The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns

Yes, Moore can be tiresome. But New Orleans hasn't just been letting things slide. Money that was allocated for improving defences HAS been diverted to fund the Iraq war. This article is one among many which makes that clear:
http://www.ocala.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050902/NEWS/209020304/1030/News08

The article is an example of what I'm talking about. That doesn't make anything "clear". It spews a ton of intellectually bankrupt arguments (like I said, they expect Bush to help but limit himself to Louisiana troops to prove their "troops were in Iraq" antiwar arguments). Then it spews nonsense about funds being diverted. If you want to know where funds are diverted, read my article "Governmental Mooching" on the featured articles. This article is an antiwar opinion hit piece not a hard hitting factually based research article.

I, for one, am not going to start throwing around blame for a natural disaster just to score political points, like Michael Moore, and now this article writer that Rob linked. Disgusting.

A few things.

Did you know:

Bush has had more appointees confirmed in one term, with greater speed, than Clinton had in both of his?

Isn't part of leadership symbolism, setting the tone and direction that a nation should follow? Kyoto would have been a nice touch.

The fact that the disaster response here was arthritic compared to the response to Hurricane Ivan should say something. Check the dates of when the hurricanes hit and see if you notice any significant events in proximity.

BTW, hurricane + Mississippi + Alabama + Louisiana + LOOP + offshore drilling platforms = Intrastate.
Intrastate = Federal.

And question, why are you assuming he hasn't done anything? Straw man arguments are painful to read.

Yes, Moore is a rabble-rouser. In case you hadn't noticed, a good number of the "rabble" aren't doing so hot right now. I'm glad there's a vehement advocate for these people.

My apologies. Bush got more judges appointed in his first term than Clinton got appointed in either of his, not both.

Clinton had more judges held up in both his terms than Bush has so far is the statistic I was thinking of, with the GOP's favorite tactic being getting them stalled in committee.

If this is what you believe, these are the battles you want to fight, and these are the sort of people you want to champion s'okay. Good on you.

I would suggest considering that "shut up" (or its variants) is absolutely the most un-democratic statement you can make, and sounds a lot like what "neo-hippies" (whatever the hell those are) are criticized of doing.

The point was more to outline that it is easy to throw around blame and find reasons to blame either side. Again, I don't like it. I'm not blaming anyone, just pointing out that faults can be found anywhere if you probe deep (or light) enough on either side. Those that do assign frothing blame are just political point scorers and it's disgusting.

As for knowing Michael Moore not doing anything, simple because he's a publicity hound. If he were doing something he'd have no trouble making a point of it and rub it into political opponent’s noses. He always does stupid small "helping" gestures in his movies and he certainly makes a point of mentioning those whenever he can. I still believe there is something odd in sucking up millions of dollars from the very people he’s claiming to be advocates for in the first place. He sits in luxury directly off the money of the poor he claims to be helping.

Yes, there were several states hit, but still it is a state level matter, since it's up to each state to determine its own response level and preparedness. Besides, there is no doubt that there is an order of magnitude difference between the devastation in New Orleans compared to other locations. Should Bush just come in dictatorship style and force a federal response on the local state without letting the local state determine it’s own response?

What's the point of making "good will" policy that's not effective, and will cost the economy? Canada did implement Kyoto treaty and many of us are already worried about the extreme costs that are now being estimated with no real impact on anything environmentally. If we actually follow through with Kyoto, another big if...

I'm not engaged in political debate with MM, and I'm not a neo-hippy claiming to be the "open minded and tolerant ones" yet storm out of the room when they hear an opposing point of view, hence shut your pie hole stands.

OK, I read the Mooching article, but can't see how it relates to this situation. I think there are two major issues: 1) the impact of a hurricane had long been anticipated, and some funds that were earmarked to build up defences were diverted to pay for the war; 2) the agency charged with responding to emergencies (FEMA) was hopelessly inadequate in its response. The agency is run by someone with no visible qualifications for the job beyond being a Bush insider. Both of these points would go some way to laying some blame at Bush's door, though you would have to be mad to suggest that Bush is responsible for the initial disaster. I would say he bears some responsibilty for the aftermath though.

