This is horrific.

[Sannum]

They should have started evacuating NOLA on Friday. Every available means of transportation should have been available for free to the people who are now in a potential tomb known as the Super Dome. Getting the hell out of dodge should have been mandatory. Trains, Planes, Transit Busses...everything should have been made available so that those people in NOLA could get inland and out of danger and out with their lives. This should have been a nationwide effort. And where is the LA National Guard? Iraq. How fucking helpful, George. :grr:. We are facing what could be the worst national disaster in the history of this nation and it is being run by lunatics!

Thanks for undoing all of the Clinton FEMA reforms you smug, beady eyed son of a bitch. I guess we can add more to the Bush death toll.:grr:

[fishnfla]

1. Yes but Iraq has a new constitution!

You forgot all about Poland too!

[sam sarrha]

21. we're now fighting for an islamic republic.. may Allah be merciful..

more merciful than Bu$h isn't hard to pull off,

[SoCalDem]

40. Little girls have shiny yellow pencils too..Never forget that!!

Too bad it's too dangerous to actually send them to school these days.. Anyway, with Sharia law in effect again, and the fundamentalist Shi'ite Islam Imams in charge, those girls will be getting hitched at 11 to some 40 yr old guy ...won;t need to know how to read or write..just how to submit to him, push out 10 or 11 babies and sweep dirt floors:(

[AspenRose]

54. And hey, those gays can't marry.

Priorities, you know.

:sarcasm:

[bamademo]

2. I know how you feel.

Everytime he's on television, I involuntarily start screaming "You SOB!".

[joanne]

5. Agreed

I can hardly watch what is happening at the Superdome. It is making me ill. Amazing the people seem to be quite calm.

[timtom]

41. You're being too kind.

I won't repeat what I start screaming when I chance to hear or see that creature. But a parental advisory would be appropriate.

[SofaKingLiberal]

3. Right

How many school buses are in LA? Wouldn't it be nice if there were enough guardsmen to use them all to evacuate?

[Fleshdancer]

11. exactly. get all buses, even school busses up and running

The news said that buses are being used to transport people to the superdome!!! This is absolutely INSANE. Every bus in the entire city should be used to get people the hell out and the south bound highways should be used for the busses to travel north or west. From there, I'm sure sports arenas in other states would accommodate these people.

I can't watch the footage of the lines outside the superdome without crying. I'm extremely angry over this.

[sam sarrha]

22. but those are Poor people & that'd cost money, Rich people need that money

[Carni]

37. Irony is not all of them are poor

Which may bite bush in his ass later (if there really IS a god I hope it will)

There are also a lot of tourists and not necessarily poor trapped there who also have no recourse because they don't own cars and can't find any to rent (I know a lot of urban people who aren't poor that don't bother to keep a car because they don't need one)

I also heard today that there were people running out of gas on the highways trying to head out because the gas is gone!

The whole thing is despicable!

[ultraist]

47. Yes, and with gas prices as high as they are...

Why not risk thousands of lives? Most of those people stuck in NO are Democrats, anyway. Who cares, * cannot be bothered on his vacation. He has to go on with "his life!" Damn.

[malaise]

4. Capitalism gone mad

while Bush looks for terra...rists. What is more devastating that a Cat 5 hurricane. Morons!!

[SofaKingLiberal]

7. YES! Someone here knows how to spell morons!!

[AllyCat]

12. Yes, but morans is so much more funny :) eom

[opihimoimoi]

14. Morans and Morons iz da same ting.....Freep lingo....

[hippywife]

32. Somebody needs to show this newbie

the picture so he gets it.

[AllyCat]

42. Welcome to DU SKL!! Here's why we say "morans"

[SofaKingLiberal]

45. my bad

:rofl:

[AllyCat]

49. He's a class act, ain't he?

We all think he sums up the RNC base nicely. I say "moran" so often now that I have to correct myself for the appropriate pronunciation in formal company.

Glad to give you a laugh. And again, welcome!

[SofaKingLiberal]

52. Thanks,

Is there a story behing the pic?

[AllyCat]

55. Yeah. It was a "counterprotest" during the 2004 election cycle

This fine, upstanding individual was there to make sure we all knew how dumb we really were by supporting someone smarter than his Dear Leader. Not sure which state or the exact date, but someone here probably knows.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. As someone said in an earlier post...this is an easy way to get rid of

a big chunk of the poor, the sick and the elderly...those are the ones that would not be able to get out of the way of Katrina. This fits into their plans perfectly..and they can blame Mother Nature, while reaping the rewards.

