A friend's father is down there and to your point, he says that the media asks the same questions to everyone they encounter:

who's to blame? Bush? Fema?
how do you feel about the relief being so late?
do you feel like you've been let down or forgotten?

nice leading questions, and it's not just the major networks doing this it's almost all media outlets.

__________________
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

From New Yawk times

Casualty of Firestorm: Outrage, Bush and FEMA Chief

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - To Democrats, Republicans, local officials and Hurricane Katrina's victims, the question was not why, but what took so long?

Republicans had been pressing the White House for days to fire "Brownie," Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who had stunned many television viewers in admitting that he did not know until 24 hours after the first news reports that there was a swelling crowd of 25,000 people desperate for food and water at the New Orleans convention center.
The president, long reluctant to fire subordinates, came to a belated recognition that his administration was in trouble for the way it had dealt with the disaster, many of his supporters say. One moment of realization occurred on Thursday of last week when an aide carried a news agency report from New Orleans into the Oval Office for him to see.

The report was about the evacuees at the convention center, some dying and some already dead. Mr. Bush had been briefed that morning by his homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, who was getting much of his information from Mr. Brown and was not aware of what was occurring there. The news account was the first that the president and his top advisers had heard not only of the conditions at the convention center but even that there were people there at all.

"He's not a screamer," a senior aide said of the president. But Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on.

"The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information," said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. "Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult."

If Mr. Bush was upset with Mr. Brown at that point, he did not show it. When he traveled to the Gulf Coast the next day, he stood with him and, before the cameras, cheerfully said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

But the political pressures on Mr. Bush, and the anxiety at the White House, were only growing. Behind the president's public embrace of Mr. Brown was the realization within the administration that the director's ignorance about the evacuees had further inflamed the rage of the storm's poor, black victims and created an impression of a White House that did not care about their lives.

One prominent African-American supporter of Mr. Bush who is close to Karl Rove, the White House political chief, said the president did not go into the heart of New Orleans and meet with black victims on his first trip there, last Friday, because he knew that White House officials were "scared to death" of the reaction.

"If I'm Karl, do I want the visual of black people hollering at the president as if we're living in Rwanda?" said the supporter, who spoke only anonymously because he did not want to antagonize Mr. Rove.

At the same time, news reports quickly appeared about Mr. Brown's qualifications for the job: he was a former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association and for 30 years a friend of Joe M. Allbaugh, who managed Mr. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and was the administration's first FEMA director. Mr. Brown's credentials came to roost at the White House, where Mr. Bush faced angry accusations that the director's hiring had amounted to nothing more than cronyism.

Members of Congress quickly weighed in. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who was in New Orleans or Baton Rouge for more than a week after the hurricane swept ashore, said of Mr. Brown last Friday that "I have been telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation" and "I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us."

Members of Mr. Bush's party also were angry. Last week House Republicans pressed the White House to fire Mr. Brown. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi pulled the president aside for a private meeting on Monday in Poplarville, Miss., to ask him to intervene personally to untangle FEMA red tape. Mr. Lott, exasperated, told Mr. Bush that he needed to press the agency to send the state 46,000 trailers, promised for days as temporary housing for hurricane victims.

For a time, Mr. Lott did not directly criticize Mr. Brown or the federal response in public. "My mama didn't raise no idiot," he joked on Capitol Hill last week. "I ain't going to bite the hand that's trying to save me."

But on Friday, with Mr. Brown's tenure in the relief role at an end, the senator issued a statement that made clear his views, and those of many others.

"Something needed to happen," Mr. Lott's statement said. "Michael Brown has been acting like a private instead of a general. When you're in the middle of a disaster, you can't stop to check the legal niceties or to review FEMA regulations before deciding to help Mississippians knocked flat on their backs."

Mr. Bush, characteristically, did not officially dismiss Mr. Brown, instead calling him back to Washington to run FEMA while a crisis-tested Coast Guard commander, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, was given oversight of the relief effort. The take-charge Admiral Allen, who commanded the Coast Guard's response up and down the Atlantic Seaboard after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immediately appeared on television as the public face of the administration's response.

In Baton Rouge, Mr. Brown appeared briefly at Mr. Chertoff's side before heading back to the capital, where, the secretary said, the director was needed for potential disasters.

"We've got tropical storms and hurricanes brewing in the ocean," Mr. Chertoff said.

Source

If you truly believe what your saying then read this.
SISTER DENSON SHARES HER EXPERIENCES OF HURRICANE KATRINA:

I would first like to thank all concerned about us in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am a rescued flood victim. I have been placed with a friend of my deceased husband who died on August 8, 2005.