I pretty much share your sentiments...my husband and I were talking about it yesterday and he said something to the effect of, "Just wait, soon it'll be 'it's all Bush's fault because he hates the environment and didn't sign Kyoto, and he hates blacks so he didn't get the levees fixed." A bit obnoxious, yes, but, in essence that's what it seems to be boiling down to. It bugs me that it's getting all political so quickly. Can't we just go in and help the people and worry about the politics of it later? Enough with the Nero, enough with the bashing, enough, enough. Let's just go help the people we can help.

And incidentally -- what does, 'Blogs that could lead to anywhere or perhaps nowhere,' mean? =)

You said:

And incidentally -- what does, 'Blogs that could lead to anywhere or perhaps nowhere,' mean? =)

--

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. Had to say something! ;)

The levees needed to be fixed before Bush was in office- Global warming was not the cause of the hurricane of 1900- nor was it the cause of this one.Check out where most of the evacuees are- Texas. Where as of last Thursday we are "officially" proud to be the home of George W. Bush.

I lived through Alicia in 1983 and where nowhere near the disaster Katrina has been I know how difficult it was to get around- I can only imagine how hard it would of been to bring in the National Guard with bridges out and all roads flooded such as the case is in the states Katrina hit.

Michael Moore and other naysayers can KMA.

Kyoto? Well how abput pointing some fingers at the 95 Senators who voted NOT to ratify that Treaty as it was worded BEFORE Gore went to Tokyo. As a result the Clinton Administration never even sent it to the Senate for Ratification.

An aside note: When the Sentate votes 95 to ZERO not to ratify a Treaty, does signing it anyway show a respect for Constitutional Rule?

The Levees, those breached had been reinforced recently.

LOL To give an indication of the Hypocracy of certain parts of the Media the NYT in April 2005 had a very nasty editorial accussing planned Army Corps of Engineering funding for upgrades such as that of being PORK BARREL funding and demanding Congress vote it down.

Since then they have changed their tune and accuse Bush of not spending enough on the ACoE.

Why am I not surprised?

OH on the Kyoto treaty vote there are some familiar names who voted to turn it down.

Kennedy
Kerry
Edwards
Boxer
Durbin
Carol-Mosley Brown

PS Bush was not part of the Federal Government then.

"I think anyone who blames either Bush, Clinton or anyone else for a natural disaster is either stupid or unethical."

Those two terms are not mutually exclusive. ;-)

To tell you the truth, I've been so busy reading about the looting and become disgusted as media call what they see black people doing, "looting" and white people "surviving" as both races wade through the water with bags in hand, that mention of blame because of the Kyoto Protocol not being signed floors me. Actually, that link from Fox news is ridiculous.

The US doesn't want to sign unless China and India sign. It's a matter of money and development, no one should be surprised at this and it has been a block before Bush stepped into office.
Kyoto has some problems that need to be ironed out and I'm not sure what will eventually happen, but I DO know that Hurricane Katrina would have happened whether Kyoto was signed or not. The conditions that are increasing the likelihood and severity of hurricanes have to do with global warming and damage to our environment in the 60's and 70's. The Kyoto Protocol is to try and work with the future - as in 50 years from now when the praires are drying up and "perma frost" is a fairy tale.

I can't believe global warming and the consequences of fossil fuel over-consumption is still being debated. The fact that Gelbspan also blamed global warming for snow in Los Angeles, high winds in Scandinavia, drought in the Midwest, a heat wave in Arizona, heavy rainfall in India and an ice storm in New England is because, if you study the science of what is happening, this make scientific sense.

I don't know if what Steven Milloy calls "junk science" is because the media does a bad job or that they don't want to lose reader interest with a bunch of scientific calculations. Whatever the case, I can suggest some balanced, scientific climate change books for him to read.

If he wants to break away from "causally linking" Katrina from global warming, perhaps he might want to start reading the science journals and not main stream media.

"The US doesn't want to sign unless China and India sign. It's a matter of money and development, no one should be surprised at this and it has been a block before Bush stepped into office."

The FACTS are if we assume the science backing the Kyoto Treaty to be accurate. A point I am not willing to stipulate except for purposes of debate using THEIR figure Kyoto will change the temperature rise for the next HUNDRED years by

and get this 0.14 degrees

http://reason.com/rb/rb061301.shtml

Now to acheive that MASSIVE climatical effect we would be required to GUT the US economy , while some other nations would be exempt from the requirements we would be held to.

Oh yes and they could change things by vote.