[sam sarrha]

24. that was me... i was also wondering about Prisons too....

[wli]

30. yep, all part of Bushler's plan to kill more Democrats & brown people n/t

[rbjensen]

31. Please tell me you are

kidding? If you are not, I'm so sorry.. really am... but I just can't go there with you.

[wli]

34. it's more innocuous than it sounds

Politically-biased defunding of emergency management and public safety programs in Democratic voting districts is every bit as real as the political bias in the BRAC base closures.

It's certainly not the sole cause for loss of life during these catastrophes (weather control isn't really plausible, though I've little doubt Bushler would use it in such a way if he had it), but it definitely contributes.

[rbjensen]

38. Okay, when you put it like that

I see the point of the post. These aren't the folks making the contributions.

[MellowOne]

33. Like on the movie Titanic

I just watched it today, the poor died in the basement of the ship.

[seabeyond]

8. no one knows where it would hit, if it will die down, if it will get

stronger. there has been a lot of hype on the hurricanes over the last couple years. just the last one, biggest storm ever, and it wussed out before hitting. cant know nature.

to say now, should have evacuated friday, easy to say. friday, not so easy

[XOKCowboy]

9. On Friday Katrina was barely Level 1

in the Gulf. Nobody had any idea where it would go or what it'd do. It didn't strengthen and head towards NO till yesterday. What should they have done? Evacuate all of the Gulf Coast?

This is indeed a dire situation and the people of NO need out thoughts and prayers but to say they should have started evacuating NO on Friday is ridiculous.

Get a grip folks.

[true_notes]

13. You are one wrong Okie

We knew it was going to swing to NO from the moment it entered the Gulf because of the light wind shear. Friction was going to cause the storm to veer and take a more natural northerly track. This isn't the weather guy's fault, it is public services.

[malaise]

43. Disagree

These debates come up during every hurricane - the bottom line is if you force people out of their homes and the storm misses, there is unbelievable anger. You cannot evacuate until you have a good idea where the storm is heading.

[true_notes]

44. Rather be Mad than Dead n/t

[Eloriel]

46. Noooo, several different computer models pegged this for NO

at least 24 hours before the NO mayor declared MANDATORY evacuation today. That convergence in the computer modeling is very unusual, and the weather people talking about it were VERY impressed and quite confident that NO was going to be IT.

[Neshanic]

50. CORRECT! The mayor hesitated.

[Boomer]

Your timing is off

Katrina left Florida a Cat 1 and almost immediately exploded into a Cat 3 when it hit the warm Gulf waters. At that point, with several days of travel over the gulf before landfall, the predictions were that it would reach Cat 4.

So by Friday it was fairly clear that a strong hurricane was headed right for the area between Louisiana and the Florida panhandle.

I remember thinking on Friday that if I lived in New Orleans, I'd be taking a weekend vacation NOW. The consequences of a hit are so devastating that some false alarms are a small price to pay.

[XOKCowboy]

27. Small Price To Pay?

We are still talking about Mother Nature here. The area between Louisana and the Florida panhandle spans several hundred miles. According to the OP we should have evacuated all of that area? What about if weather conditions changed slightly? Should we have expanded that area to include all of the Texas coast too?

Ordering evacuations is no small deal. I'm certainly not a government apologist by any means but it wasn't till yesterday that it became apparent that this was going to be a Cat 5 and that it was definitely going to hit NO. I just think that all the alarmist and hysteric posts are serving no purpose. My thoughts and prayers are going out to those stranded in NO but to say that the evacuations should have started on Friday is ludicrous.

[Boomer]

36. There are two kinds of evacuation

Voluntary and mandatory, and there was certainly enough reason for concern to warrant a voluntary evacuation announcement by Friday.

Several DUers have posted that their friends or elderly relatives left town Friday, not waiting for "official" announcements. So I'm not proposing some radical prescient event -- people who were paying attention saw strong reason for caution.

[XOKCowboy]

39. Read the OP dude....

That's what I was responding to. Of course rational people would make preparations to evacuate ahead of time. The OP said that there should have been mandatory evacs started on Friday.

