Hurricane Katrina 2 year anniversary tribute

Katrina had barely made landfall when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. assigned the blame for the very existence of Katrina on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, in this post from the Huffington Post, because he had opposed supporting the Kyoto Protocol. in a true Kennedyesque rhetorical flourish, the last line of the blog post states:

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.

aaaah...the era of the politicalization of weather had begun...


according to this satellite image, it's looking pretty threatening...NEW ORLEANS.


who could forget the school busses which were available to evacuate people?

"COOL! FREE STUFF!!"


"brownie" doin' a "heckuva job"...


sean penn joins rescue effort...OOPS! ...springs a leak.

one of my all-time favorites: civil rights leader randall robinson claims that the black folks in new orleans have been reduced to cannibalism...

"It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive."

. later retracted, but not until this comment had gone nuts on the blogosphere, exposing racist white amerikkka....

Even though Robinson intended to show the callousness of the Bush administration, for many whites the claim seemed entirely plausible and has spread throughout the Internet with heated debates on how likely cannibalism might be. That the claim was originally publicized by a black leader meant that spreading it could not be criticized as a racist act.

Pres. Bush promises that New Orleans will be rebuilt, promises massive aid...aid sent, immediately goes into somebody's pocket who it wasn't intended for.

Brad Pitt, recently surveying the "progress", or lack of, in New Orleans, called Katrina a "man-made" disaster. he's right. you've got hundreds of thousands of people living off of government assistance living in a city which is below sea level. you've got a government warning system which for AT LEAST 3-4 days gave warning to the gulf coast, which the people all over ignored. you've got a CATEGORY FIVE hurricane on the way, and a city and state government which is completely aware of the implications, and doesn't act. you've got a federal government caught with it's pants down entirely. you've got a president who can't seem to connect, or act, or do anything constructive at all. you've got residents who figure as long as they can't feed themselves or have anyplace to live anymore, need to steal big-screen TVs. then, you have a media and a political party who refuse to offer constructive criticism...and are only too happy to pour gas on the fire to enhance their political power.