Ah...my dear Sunray and others:
You have no idea the angst this is causing down here. Let alone the press, the bulletin boards, forums, blogs etc. etc. are just full of it.
And, it seems to be horribly polarizing and getting worse, and uglier if that is possible, by the hour.
I tried on a couple of forums to act as a little bit of "A voice of reason" and got shot down pretty well. As an example, I posted Femas website
www.fema.org where their duties are very specifically spelled out (look on the left for their FY 2003 plan) and exactly as you said, they say again and again that the local and state authorities are responsible for the initial response to any manmade or nature caused disasters.
They further go on to say that they will provide support in a "reasonable time frame" or some such. Being that you could have read or heard a thousand times in the days leading up to the arrival of the storm that they were telling anyone staying behind to have at least 96 hours of essentials on hand you might infer that that was their "reasonable time frame".
If you go to the National Guard website,
www.nationalguard.com amongst others, their protocols and capabilities are pretty well spelled out also. The National Guard is under the command of the Governors of the various States and can only be called up by the Governors affected unless the President calls some sort of National Emergency in which case they can cross state lines. It is also the responsibility of the local and state officials to have a plan in place both at the local level and when/if they call in the Guard so everyone knows what to do.
I also looked up Mike Brown's (Head of Fema) official biography on their site and then googled him to find not only has he never had any experience in running such an organization, he was fired from his last job for "incompetence" after 11 years as counsel to a horse racing association. This was NOT mentioned in his Fema bio. A cheap shot on my part, but stay with me.
The playing of the race card, expecially by the likes of Jesse Jackson, in my humble and personal opinion, goes so far over the line as to be dangerous. I sincerely hope that the more radical elements down here, of whatever race, do not cause another Watts/Detroit/Washington series of racially motivated riots as we saw at the end of the sixties.
Think what you may of us Yanks, and we certainly have fringe elements that are radically racist on both sides, we are not that bad of a nation. Tensions, certainly, but I live here and I can tell you that it is unthinkable and undoable for us to provide assistance based on race.
As an example, one small story that got buried in all the others, the manager of the top hotel in the French Quarter managed, for $25K, to hire some busses to get his well heeled clientle out of Dodge. The authorities commandeered the busses to get people out of the Superdome. Doesn't sound like racism to me.
So as not to bore you all to death, may I just say that in my personal opinion what was lacking was a kick ass, take charge person to have cut through all the rules, bureaucratic bullshit and egos and do what needed doing.
Apparently that persona in on the scene in the person of LT. General Honore, a Lousiana native but he arrived one Thursday too late. The Mayor did not act, the Governor did not act, the head of Fema did not act and, sadly GWB did not act in the proper time frame given that everyone did in fact know the shit was going to hit the fan and just about everything everyone planned for happened, just in a different sequence.
Let me say that again, everyone in a position to either be affected or to provide assistance knew pretty much what was going to happen when a Category III, IV or V storm hit NO or anywhere close to it. It is one of Fema's 3 worst scenario disasters to prepare for; it is mantra for the Corps of Engineers that the levees would fail at Category III or above. Local authorities have been negotiating for decades with the Corps and our Congress for upgrades to the levees.
A sad time indeed for us Americans, definitely not "Our Finest Hour". We knew what to do, we knew how to do it and we let the red tape screw the whole thing up. With the help of so many nations, including my beloved Canada, we are now doing what we could have done a week ago.
Sad, Sad indeed, my dear friends.
Bill