***UPDATE - SCROLL FOR VIDEO SALUTE TO NOLA'S BIGGEST IDIOTS***

***UPDATE 8/30 - Today's Vent With Michelle Malkin touches on a lot of this***

*UPDATE - Bryan at HotAir has a similar yet better written post up, only he stayed focused where as I just got totally annoyed thinking about it, and hearing constant "natural disaster" and "Katrina ravaged a city" crap in the background. Scroll for others

****UPDATE - Paul at Wizbang is on the same page as me, but goes a step further with video and photo evidence, and wonder why the information has been surpressed. I'm just glad to hear someone else say "IT WASN'T KATRINA!". Actually, Paul credits Katrina with saving tens of thousands of lives (and I totally agree). He makes the point that the break happening that day was coincidence, and they have higher water on days with exceptionally high tides, but that water had been seeping underneath for over a year. If not for Katrina warnings, the city would have been filled with people and tens of thousand would have been killed within hours.***

Section I: What really happend in New Orleans wasn't "Katrina" or any "natural disaster"
Section II: Race baiting media
Section III: Response to race baiting - Whites died at a disproportionately high rate.

It would be impossible to count the times we hear and read news about the catastrophe in New Orleans, and it's referred to as "Katrina". I am so sick and tired of that, because it wasn't "Katrina", it was shoddy design and construction of levees built around a soup bowl city below sea level. The concern raised over the levees was about overtopping and the flooding that a massive storm surge would have. And to clarify something for MSM kool-aid drinking libs: NO ONE WARNED ABOUT THE LEVEES BREAKING. You recall the AP's attempted "scandal" to prove that "Bush lied, he was warned", when after much blogger pressure and a "friday night correction", it was revealed that all he was warned about (which was common knowledge) was concern of flooding as a result of overtopping.

I also can't stand the fact that almost no one EVER mentions the actual strength of Katrina when it hit and most people are under the impression that Katrina was either a Category 4 or 5. The storm, which actually veered east of directly striking New Orleans was only a Category 3 at landfall, and New Orleans only experience Category 1 to 2 conditions. You might recall that the levees were built to handle category 3 storm surge, though even in the warnings leading up to the storm about a 4 or 5, there wasn't talk of them breaking, it was just talk of a storm surge so high it would make them irrelevant. A side issue I have is that the levees have been rebuilt to that category 3 level. Beyond the stupidity of not building them to handle a 5, why should we believe they could handle a 3? They didn't even handle Katrina's 1-2!

Let me take you all the way back to only 8 weeks after the storm (October 26, 2005) to finish my point before I move on. This WAPO article was written before anyone even knew that NOLA only dealt with category 1 to 2 conditions, but already it was obvious that "Katrina" wasn't the villain.

Today, exactly eight weeks after the storm, all three breaches are looking less like acts of God and more like failures of engineering that could have been anticipated and very likely prevented.

Two months after that we had another WAPO article that first made it clear just how weakly New Orleans was actually hit. In this December 22, 2005 piece we see that inspite of evidence and the facts, The Army Corps of Engineers and other Louisiana liars still calling the storm a category 4 or 5, which again is the belief it seems most Americans hold. Check it out:

The National Hurricane Center released a summary report on Katrina this week that downgraded the storm's intensity at landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29 from Category 4 to Category 3. The winds in New Orleans, which lay to the west of the storm's center, were probably even weaker than that, at Category 1 or 2 speeds, the report said.

Leaders of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency responsible for New Orleans's levees and ultimately accountable for their failure, initially blamed the problems on the fact that the storm was more powerful than the Category 3 event for which the levees had been designed.

As recently as last week, federal and Louisiana officials responsible for the region's levees were describing Katrina as a Category 4 or 5 storm. Edmond J. Preau Jr., Louisiana's assistant secretary for public works, told a Senate panel that Katrina essentially delivered a Category 5 blow to the Gulf Coast.

"That storm was the biggest storm ever to enter the Gulf of Mexico," Preau said in testimony before the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "I think it would be a real disservice to everyone if Katrina goes down in the history books as a '4' because the wind speed dropped at the last minute."

Well if that would be a disservice, then what do you call what I'm doing? IT WASN'T A CATEGORY 5, 4 OR EVEN A 3!!! Do you not remember all the "dodged a bullet" talk in NOLA? It was justified because they did dodge a bullet. But they couldn't dodge the bullet of incompetent engineers. They couldn't dodge the bullet of Louisiana's Senior emergency management officials being indicted before Katrina for up to $60 million in unaccounted for funds. They couldn't dodge the bullet of Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin refusing to issue the mandatory evacuation that Bush asked for. They couldn't dodge the bullet of Nagin ignoring their own evacuation plan by letting hundreds of buses sit (do you really need a link?), which essentially puts most deaths on his doorstep. They couldn't dodge the bullet of Blanco blocking the Red Cross from entering the city for fear of creating a "magnet" to the Superdome. etc. etc.

I could go on and on about what really happened in New Orleans with hundreds of links, but the fact is that most of you already know all of this, and I'm just sort of using this as a refresher. And those of you who don't know this most likely chose not to know all of this so you could blame Bush. To sum up this portion of the post though, I just have to say again "Katrina" didn't destroy New Orleans did, crappily built levees did!!!. I can't even describe how sick of hearing "worst natural disaster" I am.