This is NOT environmental policy, but is what I call and have been running around in my mind for an article.

Diplomacy as War by Other Means.

IE a diplomatic and economic attack upon the Untied States with the goal and aim of reducing us to a more manageable size.

Bush has been accused of costing the US allies(?)

We have discovered in the last few years that some of our so called allies were being paid very well by those we took out of power.

Some people have a different definition of allies than I do.

Did the federal government, or any member thereof, cause the hurricane? No.

Did the federal government do a good job in responding to a multi-state disaster of epic proportions? No.

The system is set up so that the federal government steps in with help when the situation overwhelms the capacities of a given state; certainly that is the case with Katrina. The repercussions of this storm are going to be felt throughout the country.

Captain's Quarters has a very enlightening rundown

New Orleans DID have an evacuation plan and a very good one.

But the best plans are of no use if

YOU DON'T FOLLOW THEM!

"So the failure to order the buses out of their yards wasn't some failure of imagination on the part of Nagin and New Orleans. It isn't a case of the city not understanding the scale of what a Cat-4 storm could do to the city. According to New Orleans' own emergency plan, those buses should have rolled at least as soon as the mandatory evacuation order was given on Saturday, if not when the voluntary evac order came earlier. The city's OEP failed to carry out this crucial part of the emergency-response plan, which is why so many of the poor, infirm, and just plain stubborn citizens got stranded when the levees broke"

I love how the left wants to just thow out the US Constitution and say that Bush should have roared into the affected areas without approval from the governments. I wonder if Bush would have gone into Louisiana over Blanco's stalling and objections, what the left would say.

I also love how they keep bringing up "Bush defunded the levees". This is a pretty stupid argument from the left considering that the 17th street levee was the biggest baddest and MOST COMPLETE levee in the SELA district. Yep, folks, even if Bush would have given 100 billion dollars to the SELA the 17th street levee would have STILL BROKEN, it was complete as far as the SELA was concerned. Perhaps lefties think that after we have completed a levee to it's intended design that we should then have just stacked dollar bills on top of it to stop the storm surge.

Oh yeah, by the way, the Jefferson and St. Bernard levees weren't breached, they were topped. There were no plans in the SELA to heighten these levees. So I'm wondering what the left actually thinks more funding would have done. In case they still can't get it ---

MORE FUNDING FOR SELA WOULD NOT HAVE STOPPED THE 17th STREET LEVEE BREACH. PERIOD.

So keep harping on non issues lefties, as always, you're fishing off the wrong pier.

As for the "looting" versus "finding" statements. DO YOU FOOLISH LEFTIES NOT REALIZE THAT IT IS THE MEDIA, and not the government that's making these characterization. Oh yeah, right, the left thinks that the media is a Bushco controlled cabal. I forgot about that. So if you want to bitch about "surviving" versus "looting" take your argument to the AFP and AP, don't put it on Bush's doorstep.

Finally, Kyoto. Kyoto is useless. Of all the signatories, who's met their emission levels??? NO ONE. I'm sure the left doesn't want to acknowledge Bush's environmental plan. They don't want to mention that, because it's a stronger treaty than Kyoto, that actually has a chance of being met, and actually does more for the environment than Kyoto ever will.

I can only suggest that those who support Kyoto have never read it, and if they read it, they don't understand it. The main point of Kyoto is to allow un-industrialized nations to SELL their quota of emissions to industrialized nations. Kyoto is a wealth-distribution plan, it's not an environmental accord.

And I'm sure that the left doesn't want to admit that the United States is a NET ABSORBER of CO2 because that would throw their junk science global warming out the window. I also assume they want to stay away from the NOAA announcement that this hurricane cycle is "normal" and that intense hurricanes have even DECREASED in frequency in the Bush Administration.

So hey lefties, by your logic, if we accept global warming, we also have to accept that global warming REDUCES THE FREQUENCY OF HURRICANES.

Once again, logic and facts support the right, and skewer the left.

--Jason

Oh yeah, take a look at the N.O. Hurrican Evactuation plan, page 13, paragraph 5 then look a this picture and you'll know who to blame for the New Orleans situation.

http://www.jasoncoleman.com/Media/Images/Katrina/busses1.jpg

-JC

Nailed it. Thank you.

