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Some intriguing numbers came out this week proving that race played no role in the response to Hurricane Katrina. Of course, this bit of news never saw the light of day among America's leading news providers. They couldn't even tell the amazing news of 15 million people going to the polls in Iraq with only scattered violence. No, they had to concentrate on the feckless John McCain and his sympathy campaign for the terrorists. But I digress ... The numbers were released from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. What they indicated was worthy of front-page coverage in...

BATON ROUGE -- Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, thousands of people were trapped in the city without food, water and medical care and growing increasingly desperate for rescue. But a top aide to Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent out an e-mail informing his colleagues that his staff had stopped calling for the buses needed to evacuate people from the Superdome and other places of refuge. "NO MORE CALLS FOR BUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Ty Bromell wrote Wednesday morning, Aug. 31. "My people are not calling for buses now." Bromell, who heads Blanco's Office of Rural Development, said he had gotten word...

Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron tells The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune of his encounter with a doctor from FEMA. The doctor and three others arrived at the Superdome with a refrigerated 18-wheeler prepared to process 200 bodies that were reportedly stored in a freezer, there, following accounts of murder, mayhem and rape. The real total was six, Col.Beron explains. Four died from natural causes, one from an overdose, and one was an apparent suicide. (Four other bodies were found, nearby, outside the Dome.) The Times-Picayune went on to expose a long list of wild exaggerations and false claims of carnage...

<p>Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.</p> <p>BATON ROUGE, La. — Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.</p>

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong. BATON ROUGE, La. — Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane. The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of...

WASHINGTON (Sept. 27) - Former FEMA director Michael Brown aggressively defended his role in responding to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday and put much of the blame for coordination failures on Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. "My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," two days before the storm hit, Brown told a special congressional panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe. The storm slammed into the Gulf Coast on Monday, Aug. 29. Brown's defense drew a scathing response from Rep. William Jefferson, D-La. "I find it absolutely...

Tim Russert and a couple of other Sunday show hosts pretty much let the cat all the way out of the bag this morning, outlining the Liberal MSM overall strategy, and how they plan to implement it. First a timeline, to avoid confusing seperate issues: 1. Blanco and Nagin led off the Blame Bush attack, a preemptive strike to avoid responsibility for their monumental failures in safeguarding Louisiana and New Orleans before, during and after the storm. 2. The Liberal MSM picked this up and ran with it, partially to support the Dems in Louisiana, and possibly partly as the...

RITA BEAMISH Associated Press Writer As far back as eight years ago, Congress ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a plan for evacuating New Orleans during a massive hurricane, but the money instead went to studying the causeway bridge that spans the city's Lake Ponchartrain, officials say. The outcome provides one more example of the government's failure to prepare for a massive but foreseeable catastrophe, said the lawmaker who helped secure the money for FEMA to develop the evacuation plan. "They never used it for the intended purpose," said former Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. "The whole intent was...

We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail!Good morning!!Do not let the victims of the attacks on New York and Washington, nor the brave members of our Nation's military who have given their lives to protect our freedom, die in vain!!The Sinking of the City of New OrleansAs I am sure we all know by now, unless you've been living in a cave, the city of New Orleans was reminded, in the most brutal of ways, that man is not the master of nature, but that he lives within the will of his surroundings.  That...

The lesson of Hurricane Katrina is not about a failure to help. It’s not about a lack of desire to be compassionate, to save lives. It is not about the speed of response. The lesson is about an American culture that has forgotten how to think for itself, to act with personal authority and responsibility. The lesson, is about the deadly legacy of dependence. Too many Americans, used to soft living and the asinine wisdom that taking care of one’s self is politically incorrect, think that government is an all-seeing Santa who will care for their needs from cradle to...