[Boomer]

20. dupe

system dupe

[eallen]

10. You can't evacuate the city for every gulf storm.

A couple of days ago, Katrina looked a moderate storm that was headed into Appalachicola, well away from Louisiana. It has since intensified, and put New Orleans in its sites.

Count how many storms have gone into the Florida panhandle in the last two years. Would you evacuate New Orleans for all of them? This is a horrible storm. I dread what I'm going to here tomorrow. But unless you live on the gulf coast and understand how erratic these storms are, be a bit cautious about casting on what people should have done earlier.

[Fleshdancer]

16. true, but you can have a plan better than this. n/t

[SmokingJacket]

26. Yes. Basically what they have is NO plan at all.

They have a traffic map, and they have the superdome and a few other shelters. Damn, I could have done that, sitting here on my butt. They could have paid me in gift certificates to Amazon or something -- what are they getting for their privatized emergency planning?

Every penny we spend on this JOKE war on terra should go to protecting our citizens -- not just from muslim boogeymen but from natural disasters and diseases, which, in this age of global warming, are much more of a threat to us.

[eallen]

28. I agree

[malaise]

48. Actually they appear to have evacuated the city

in a rather orderly fashion. Perhaps because we face these things year in year out, I'm less ruffled than some of you, but we never have mandatory evacuations before 24 hour notice of a hit.

Anyway people were moving out of NO all of yesterday with voluntary evacuations. The bottom line is that a Cat 5 is a rare disaster and there will be serious damage and even death and a whole lot of inconvenience for weeks and even months. Not everyone wants to move - some people just can't be bothered to start all over again and would rather die - that's their right.

[sam sarrha]

25. that is why he consulted with his lawyers till 11am today before evacuating

[Horse with no Name]

35. He consulted with the attorneys because you cannot have a

mandatory evacuation without evacuating everyone.
They didn't have anywhere to take the hospital patients so they had to decide if they could exclude the hospitals from the evacuation orders, which they did.
It's shit in my eyes.
They should have evacuated the patients. Without electricity, generators aren't reliable enough and any patient that is on a ventilator has to manually bagged. They only run minimal lighting and certain plugs (the red plugs you see in hospitals.)
That's alot of patients being bagged for a long time.
It's unsafe. Very unsafe for the period of time they are talking about.

[Dem Agog]

15. he's a murderer, i think he's probably rubbing his hands together rght now

i seriously believe this man who stole the election twice is a homicidal maniac. i think he's glad to see more killed... nothing makes him happier. only hitler had a darker soul or more desire to murder than this asshole.

[proud2BlibKansan]

17. They did start evacuating on Friday

It didn't become a national story till today.

[BlueJac]

18. Yes we are making progress is Iraq

Iraq is showing progress. The new constitution is progress in Iraq. As Katrina is showing progress on New Orleans!! Bush just SUCKS!

[insane_cratic_gal]

19. they had 80% evacuated

according to the news stations

http://www.wwltv.com/perl/common/video/wmPlayer.pl?title=beloint_wwltv&props=livenoad

[Cats Against Frist]

23. Yeah -- I'm fucking pissed off.

And I'm not generally that emotional. But I would officially like to register my disgust with Bush-in-a-Can, and the herding of the poor into the football stadium, and the national guard several thousand miles away. It's fucked up.

Fucked. Up.

[AngryOldDem]

51. Even if the Dome holds...

...it will be the eighth circle of hell in there. I just heard that at the minimum, they are expecting the field level to be flooded, with no air conditioning for at least two days -- I think they'e being a tad optimistic with that prediction.

Thinking about all those souls in the Dome makes me sick...but where else are they to go?

[stray cat]

29. Friday it was a category 1 storm expected to impact FL only

[steve2470]

53. 10 pm cdt advisory at this link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4491096&mesg_id=4491096

[Jacobin]

56. If you evacuated New Orleans for every hurricane in the gulf

it would not be a functional city.

No one had any idea that it would hit New Orleans last Friday.

No one.

[theboss]

57. And if the storm had turned and hit 500 miles away.....

You can't empty a city on every potentiality.

[johnaries]

58. We still have plenty of C-130's here in the states. I see them flying

over my property in Mid-TN once or twice a week. Why couldn't some of them pick up the folks stuck in the SuperDome yesterday or the day before?