***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.

 

It wasn't even two weeks ago that the AP launched their latest "get Bush" campaign by trying to say that new video evidence proved that President Bush was warned about the possibility of levees breaking, despite an interview on ABC where he said:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"

The AP story, put forth by a former Rathergate era 60 Minutes II producer (among others) showed video of pre-Katrina briefings in which the President was involved and there was passing mention of levees being "topped", and tried to claim that this directly contradicted the President's statement a few days after the Hurricane Katrina hit. The problem is, the story and video didn't support the AP's claim. Nowhere in the pre-Katrina briefings did we see anyone warn of the levees breaking/breaching, only passing mention of overtopping, and this wasn't some new video dug up by he AP, it was readily available to the media, and just pulled out now in an obvious effort to attack the President.

Bloggers, myself included, were all over this immediately pointing out the AP's lie. The controversy went on for a few days while virtually every media outlet pumped this story as some sort of huge blow to the President and his credibility, and basically treated it as a documented lie. There was no question that it was in fact the AP lying, because they made a claim that they said was supported by the video montage, which it wasn't.

After the "news" was out, and the damage was done, the AP waited until that Friday night to issue a "Friday Night Clarification", which was basically a short article copping to their lie. They conveniently waited to release this "clarification" until the week's news cycle was over so that no one would pick it up. They figured they did their damage with the first impression off of their original lie, and that they could skate out by saying "we corrected it", without any attention really being given to the correction. Lucky for us people like Drudge picked it up, allowing the bloggers to be all over it and expose it to some of the public (though we don't reach the audience the evening news programs could have.) The "clarification" was a very limited release, and I still don't know if the AP ever put it out on the wires.

Well, thanks again to Drudge, we learn that there is yet another development in this story, yet the AP doesn't tie it in to the old bogus story as they should have. Basically the Army Corps of Engineers (most likely where the President and others were getting their information) had maintained that there wasn't concern of the levees breaking/breaching:

The corps called it an unforeseen combination of events that split the earthen levee and toppled the floodwall.

Of course it should be noted that we all know now, that the levee should have held had it not been for design and/or construction flaws, especially considering New Orleans only endured category 1 to 2 conditions. Also, in the aftermath, this same Corps of Engineers has tried to blame the failures on the category 4 storm, but again, the experts have downgraded where the eye struck at landfall to only a category 3, and said that NOLA only dealt with category 1 to 2 conditions. So these "experts" that we were relying on at the time, obviously didn't know what they were talking about, and it has only been in the aftermath that other experts have determined the real causes of the break. The Corps of Engineers is really dealt a heavy blow in this article:

Scientists working on an independent study of a floodwall that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina said Monday that a government test 21 years ago predicted the wall could fail.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' built a levee and floodwall system to test a design similar to the 17th Street Canal in 1985, which "indicated that failure was imminent," according to a statement from Raymond B. Seed and Robert G. Bea, in charge of the National Science Foundation's Independent Levee Investigation Team.

"Not only did they have that in their repertoire of information, they failed to use it, as best we can tell," Seed said in a telephone interview from the University of California, Berkeley.

Seed said that "sometimes there's separation between the engineers in the research center and the working Joes in some of the districts. It wasn't all that surprising. It was just disappointing."

What a lot of this seems to boil down to is that the Army Corps of Engineers screwed up big time and should have been screaming these warnings that they've denied knowing, but the evidence now seems to show they had. It is my understanding that these were the experts we were relying on for information, and again they've been proven to be a failure in the aftermath.

It should also always be noted that Louisiana's own emergency planning agency was indicted and awaiting trial before Katrina for blowing as much as $60 million in unaccounted for federal money. Anyone know what happened with all that yet? Also, should it be a surprise that if $60 million disappeared, and the people responsible were awaiting trial, that we have a city unprepared for such a disaster. Remember, FEMA organizes relief, they aren't the "on the ground" "first responder" types. The relief effort requires competent local and state agencies and officials.

The main point to go back to is that there is no evidence that the President was warned about levees breaking/breaching which makes his comments on ABC completely accurate. Liberals will say that this is playing semantics with "breaching" and "overtopping" but it's not. There is a huge distinction there, and again this line about the Corps of Engineers just reinforces that:

The corps called it an unforeseen combination of events that split the earthen levee and toppled the floodwall.

