procedure for the media and left-wing black leadership.

Mark my words: you will not hear a word of criticism from Jesse Jackson Sr., Randall Robinson, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, or Kanye West being directed toward Clarence Ray Nagin Jr. Why? Because he is just another black politician instead of a responsible elected official who happens to be black. In the mindset of more-blacker-than-thou blacks, black politicians who are on their side can do no wrong.

Do you remember the intelligence report that mentioned that Osama bin Laden intended to attack the United States that the President received a month before the 9/11 attacks?

I remember that memo, and the stink the Democrats made about it, even though anyone who has read the memo can clearly see that no specifics were included in the memo, and that it was only a background brief on the terrorism issue. The memo also stated clearly that no specifics and no leads were available but that there were a large number of investigations in terrorist activity being conducted by the FBI.

In this case, with New Orleans, the mayor and the governor were given fair warning that the hurricane was going to hit, or come very close to hitting New Orleans, and at the very least it was going to hit the Gulf Coast. The data regarding the path of the hurricane was quite specific that the highest probability path was going to wreak havoc on New Orleans.

It is also without a doubt that the insufficiency of the levees to stand up to a CAT 4/5 hurricane was well documented, and that the mayor and the governor were aware of that weakness.

It is without a doubt that a specific danger of flooding in the low lying city was a near guaranteed event in the case of a direct hit, and a high probability with a near miss. The probability cone for the hurricane's path in the last two days before landfall did not include the possibility for a complete miss.

In other words - there was a specific danger to New Orleans that was identified. There were probability cones and statistics that indicated that a disaster was inevitable by 48 hours before landfall. The mayor and the governor had a detailed map of exactly how the hurricane was going to come at the coast, what the dangers were, and more importantly - they had emergency plans to fall back on to alleviate the loss of human life.

The governor and the mayor both resisted Federal pleas for proactive measures satisfying themselves with half-hearted declarations and toothless mandatory evacuation orders. Half of the measures in their emergency plans were ignored for activities preceding the disaster, and a good number of common sense actions were forgotten in the time span following the disaster.

The media not surprisingly is blaming President Bush. It doesn't matter that the mayor and the governor had more detailed information about Hurricane Katrina than the President did about possible terrorist attacks in 2001. It doesn't matter that the President could not usurp the authority of the local officials without doing something drastic like declaring Federal martial law before Katrina made landfall, because that's the only thing the President could've done to have made a bit of meaningful difference, and by that act of competently mitigating the negative consequences of the disaster, he'd have doomed himself to an almost guaranteed impeachment, because if he'd taken positive action to prevent the worst effects of the disaster on human life, he would have canceled the justification for his declaration of martial law. And that was the pickle our President was in two Fridays ago. How could he prove that martial law was necessary to get around the governor's and mayor's obstruction to proper emergency measures, when by bypassing the governor and mayor he would've solved the problem, but left the governor and the mayor in a position to say that they would've done exactly what had been done, and that the declaration of Federal control over the disaster area 48 hours prior to Katrina's landfall constituted an illegal act...

And the funny thing is, I bet a lot of people on FR would side with the Democrats, because if the President had intervened in such a manner, we'd have no knowledge of how incompetent the Democrats have managed it, and the President would be up a brown, smelly creek without a paddle.

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