On the day of the storm Katrina, I had to return back to New Orleans after getting out of harms way to make sure that my step son was not stranded at the International Airport in New Orleans after receiving a desperate called from him within the airport that all airport attendees had indeed abandoned them to flee for their own safety. My stepson and I tried to get on the Interstate to leave the city only to be told by authorities that they would not be taking on any more vehicles and that we should prepare to seek safety and prepare for the storm. Our relatives who lived near the Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans were more than happy to let us stay with them. Several hours later, the storm approached and changed our lives forever.

That night their lovely home filled with water rapidly and we could do nothing but sit and try to figure out what would happen to us next. We then began to take whatever perishable was available and move to the upper floor of the house where we anchored down for the night. Doing the night, we heard cries of people wanting so desperately, like us, to be rescued but there was nothing that we could do for them. The cries continued through the night until you could no longer hear them any more. The next morning we discovered that our neighbor had been covered by water and drowned because of the burglar bars on the windows. Our neighbor across the street took it upon himself to rescue a woman and her kids whose front door blew in from the water rushing in. He was able to save her son and as he returned to the water to help the others, he went under and drowned. Later that morning his body became part of the debris left from Hurricane Katrina. By that afternoon, all of us who were survivors were using whatever means necessary to signal for help and all they did was pass by us not knowing what to do. There was just too many to save. All we had left was to form a prayer circle and ask the Lord for favor and He answered. Within a half hour after fervent prayer, the Lord sent the NOPD (New Orleans Police Department) boat to rescue us. The officer said the US Coast Guard spotted us on the 2nd floor and told them not to pick any one else up but us.

We were then taken to I-610 and St. Bernard Avenue Bridge and slept on that bridge for two (2) days. We watched as Black Hawk Military helicopters landed and took only the special needs persons, medically ill, senior citizens and children. Later that evening they explained to us that helicopters do not fly at night and we would have to stay until the morning when trucks would come and/or buses, but they never came.

People began to panic, they believed that at this point that no one cared, that they would be left to die, and then the worst began to happen, folks turned on each other. Our lives were in jeopardy and it was no longer safe for us to stay on this bridge, we had once again returned to the filthy waters of New Orleans. Some of my family that was with us could not swim and was afraid of the water. So, we paid a man who had a little boat but the boat would only hold two.

My Stepson and I decided to let the non-swimmers go on in the boat and he and I would take to the water. We all made it to the other side of the bridge to another piece of the Interstate, which was high and dry only to be discovered by other boats in the distant that rescued all of us. The next boat took us to I-10 and Causeway where there were others who had been rescued, waiting to be taken to shelters. We did not know where we were going and we did not care. I did not have a bath, cold water to drink or food to eat for five days. I was taken to Nicholls State University in Thibdaux, Louisiana where somehow our family members and friends found us and took us to their home in Lafayette, Louisiana.

As for my stepson he walked over (10) Ten Miles to the airport in New Orleans from Interstate 10 and Causeway on the day we were left under another over path. Delta Airlines and United Airlines gave evacuees free Phone Cards so that they may call their families and let them know that they had been through a horrific ordeal but they were all right. It was my son's first time in New Orleans because he decided that he should stay with me after his father's funeral since I did not have any children. My son made it back home to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and I have been relocated to Washington, DC with a lovely friend of my husband's.

I have been through a horrific ordeal but it has made me a better person for doing so. I am a lot stronger and more humble. God really knows how to get your attention when you realize all you have is God!

__________________
"What you hear in a great jazz band is the sound of democracy. “The jazz band works best when participation is shaped by intelligent communication.”
Harmony happens whenever different parts get to form a whole by means of congruity, concord, symetry, consistency, conformity, correspondence, agreement, accord, unity, consonance…….

Heres another reason they could not leave.
Posted on Sat, Sep. 10, 2005


Witnesses confirm e-mail account of police barricading escape route


By Gardiner Harris

New York Times

Police agencies south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds attempting to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, according to two paramedics who were in the crowd.

The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people. The witnesses said they had been told by New Orleans police to cross this same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.

Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.

``The police kept saying, `We don't want another Super Dome,' and `This isn't New Orleans,' '' said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., police department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.

``As soon as things calm down, we will do an inquiry and find out what happened,'' he said.

Bradshaw and his partner, Lorrie Beth Slonsky, wrote an account about their experiences that has been widely e-mailed.

Cathey Golden, a 51-year-old from Boston, and her 13-year-old son, Ramon Golden, on Friday confirmed the account.

The four met at the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. Bradshaw and Slonsky had attended a convention for emergency medicine specialists. Golden and her two children, including 23-year-old Rashida Golden, were there to visit family.

The hotel allowed its guests and nearly 250 residents from the nearby neighborhood to stay until Thursday, Sept 1. With its food exhausted, the hotel's manager finally instructed people to leave. Hotel staff handed out maps to show the way to the city's Convention Center, to which thousands of other evacuees had fled.