Read the latest article now if you hadn't done so already. And a note to liberals, before you start your predictable whining - "How can you use the AP as your source when you slam them for being biased liberals who put out the original story", just settle down. For starters that is the point. If I were using Fox News or something you'd whine about it being a story spun by conservatives. But you can't get away with it if it's the AP. But beyond that, this is my analysis tying it in to the other story. The AP isn't being as honest as they should be here, by pointing out all what I did in this post (i.e. that the Corps of Engineers is saying basically reaffirming Bush's "no one anticipated" statement.) The AP, rightfully, slams the Corps of Engineers with this article, but doesn't point out that these were the "experts" who supposedly had the most knowledge before the storm, and who's brains everyone relied on. This story should be framed as a follow-up to their "clarification", instead of forcing me to do it.

See previous:
BREAKING: AP Issues Friday Night "Clarification" On Bush/Katrina/Levee Breach Video
SMASHED: AP's New "Bush Lied About Levee Breach Worries" Campaign Destroyed By Bloggers

Others who blogged the original AP lie and "clarification" (hopefully sending trackbacks from this post will get the word out on this development):
Mark Noonan at Blogs For Bush, Bryan Preston at Junkyard Blog, Ripclawe at Narcissistic Views, Sister Toldjah, Wizbang, Outside The Beltway, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Myopic Zeal, Iowa Voice, Generation Why?, Blogs For Bush, Sister Toldjah, Flopping Aces, The New Editor, Two or Three, MacStansbury, LawHawk, Pursuing Holiness, Wizbang, Powerline, Outside The Beltway, Willisms, Flopping Aces, The Jawa Report, Don Surber, Scott at Powerline Blog also here, Captain Ed, RedState, Delmarva Dealings, Gina Cobb, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, Newsbusters

UPDATE:
Paul at Wizbang is all over this thing. Also, if you read down in to the comments, he makes a lot of sense when discussing the future of levee building in NOLA. Paul uses this article and this article from the Times Picayune as the main source for his post.

 

By now, I'm sure you're aware of the bogus and spun AP article (and video) meant to be the "Bush lied" smoking gun for the left, that was quickly destroyed by the right side of the blogosphere. This didn't matter because the anti-Bush media jammed it down the public's throat for two days, never explaining the flat out lie it contained, not to mention that the first impression means everything, so the damage that had been done is really irreversible.

The AP clearly planned this whole thing out, because they must have known the bloggers would bust this. After all, one of the writers was Rathergate era CBS 60 Minutes II producer (shocking huh?), so they waited until late friday night, when the evening news programs were all over and virtually no one would ever get the news, the AP issued a "Friday night clarification". That clarification basically admits to a flat out lie. They admit that they made a claim in the original story, that they said the story supported, when it didn't at all... and they now admit that.. but if they're really interested in "truth", why did they never even put the story out on the wires? Why is it still being burried? I mean, we know most of the media wouldn't pick it up anyway, but still.

Well a couple bloggers have stayed on it and noted that one media outlet did the noble thing. Powerline and Patterico both point out that the Arizona Daily Star printed it on the front page. I'm not holding my breath for the rest of the media to follow suit. They got their desired effect out of the original lie... Why make a big deal out of reporting the truth now, and risk appearing to defend the President?

 

h/t Drudge

AP FRIDAY NIGHT CLARIFICATION ON BUSH/KATRINA VIDEO Fri Mar 03 2006 19:48:29 ET

Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.

I'm not expecting the media to run as wild with this one. This is basically the AP being forced, kicking and screaming, to admit their spin job... though not in so many words, and I don't really consider this "good enough", but it's better than nothin', and more than we usually get. (i.e. Dan 'The documents are fake, but the story is still real' Rather)

Mark Noonan Blogs For Bush adds:

And, of course, it is released after the days news cycle is all set. I'd like a Congressional investigation of this.

What we have here is a very strange confluence of events: this story started just as Mardis Gras brought New Orleans back into the public eye. Normally, the story would be about how New Orleans is recovering - but the story instead was a bogus re-write of videos that the Administration had long ago provided to the MSM. I smell a rat here - a DemocRAT, if you ask me. This is simply too beneficial for the Democrats for it to be coincidence - there could very well be collusion, and that would make what the AP did a de-facto campaign contribution to the Democratic Party. I believe that such a donation - which would have to be figured as a value of tens of millions of dollars - would be illegal under our campaign finance laws.

