Yes, I just wrote about it, my ideas...
I agree that it sure looks and did as it was happening that Nagin, Blanco and others in Louisiana were stalling for time, had ulterior motives for posing such obtuse and stange excuses as to the conditions there, appearing to thwart so many efforts to aid and assist and were just.far.too.quick.to.blame.the.feds; it just looked too questionable from the very beginning and once there was so much as a parcel of information out that Nagin, Blanco and Landrieaux (spelled? sorry) had not been competent on behalf of their own constituents, the blaming immediately increased as to Bush and FEMA.
I agree that Nagin seems to have refused anyone access to the area with odd insistence, drawing out ridiculous reasons why people were suffering.
I agree and here's another oddity for you.
Why was Ray Nagin holed up at the Hyatt Hotel for 24 hours after Katrina passed without a phone line? Why was he there another 24 to 48 hours with only one phone line after they rigged up a switch they cobbed at Office Depot?
He claimed his Emergency Operations Center was underwater, making the Hyatt a better choice, but with no phones, and no e-mail, he was essentially out of play for the critical 72 hours after the storm.
He claimed he was trapped there by rising waters, but he was able to give interview after interview to the national media, so it wasn't comms issues that kept him there. He could have called for a boat or chopper, which I know that both the city and state had available, over public television if necessary, and gotten to a place he could have exercised some leadership and made things happen.
He had to know all this, so staying at the Hyatt was by choice.
Why?
There were cops at the Hyatt, tenth floor, holed up with looted generators and beer, the Hyatt guests snagged 13 buses that had been scheduled to pick up at one of the shelters or overpasses, and now Compass works security for a hotel collective.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three time is enemy action, but here we see a nexus of four independent lines of occurrence all connecting at hotels, specifically the Hyatt.
End of the world hurricane party stretching out three days?
Wife out of town, time to play?
Bad eggs that run the city from the shadows also holed up at the Hyatt, pulling Nagin's strings?
Allowing him to feel comfortable in the presence of his "bosses"?
There's a whole section of the puzzle we aren't seeing here, and I have a feeling that pulling on even one thread will unravel it all, since the edges are visible in so many different places.
I'd like a New Orleans insider, say someone at the Dead Pelican, to get their hands on a Hyatt guest register for that period, and I'd also like to know who all was on those 13 buses. Wait,,,I thought of this just as I was about to hit send. Nagin wanted to allow the larger hotels gambling licenses after the storm. That's six lines of convergence.
If we assume that Nagin could somehow have personally profited from hotel gambling, i terms of cold cash or political favors, it narrows the range of possibilities in how this all ties together.