Don't make these cheap political points. The main difference between Texas and Louisiana is that Texas suffered only minor exposure to the hurricane, while Louisiana got an entire city swamped.
Nobody came out of Katrina looking too pretty, and your trawling for votes off of it while damage crews are still scooping bodies out of the mud sure doesn't break the mold.
I noticed that both of these monster hurricanes were females.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
The vast majority of Louisiana residents who were in the way of Katrina evacuated, and we didn't even wait for the government to tell us to do it. The evacuation went pretty smoothly too.
I've also noticed Texans eat beef brisket smoked for 8 hrs, while Louisianans eat French food made from bottom feeders (catfish and crawdad etouffee) in cream sauce. (I like both, but still just an observation)
Maybe in New Orleans, but not SW Louisiana. They were dumping the boats out and going and getting their neighbors.
In most major cities, the goobermint takes care of a lot of people (10% in NOLA)--the rest got out.
Out in the sticks, you take care of your own and your neighbors, because no one else is around to do it for you.
This is a rural/urban thing as much as anything else, and even then, generalizations can come back and swat you. But city folks like living where there are abundant services, country folks provide their own every day.
4. Texas: Command and control remains in place to preserve order.
Louisiana: Command and control collapses allowing lawlessness.
# 4 was a key factor in taking a bad natural disaster to the worst case possible! We know now that the reports of multiple murders & rapes were unconfirmed rumors....but when the mayor and police chief were the rumor mongers on Oprah, they stopped everyone who should have been in New Orleans rescuing & helping those first days.
What did you notice about Mississippi?
One thing I noticed is that, like the mainstream media, you have completely left out Mississippi in your coverage. The hurricanes did not stop at Louisiana and Texas. There was damage all along the path of those two and yet like the media and the partisan politicians you have decided to pit Texas (GW's home state) against Louisiana (dem rule).
Sorry, but this thread mirrors the mainstream coverage it doesn't expose it.
Bush has been criticized, essentially, for not arrogating authority for the evacuation of New Orleans to himself.But what if Katrina had done what Rita did, and caused fewer casualties than the evacuation did? Had that been the case, the criticism of Bush would have been just as loud over the few who died in the Texas-style evacuation as in fact it has been over the thousand who died in Katrina.
Already posted about a week ago:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1491692/posts
Don't know about the other factors, but according to economagic.com TX per capita disposable personal income is only 3% higher than LA.
SE Texas and SW Louisiana both got pasted by Rita. Katrina mainly hit Mississippi and some of SE Louisiana. The residents of SE Louisiana around New Orleans coped pretty well. NO was a disaster of truly Howard Deanian proportions.
Lesson Learned: What the hell did you expect when the hurricane hit the FREAK SHOW!!!
This should be sent to the office of the GOP in Louisiana.
Here it is http://www.lagop.com/
And here's the Email address for the Executive Director for the office of the Louisiana GOP: ellen@lagop.com
Here is an e-mail I received today and thought I would share with you all.
George Bush, the man
David Warren.The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, September 11, 2005
There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked.
I'm tempted to say that the only difference from
Canada is that they have a few things right. That
would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to
discover things we still get right.
But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If
something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina,
we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We
would be waiting for the Americans to come save us,
the same way the government in Louisiana just waved
and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that,
when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults
live.
And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that
has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S.
Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard.
Within a few days, under several commands, finally
consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell
Honore, it was once again the U.S. military
efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on
a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly
institution.
We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one
feckless government after another that has cut corners
until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have
the ability even to transport and equip our few
soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big
scale, we become a Third World country. At which
point, our national smugness is of no avail.
>From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S.
equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are
still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed
that a heartless, white Republican America had
abandoned its underclass.
This is garbage. The great majority of those not
evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food
stamps, prescription medicine and government support
through many other programs. Many have, all their
lives, expected someone to lift them to safety,
without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor
they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of
transit and school buses that could have driven them
out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.
Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth;
and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare
dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and
social degeneration we saw on display, as the
floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many
died, and one's heart goes out. But already the
survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and
their various entitlements have been directed to new
locations.
The scale of private charity has also been
unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I'll
wager the most generous state in the union will prove
to have been arch-Republican Texas and that,
nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming
disproportionately from people who vote Republican.
For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the
wallets."
The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so
far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions
about the bashers' state of mind.
Consult any authoritative source on how government
works in the United States and you will learn that the
U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and
institutional responsibility for first response to
Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.
Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient
step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin
deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days
in advance of the storm fall. In the little time
since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense
recovery operation -- the largest in human history --
without invoking martial powers. He has been
sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once,
to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish
blame-throwing.
One thinks of Kipling's poem If, which I learned to
recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge
that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to
apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or
true:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise .
Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense
presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all
the rest, but a man.
Two thumbs up for Texas
Bump!