A group of nearly 200 guests gathered to make their way to the center together, the four said. But on the way, they heard that the Convention Center had become a dangerous, unsanitary pit from which no one was being evacuated. So they stopped in front of a New Orleans police command post near the Harrah's casino on Canal Street.

A New Orleans police commander whom none of the four could identify told the crowd that they could not stay there and later told them that buses were being brought to the Crescent City Connection, a nearby bridge to Jefferson Parish, to carry them to safety.

But on the bridge there were four police cruisers parked across some lanes. Between six and eight officers stood with shotguns in their hands, the witnesses said. As the crowd approached, the officers shot over the heads of the crowd, most of whom retreated immediately, Bradshaw, Slonsky and Golden and her son said.

__________________
"What you hear in a great jazz band is the sound of democracy. “The jazz band works best when participation is shaped by intelligent communication.”
Harmony happens whenever different parts get to form a whole by means of congruity, concord, symetry, consistency, conformity, correspondence, agreement, accord, unity, consonance…….

Here's a story in our local paper that just blew me away. A family that lost everything and someone offers them a house, clothing, and a job and their response is "no thanks, it's too cold in Michigan". Unbelievable. I guess it's better to be hot and homeless - http://ilecamera.com/stories/090905/...50909003.shtml

Eight weeks ago, Rick Frizzell's mother passed away. Her three-bedroom house on Grosse Ile has sat empty and on his drive down to help with the Hurricane Relief, Rick came up with what he thought was a wonderful idea and a fitting tribute to his mom.

"I wanted to try and find a family to put in that house," he said. "Why not find a family that has lost everything and move them up here and set them up in that house? My mother would have been so proud of that idea."

So Frizzell started talking to people about the idea.

"One of the shelter directors suggested I just start talking to people and getting to know them, and that maybe I would find one that I think would be a good fit," Frizzell said. "I also have a responsibility to my neighbors on Grosse Ile. I don't want to bring back someone who doesn't respect the law or anyone like that."

So Frizzell started meeting people. And a young family caught his attention.

"The parents were probably in their late 30s and they had two young daughters," Frizzell said. "They had lost everything. All they had were the clothes on their back. John and Sue were the parents' names."

Frizzell wanted to set them up in his mother's house, provide them all with new wardrobes, get them jobs at one of his businesses and get them back on their feet.

On his drive home to Michigan he got a phone call.

"They called me and said they didn't want to come to Michigan because of the climate," he said. "They thought they might get sick because they have never even seen snow."

Frizzell said it was one of the most shocking calls he's ever received.

"I didn't know what to say," he said. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I called the director of the shelter and she was stunned."

The experience hasn't hindered his spirit. "I want to put a family in that house," he said. "It's the least I could do for some family that has been through this ordeal."

__________________

Xoutpost.com - where you come for the information but stay for the friendships

You are missing my point Quicksilver...I am well aware that there were some folks who had no choice but to stay. There was clearly not enough planning down in LA and MS for this type of catastrophic disaster. The story on CNN that was posted for a few days on the front page showed a family which could have easily have fled from the disaster. If they honestly could not then the story did not explain it in detail. It is this group that I shrug my shoulders to and say, "You risked your life to stay, you fortunately made it through alive, and now you are angry at everyone else for the consequences of your decision?"

You are missing my point

Perhaps I did. However it might have been helpful to include the revelant facts ie "The story on CNN that was posted for a few days on the front page showed a family which could have easily have fled from the disaster" Without that info I chose comment on what you wrote which stated a general opinion "yet a lot of the folks down there could have easily prevented a life threatening situation from unfolding in front of them by EVACUATING." A lot of folks was not specifically talking about
the story on CNN. Seeing as how I did not read the CNN story your comments seem to imply that the story was talking about "a lot of people" Which does not fit the circumstances of everyone. Thanks for the clarification and yes perhaps some should have evacuated.

__________________
"What you hear in a great jazz band is the sound of democracy. “The jazz band works best when participation is shaped by intelligent communication.”
Harmony happens whenever different parts get to form a whole by means of congruity, concord, symetry, consistency, conformity, correspondence, agreement, accord, unity, consonance…….

you know what's even more funny.. this might be apples to oranges but let's look at 9/11... Did Rudy J. cry to FEMA??? People stepped up to help each other, Port Authority stepped up, FDNY helped out, NYPD helped out, and Rudy worked closely WITH the community to help the rescue effort. We didn't hear much about looting etc. What a huge difference in culture and execution in the local leadership... The dumbass mayor in New Orleans on the other hand is a completely useless tool.. no planning, blaming FEMA even the governor is a useless uneducated sounding tool... If anybody IS to blame.. it's them for not putting a plan together.

Ignorance shows no fear


And when they finish their book deals, lets hope noone buys

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