Front of the line

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

AP via Yahoo News

Cheney

Cheney continues to be on vacation in Wyoming.

New Orleans blogger

Here's a link to a live blogger in New Orleans. To get a sense of it, it is a good idea to go to the bottom of the page and hit "previous" until you get to the first entry, right before the storm hits, and read through to this morning's entry.

Who can we invade?

The Bush administration has only one gear when it comes to disaster response: create a target, attach blame and attack.

With Katrina, no target could be blamed, thus no action.

Bad news, good coverage

Steve Gilliard, The News Blog, is providing a good roundup of news coverage of New Orleans. (scroll down)

Barber adds more wind

Professional blowhard, political hack and, unfortunately for Mississippi, Governor Haley Barber on CNN this morning said people had ample warning to evacuate New Orleans, and elsewhere, but chose to stay, thus completely ignoring the obvious fact that many people, the poorest people, and the sickest, had no means to evacuate.

Barber also said the Feds were doing a great job. Like most of today’s Republicans, when the facts are uncomfortable Barber resorts to lies.

At least, for once, a CNN interviewer (Miles O’Brien) pressed him.

Atrios asks, this morning, if anyone in the administration is competent enough to run even a lemonade stand and links to this, from Gilliard

My touchstone for this disaster is last winter’s ice storm that left me powerless for four miserable days. No heat. Flushed the toilets with stream water hauled up in buckets. Filled the small generator that kept the sump pumps running in two houses every three hours. No running water. It was miserable and cold and I felt very helpless. I can’t imagine sitting on a roof for days in hot sun and nights without water, night and day with mosquitoes, hoping for help, trying to decide whether to risk wading out or staying.

The feds lack of effective response is unforgivable. Before Bush took the helm I thought if it had to, the U.S military could move mountains on very short notice. All those fast little shallow draft boats for landing on beaches, squadrons of helicopters, huge trucks, big supply and hospital ships, bulldozers, giant airplanes stuffed with supplies, instant wireless communications networks…. I thought handling a disaster like this would be a cinch. Instead, we find ourselves doing no better than much poorer countries when faced with the tsunami.

Our helplessness should be an important wake up call. All we take for granted is on very fragile foundations and these foundations themselves are being left to rot or are willfully being whittled away by the nutcases in the White House.

Here’s a link to a Washington Post column, via Josh Marshall, that discusses the Bush gang’s trashing of FEMA, beginning in 2001.

Check out this story, "No one can say they didn't see it coming" by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.

Everything Bush touches turns to shit.

I do not believe he gives a damn about what happens to the people of New Orleans.

We know where the National Guard is, but just what does Homeland Security do anyway?

I take instant access to information for granted. I sit here obsessively flipping from coverage to coverage, avoiding Bush, dodging the worst of hard hearted Paula and boot lick Wolf, and from time to time I have to remind myself that the people in New Orleans, with no TV’s, no phones, few radios, have no sense of the big picture of this disaster. Not that it would be a comfort, but I can’t help but think knowing water is everywhere and is going to be there for weeks would help people make good decisions about how best to survive. A cheap portable radio would be priceless.

I think there are an awful lot of people that are unaccounted for.

If families are separated, there is no way to find out who is alive, who is safe or where anyone is. Think of the heartache of that.

Get ready for the fuel crisis.

Haves leave. Have nots stay

When they give evacuation orders what do you suppose people do who don’t own automobiles or have enough money to buy tickets on public transportation?

Seems to me recent evacuations assume most people have cars or somehow can buy their way out. Looking at the videos from New Orleans it looks like there’s a lot of poor people that were stuck there. I guess the alternative for the largely invisible and rarely considered poor was walk to the Superdome.

Haves leave. Have nots stay.

Their ought to be a better way.