First of all, check out the donation link under the navigation bar on the left. Donate.

Second, Zoe found out that Air America Radio has set up public voicemail for Katrina victims to communicate. Check out her post for more information...

PSA -- Emergency Voicemail For Victims of Katrina

This post from Laura Rozen shows how cold these bastards are.

September 03, 2005

If he could go to Baghdad, why didn't Bush go to the New Orleans Superdome or the Convention Center? It was bizarre for all of the country and much of the world to be watching those scenes for days on our TVs and news reports, and for Bush's photo ops to be in areas that were far less critical. I know there are security considerations but his visit seemed extraordinarily hollow even by this administration's standard of ultra-stage managed events. Dutch viewer Frank Tiggelaar writes: There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV. ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time. The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

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Bush has no intention of actually doing anything. Just put up a photo op and people will forget that nothing was actually done. I don't think it's going to work this time. This disaster is too huge. It's not going away. It will only get worse. Much worse. And don't think that race has nothing to do with this. The is racist America for all the world to see.

Superdome Evacuations Temporarily Halted

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. The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.

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  thanks to Eschaton

They are in front of the line becasue they are white. They are in front of the line because they are first class passengers and the blacks are third class passengers and, if you watched Titanic, you know how third class passengers are treated. They are locked down below and drown.

How bad is this going to be? We have several hundreds of thousands of refugees. Maybe upwards of a million? More? What in the hell do you do with all these people. The Houton Astrodome is full. There is no place for these people to go.

Refugees still waiting for relief

And the hurricane experts shook their heads in disgust and futility, much of it directed at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "We told FEMA, and we told them long ago, and we told them more than once that they needed to purchase the land for tent cities with full facilities in anticipation of this," said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, where experts warned since the late 1990s that New Orleans' levees couldn't withstand the storm surge of a major hurricane. "They told me Americans don't live in tents," van Heerden said. "I guess that sums up their attitude." [...] "I fear the worst is yet to come," said Jennifer Leaning, a Harvard University public health professor who is helping with the Red Cross relief coordination. "No refugee population in the world lives like this. There is a vast need for at least a little personal privacy. The sanitation problems, disease, and civil unrest will grow. To think that we can house people in the open in these vast shelters like the Superdome and the Astrodome for more than a couple weeks is delusional."

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  thanks to War and Piece

There is no planning or anything put in place to house these people. Nothing! And do you think that these people will be welcome for very long?

Some Houstonians question welcome-mat effort
Refugees being helped at expense of the city's poor is one sentiment

Amid the overwhelmingly compassionate response to hurricane evacuees in Houston, a less-welcoming undercurrent is developing among people worried about the impact of thousands of needy, desperate people.

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Ever read The Grapes of Wrath? Large refugee migrations cause huge disturbances and may be looking at something on the scale not seen since the Great Depression. And the number of refugees during the 1930s evolved over a period of years as the the farms failed. We now have an instant refugee population that rivals that of the 1930s.

And what about rebuilding New Orleans? Do you think the refugees are going to be able to afford the rebuilt housing? Federal guidelines won't allow the New Orleans we know to be rebuilt.

Hurricane Q&A

Federal regulations require that when a building erected in a flood plain is substantially damaged, it must be elevated when it is rebuilt. Does this mean that if New Orleans is rebuilt, the whole city will be on stilts? Large parts of it, yes. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials say that much of New Orleans is considered a flood plain, and if structures are rebuilt in those parts of the city, they will have to be elevated substantially. "Absolutely, yes," said Ed Pasterick, a FEMA specialist in Washington, D.C. "There may be decisions to be made as to whether large areas of the city can or should be rebuilt." Before any of New Orleans can be rebuilt, millions of gallons of toxic sludge and millions of tons of wreckage into which the toxins have been soaking will have to be removed. How is that much dangerous debris disposed of? Experts say it could be heavily treated to remove the toxins and dumped way out in the Gulf of Mexico. Or it could be buried in a concrete bunker, capped with concrete and then grassed over. It would, of necessity, be a very large bunker.

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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

'This is criminal': Malik Rahim reports from New Orleans

It's criminal. From what you're hearing, the people trapped in New Orleans are nothing but looters. We're told we should be more "neighborly." But nobody talked about being neighborly until after the people who could afford to leave … left.

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United States of Shame
by Maureen Dowd

Stuff happens. And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens. America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America. W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

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Connect the Dots
by James Kunstler

Turning to New Orleans. . . viewing the hurricane damage on TV, it is hard not to conclude that most of the building stock in the city is irreparably ruined. One can't help feeling that the city we knew and love is really gone forever. Some kind urban settlement will remain, but New Orleans' downtown of hotel towers and megastructures may be the first comprehensive ruin of the Modernist city. Much of the stuff just outside New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast, was largely post-war suburban fabric -- collector boulevards with their complements of fry pits, malls, muffler shops and subdivisions. We'd hope that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana will not undertake to rebuild them they way they were. The era of easy motoring is over now, and to rebuild suburban sprawl would be a double tragedy.

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3-6 months to drain, dry out city

An AP Essay: Is This Happening in America?

Image after image of unrelenting sorrow, layered one atop the other like a deck of haunting cards. A baby held aloft, inches above a sea of desperate faces, gasping for air. The dead left where they've fallen, in plain view, robbed of even the simple dignity of a shroud. Survivors waiting, then begging, then fighting, finally, over food and water.

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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

Storm's Economic Shock, Job Losses Likely to Rival Worst

Hurricane Katrina, by forcing an exodus of workers and families from New Orleans and surrounding areas, appears likely to rank alongside Sept. 11, 2001, and the Arab oil embargo of 1973 as one of the nation's most serious and sudden economic shocks -- particularly in terms of job losses -- in recent memory.

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  thanks to The Agonist