This one helps clarify my earlier comments

http://www.jasoncoleman.com/Media/Images/superdomebusses.jpg

--Jason

Excellant just plain excellant. Data I absolutely love data. .014%. Nuts they are nuts. As far as the levees. Well I say worst case senario +25% engineering.

New Orleans is a enviromental nightmare and virtually unihabitabel and the clean up(at a guess) would be so high as to not be feasable but you know what if people want to live there; cet la vie, Let them.

As for the blame game ya'll are right, people should just shut thier pie hole and sell thier high dollar suits and give the money to the refugees instead of sitting in front of the camera gettin air time patting themselves on the back for being so insightful, and that is the one thing thats got me angry over all.

Yes we could have been better prepared but then again we weren't. Call it fate or call it an act of God or God's punishment or what ever you want to either way it happened and now we have to go pick up those people brush them off clean them up and help them press on with thier lives. That is what we do best as Americans.

What I find interesting is that the real Government; us the people, reacted faster than the Gov..

The natural disaster was just that... a natural disaster. There is no political force on earth that could have stopped it. I'll also buy that there was no amount of funding that could've prevented the city from bursting its dykes and flooding. I'll go even further and purchase the improbable story that Bush was prevented from doing anything by State Vs. Federal legislature. I'll defy common logic and agree that Bush loves African Americans and that if it had of been a wealthy, white region the result would have been exactly the same.

Unfortunately the process of buying into those stories has left me with no change to buy into the final one: that Bush should have kept his holiday going for three days after the disaster struck. I've heard the argument that 'Bush is the most connected man in the world, why, he can handle a disaster from his ranch', and I've got to say it just doesn't ring true. If a nation sees that its commander and chief is off at barbeques and ball games whilst a large number of its citizens are drowning, I suspect that nation is going to feel a little disheartened. I suspect that even if some fantasy federal/state laws prevented the Bush regime from exercising a little leadership and taking control of the terrible situation, a trip to the site of the disaster, earlier on in the piece, may have helped the nation feel like their government cared about them.

Oh, and on a side issue - I'm not sure if global warming causes hurricanes, I think a lot more research would need to be done to find that link. But did I see someone just suggest that Global warming isn't a scientific fact? Jesus. There are some self-deluded people out there. Kyoto might not be the answer, nor may I hazard a guess, is Bush's so called 'environmental plan', however suggesting that something which is unarguably true may be false is more unhelpful than either solution. We need to be careful when looking at events in this world not to see them through the prism of left and right wing politics, otherwise our judgment may very likely be compromised.

Jason Coleman, I'm certain you just called me a "stupid leftie" due to the fact that I wrote that the government was making a racial "looting" versus "surviving" statement. I assume this because I was the only one to talk about this in the comments.
Please re-read what I wrote.
Please note I didn't write one thing about some sort of government conspiracy.

Also, please stop calling me "stupid" and a "leftie". I've been known to do stupid and leftie things in my life, but I certainly don't think I could be catagorized as either one - especially based on my previous comment.

As far as Kyoto...
Jesus Murphy, I've read it, studied it and understand it very well. I didn't say it was the answer, you really have to read more closely. Bush does have his own environmental plan and as I haven't studied it as closely as Kyoto, I didn't comment on it. There are a hell of a lot of alternate plans out there. I was saying that Bush has problems with Kyoto that go back further than his administration so I personally would not agree that if he had signed it, it would have prevented anything. As well, his signing it doesn't mean he's taking are of business environmentally anyway. As we can both agree, signing the agreement doesn't hold nations to their promises.

Oh, and your comment, "intense hurricanes have even DECREASED in frequency in the Bush Administration" - wow.
I hoping this is just your grammar because you certainly can't be saying that the Bush administration has had a hand in this statistic you're offering...

By the way, why are you yelling? What's with the CAPS?

Ada, it' wasn't directed at you, but the "stupid lefties" that are propping this argument up all over the internet.

For the caps, my apologies.

As for global warming, I said that to as a counter to the posts like those from RFK Jr. and the Moore camp that attributed Katrina to global warming and blamed republicans for it.

No, I'm not suggesting that Bush had anything to do with it.

If I'm responding to a person in general, I'll call them out by name, otherwise I'm just ranting away, just like Sam is. Just borrowing some of her bandwidth to do it.

--Jason

Is Jason really saying global warming is junk science? So all the scientists are wrong? And his evidence is...?