Sorry if this has been diaried already, but I saw this and just about lost it:
White House hails Katrina recovery
As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. I had to rewrite this, because the first version of this diary was basically just cussing.
"The president is fulfilling his commitment," Powell said. "It won't happen overnight, but I'm convinced that the groundwork is being laid for a vibrant Gulf Coast area."
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
It's been an entire year. The problem is that the Gulf Coast already was vibrant, before the whole Katrina thing. And I don't give a damn about whether you're convinced, tell me why I should be convinced. I mean, you sound like a CPA official in 2004, talking about roses and democracy while Baghdad falls down around your ears: anything less than all optimism, all the time emboldens terrorists.
"The local officials in Mississippi, and the local officials in Louisiana want that money to get out into the marketplace as fast as possible," he said.
Spoken like a true Republican. Don Powell is the "Federal Coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding", which I thought was supposed to be Karl Rove. Anyway, Mr. Powell is a banker by trade, which makes me wonder what his qualifications are for the position he's in--wouldn't it do to have some people with emergency mgmt experience in that position? Or urban planning?
In any event, "the marketplace" is not living in a FEMA trailer eating MREs.
Later on, we get this:
Updating reports of the progress in rebuilding the New Orleans levees, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, Chief Engineer of the Army Corps of Engineers, said 220 of the 350 miles of levees in the city have been restored or repaired as needed.
Even so, Strock acknowledged that the new levee system was not built to withstand the strongest storms.
"We don't have the authority to do that yet, and that's one of the tasks that we have been committed to, to determine what it would take to withstand category 5 across the coast of Louisiana," Strock said.
"It's very hard to say exactly what the category of storm it can protect against," he said.
Given that the storm sewers are still full of debris in places a year later, the fact that the levees are only ~2/3 repaired is probably academic in terms of how strong a storm NOLA could endure. I understand the condition of the sewers is such that parts of town flood almost immediately during regular thunderstorms. It's not like there's any natural drainage in areas under sea level.
In assessing progress in the past year, White House officials also took pains to enumerate what they believe went wrong in the initial response to the storm and steps taken to address them.
David Paulison, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said communications, logistics, vehicle tracking, victim registration and other response issues have been updated and improved.
Well, that's reassuring.
Remember that the single scariest thing--maybe even more so than the fact that an 80% of the entire metropolis was laid waste--was that in the event of some sort of unconventional weapons attack on an American metropolis, we would have had the same refugee crisis, and the same criminal, almost bored response from the federal government, the people who are supposed to be the last thing standing between civilization and catastrophe at all times.
If DC gets nuked by Osama, or whomever, you're looking at a roughly comparable number of refugees. Where do those people go? What do they eat? What happens to the economy, local, national, global? What happens to the city, since a city is the sum total of all the relationships between the people that live and work there? What can the federal government do about any of it? since, after all, the whole point of a federal government is to protect the people that grant it its power. That's the very essence of the social contract. Why was it not upheld in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? How is it justified to spend billions a day in Iraq and perhaps 50 billion in a year in a critically wounded American city?
What the fuck is wrong with these people?