"...April 14, 1997 Web posted at: 2:05 p.m. EDT (0605 GMT) (CNN) -- The flooded Red River was past its high-water mark at Fargo, North Dakota, and nearby Moorhead, Minnesota, Monday, as Fargo moved into a post-flood cleanup mode." http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/9704/14/floods.update/index.html "GRAND FORKS, N.D. (AllPolitics, April 22) -- President Bill Clinton, in his role as consoler-in-chief, toured the flood-ravaged upper Midwest today and declared the federal government will help people there rebuild their homes and lives." http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/04/22/earth.floods/

Political Machine Turned Out Votes N.O. Style 10 November 1996 The Baton Rouge Advocate NEW ORLEANS - Red beans, parades and a thousand people all were part of the push that got nearly 186,000 voters to New Orleans polls on Election Day and gave Democrat Mary Landrieu a U.S. Senate victory. Republican Louis "Woody" Jenkins has refused to concede defeat to Landrieu, who had an unofficial 5,899-vote lead after voting machines were opened Friday. The statewide tally released by the secretary of state on Friday was Landrieu 853,076, Jenkins 847,177, the closest Senate election in Louisiana history. Campaign manager Tony...

Jack Kelly: No shame The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed Sunday, September 11, 2005 It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow. Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476). "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth. Jason...

Critics say President Bush's personal response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster was too little, too late - with an Air Force One flyover the day after New Orleans' levees broke and a trip to Baton Rouge two days later. President Clinton, other the other hand, got glowing reviews for responding to his administration's biggest disaster, the Oklahoma City bombing - even though he took a day longer to arrive on the scene than Bush did last week. New Orleans' levees broke on a Tuesday - and Bush had his own boots-on-the-ground just three days later on Friday. When the Alfred...

With all the caterwauling about how President Bush was wrong to put FEMA under DHS, I thought a little research would be in order. I know you've heard here and there about who did what and when during the process of creating DHS. Here are the FACTS you can arm yourself with (and spread around to other media outlets): S.2452 Sponsor: Sen Lieberman, Joseph I. [CT] (introduced 5/2/2002) National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act of 2002 Establishes the Department of National Homeland Security as an executive department to be headed by the Secretary of National Homeland Security who shall...

Sept. 11 was an epochal event in American culture, so it's no surprise that it's everyone's favorite comparison to the destruction of New Orleans. But the more instructive analogy is another great urban catastrophe in recent American history: The 1995 Chicago heat wave, when a blend of extreme weather, political mismanagement, and abandonment of vulnerable city residents resulted in the loss of water, widespread power outages, thousands of hospitalizations, and 739 deaths in a devastating week. --- Affluent and middle-class Chicagoans had little trouble getting out of harm's way. They either turned on their air conditioners or fled for cooler...

Fact: Katrina was a devastating storm. It left terrible damage to innocent people's lives and to property throughout the Gulf South. Fact: There have been other storms as damaging and some far more damaging. What, then, is different about this storm? Here are a few tentative thoughts. First, the incompetence of the local and state authorities in Louisiana and especially New Orleans was breathtaking. To issue a mandatory evacuation order without providing means of transport is almost criminally irresponsible. To take citizens to shelters where they would be beaten, robbed and raped and to provide no police protection for them...

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne." For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three. Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in...

Politics: Louisiana's senior senator, whose brother is lieutenant governor and whose father was New Orleans' mayor, is blaming President Bush for "the staggering incompetence of the federal government." Come again? It's understandable that on the Sept. 4 edition of ABC's "This Week," Mary Landrieu said of President Bush, "I might likely have to punch him — literally" if he or members of his administration made any more disparaging remarks about local authorities and their pre- and post-Katrina efforts. Some are and were family. Brother Mitch Landrieu is lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Father "Moon" Landrieu was not only mayor of New...

Let's start with one simple fact. States and cities bear primary responsibility for preparing for and responding to their own problems, and Louisiana and New Orleans get a big fat "F" for their efforts. They can blame Bush all they want, but the fact remains, they blew it big-time and caused a catastrophe to which an adequate federal response was virtually impossible. It's amazing, how talking heads and Democrat politicians-and even some Louisiana Republicans-are trying to make this a federal failure. When did the federal government become society's diaper? If you don't take reasonable care of yourselves, shouldn't you expect...