While all the "Katrina"/"natural disaster" crap seems to get at least a daily mention, the past week has been building towards today with countless descriptions along those lines. The year anniversary is a major media event, and my favorite liberal media offender, the Yahoo! home page pulls a Kanye West:

Are you effing kidding me? "The poverty and racism that separated New Orleans before Katrina plague the city's reconstruction." sounds a lot like opinion, and not much like news to me. Both that headline and the "racism" button under the picture link to an AFP "article" entitled: Race relations still tense a year after Katrina. Not surprisingly the article mentions nothing about Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin's repeated racially charged remarks. Worse than that, this "article" is clearly nothing but an opinion piece that I almost can't believe doesn't use the phrase "white devil". Just read the opening three paragraphs:

NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - The chaos following Hurricane Katrina showed millions of Americans that deep racial divides, poverty and racism persist in their country.

Images of seas of black faces begging for help that took days to arrive, and stories of sheriffs from adjacent white suburbs turning desperate evacuees away at gunpoint as they tried to flee New Orleans, horrified the nation.

But for many who grew up in a city that had hosted the slave trade and clung to segregation, the initial shock was transformed into fury that their deepest fears and suspicions were true: the government does not care about black people.

That third paragraph CLEARLY reads like the writer's opinion. The article goes on with more of the same, but never actually substantiates it's claims about "racial divides" and "racism". I'm annoyed by the liberal MSM all the time, but this is just ridiculous. This article shows no evidence of the racism it is claiming to report on, I'm just stunned at how weak of an "article" it is. They didn't even try.

As the "article" goes on, there are a bunch of other lines meant to hit you emotionally, but again, there is no substance to the. It quotes a number of black people, only one of whom says anything about racism (even though that is the message of the entire "article"), "The racism is so raw here". Well, case closed. She offers no substantiation.

This article opinion piece reports "racism!", but then speaks skeptically about white reaction to those claims:

Many whites in the city respond defensively to questions of race. When Spike Lee's documentary premiered ahead of Katrina's anniversary, the city's newspaper ran a front-page review complaining that the voices of white victims were not heard.

How stupid does the writer have to be to put that line in there, and then not interview a single white person for this "article"!? I suppose whatever audience this was written for wouldn't notice that anyway, they're just looking to get pumped up about their Bush hatred.

Of course the icing on the cake is ending with the obligatory lie (see first section of this post)

Katrina swept ashore in the early morning of August 29, killing more than 1,500 people along the US Gulf Coast and flooding 80 percent of New Orleans.

Katrina didn't kill them! Failed levees did, and they were only there because Blanco and Nagin chose not to make them leave, and drag them out whether they liked it or not! (Before you libs say "you can't force anyone from their homes", I have to say "then don't bitch about their situation if they chose to stay").

What annoys me more than anything though is the whole "race" discussion being brought up at all. Virtually everyone ignores the fact that whites died at a substantially higher rate than blacks did there. Don't believe me? Check out my original post here and see these updated statistics here and here. I was going to screen cap all of this and include images, but I've lost interest after getting sidetracked this morning. But the gist is this - NOLA is (well, was) 67% black and 28% white, while 40% of those that died were white and only roughly 50% were black (give or take, based on different stats that seem to overlap).

Have you ever seen an article asking why America is so racist against whites and let them die at a significantly disproportionate rate in the aftermath of Katrina failed levees? Where's the outrage?

Anyway, as I said, I've already become bored with this. I'm off to dream about the billions in tax dollars we're spending to rebuild a city in such a manner that it will be able to be easily destroyed again. Great investment. The only plus side is that maybe they can clean the crime situation up a bit, as they've exported their crime problems to Houston.

*UPDATE - Others*
Florida Cracker, Locomotive Breath 1901, 186k Per Second, RedBlueChristian, Sister Toldjah, Junkyard Blog, The World According to Carl

***UPDATE***
A video tribute to the NOLA idiot parade. New Orleans' biggest a-holes caught on tape. (please email me with links to others if you know of them)

This first one is not safe for work due to language (eff word). This clown wanted the feds to give everyone $20k... You know give them "what the f*** we deserve".

"Kanye West doesn't care about being a douche bag":

Count Chocula Ray Nagin's famous I have a Hershey speech:

Nagin's Nestquick clarification... That's the kind of chocolate I'm talking about (Bonus, notice in the "chocolate city" speech, he's addressing specifically by name "black people". So not only is this "clarification" idiotic, it's a flat out lie):

New Orleans cops looti.... er, I mean... catching looters... No wait... Yeah, New Orelans cops looting.

more...

Blitzer describing the refugees in a way that would have caused widespread outrage had it been Hannity or O'Reilly, but the left won't eat their own channel.

Shep and Geraldo lose it on the air, even with out naming names, fueling a lot of the Bush blaming that came out of this. We never saw them crying at Nagin and Blanco's doors for not issuing a mandatory evactuation and using buses to get people out, leading to the unmanagable situation that FEMA had to come deal with. You didn't see them yelling and screaming about them blocking the Red Cross from entering the city.

I don't want to downplay the situation, but you can go anywhere to find the outrage about it. My outrage is over the continued misreporting of what happened.