interesting article(s)
From The Huffington Post:
[The President] also unleashed a torrent of facts and figures: “The Department of Transportation has provided more than 400 trucks to move 1,000 truckloads containing 5.4 million Meals Ready to Eat — or MREs, 13.4 million liters of water, 10,400 tarps, 3.4 million pounds of ice, 144 generators, 20 containers of pre-positioned disaster supplies, 135,000 blankets and 11,000 cots.” It was as if by piling so many disparate numbers so high he might be able to block out the two most significant numbers of all: the number of National Guardsmen unable to help out in Louisiana and Mississippi because they are deployed in Iraq, and the tens of millions of hurricane and flood-control dollars that never made it to Lake Pontchartrain because they had been diverted to Iraq.
5 Comments // Comment or Ping
Andy Mount
…because nothing is ever enough from a Republican :)
4:57 pm, Sep 2nd, 2005
Heather
so, are you saying that if you were in New Orleans with no food or water or medicine or toilets for you or your family for four days that what has been done would be enough for you?
6:12 pm, Sep 2nd, 2005
Andy Mount
woooooooooooooooooah….. easy, easy… I’m not saying that at all… it was actually a mis-placed/ill-timed jab at you because of the commentary going on at your Hubby’s blog. However, I don’t think that our government didn’t do the best it could for the citizens of that area. If anything the local/state governement should take the brunt of the anger for not being more prepared. Don’t use this as an excuse for more Bush bashing. This scenario has been discussed year after year and after the rash of storms that came through last year, which they dodged, they should’ve been ready. If you’ve seen and listened to the President as he surveys the damage and helps hand out supplies, you can see that he genuinely cares for those people and actually admitted that the response thus far has not been acceptable.
That being said, my family is actively trying to help the situation with whatever we can afford in donations and are actually considering going there with a group of people from the area to help out. No political party has cornered the market on compassion no matter what the party leaders might say in the way of political rhetoric. We are all Christians first, regardless of our polictical leanings. The people down there are all U.S. citizens, Democrat, Republican, and everything else under the sun. All I’m really trying to say is that we don’t have to make every event political. A tragedy is a tragedy and ultimately, no matter who our President was at the time, this couldn’t have been prevented without years of preparation and planning.
I know you didn’t write the article posted and most of what I just said wasn’t even directed at you as much as the media. For you personally I wanted to apologize for the timing of what I thought to be a joke. Sorry bout that.
10:41 pm, Sep 4th, 2005
Heather
I accept your apology, Andy. I knew you were commenting in a joking manner, I was just upset by the number of people I’d seen on the news begging for water for their newborns.
What seems odd to me is that FEMA was basically dismantled under the Bush administration, and grouped under homeland security. If this is how we handle disasters at home, I’m frightened about what the aftermath of a so-called ” extremely likely” terrorist attack at home will be, despite the fact that this administration has been “preparing” for that since 2001.
2:54 am, Sep 5th, 2005
Andy Mount
I share your fear. Even the U.S. can’t stop everything and the eventually the camel’s back will break, if that straw hasn’t already fallen. It seems like the terrible response time was caused by a terrible lack of communication (which would seem to be the easiest part of getting support to the people), where one of the department heads in charge of getting aid organized didn’t even know there was a catastrophe until late in the first day. Scary.
7:25 pm, Sep 6th, 2005
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