We should have a full hearing in Congress, with the AP and the DNC forced to turn over all documents which may in any way be related to Katrina from the day it went ashore to the day this AP story ran last week. We need to get to the bottom of this, lest the MSM - by getting away with this - merely become an adjunct of the DNC dressed up as an independent media.

Right on Mark... Sadly we know this will never happen, but I'm glad you pointed out one thing I left out in previous posts, which is that these tapes weren't some "leaked" new revelation, but something that had been shelved for months by many news organizations (I had read that somewhere too, but was to busy with how bogus the whole thing was at the time, and I can't remember where now.)

Bryan Preston at Junkyard Blog is out front on this too, as is Ripclawe at Narcissistic Views, and Sister Toldjah.

See previous:
SMASHED: AP's New "Bush Lied About Levee Breach Worries" Campaign Destroyed By Bloggers
Media Goes Nuts With New "Bush Knew About Katrina/Levees" Video... Distorting All The Way

Others who blogged on the bogus AP attack on the President (getting trackbacks out to bring attention to this new development that most are unaware of at this point... since we know the MSM won't be reporting this part) Wizbang, Outside The Beltway, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Myopic Zeal, Iowa Voice, Generation Why?, Blogs For Bush, Sister Toldjah, Flopping Aces, The New Editor, Two or Three, MacStansbury, LawHawk, Pursuing Holiness

These folks blogged about the fact that the writer of the story is a former 60 Minutes II producer:
Wizbang, Powerline, Outside The Beltway, Willisms, Flopping Aces, The Jawa Report, Don Surber

The Army of Davids 'done good' forcing this "clarification" from the AP, and has seen many victories in recent years. Now march with this latest development.

UPDATE
The few other bloggers who are aware of this new development seem to all be noting the curious timing of this "clarification". Late Friday evening when it's only blogger types who are going to catch it. The day's news cycle is over, and they now have about 2 and half days for other news to become next weeks story so this thing gets absolutely no attention (not that it would have anyway... do you see any of the evening news programs, or CNN, or NY Times making this a leading story even if it had been released in time?) But this late release time did prevent folks like O'Reilly and Hannity from being able to report it.

Anyway, this is really just par for the course for the AP. Their motto is clearly "lie and retract, lie and retract", only instead of admitting it was a lie and retracting, they issue "clarifications". I'd go a step further than noting the suspect release time of this "clarification", and say this may have been planned all along. Do you think they were stupid enough to not know that the bloggers would bust this? I mean we're talking about a former CBS 60 Minutes II producer, surely she knows the power of blogs first hand, and surely she knew the lies she was telling in this article. Go back and read this "clarification", it is truly an admission of lying if you digest what it actually says. It's not a "this is what we meant", it's really admitting the lie, but trying hard not to.

Here's my other problem with this latest development... Why can't I find the "clarification" anywhere except Drudge? I've done a few Yahoo! and Google News searches and have yet to find it. Yet Yahoo! was running it in the news section of their home page for approximately a full day (maybe two, the days all ran together, but I know it sat at the top of that list for a loooong time, just like this headline has all day today: "Pentagon releases names of Gitmo inmates"). So why is this latest development, admission of guilt, not also top headline or even indexed? Interesting.

Scott at Powerline Blog is on this now too, and wonders if we'll see a similar "clarification" forthcoming from the Democrats for this pile of ridiculous they dumped out yesterday. Scott also has John of Powerline's comments on this:

I think it's reasonable to assume that the AP's "clarification" is the result of our dissection of their incredibly lame story. I think this highlights, though, how hard it is for truth to catch up to error. Hundreds of newspapers printed the AP's misinformation, and it was the basis for television news on all of the broadcast networks. The correction (or "clarification") will never catch up to most of the tens of millions of people who heard the original story. The news business is all about impressions, and corrections, days after the fact, never take away the impression that the original story falsely created.

Exactly. This is such hit and run BS from the AP. They had this whole thing planned - Launch the attack in the middle of the week when everyone will hear it, then "clarify" when no one will, and the damage is done. Disgraceful!

Captain Ed is now weighting in as well, and notes that the new "overrunning" language the AP has brought in isn't accurate either. This was clearly part of their attempt to keep from fulling admitting what they did and retracting the story.

UPDATE
More blogger reax:
RedState, Delmarva Dealings, Gina Cobb, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, Newsbusters

By the way, I still haven't located this article online anywhere. Like I said earlier, why isn't this on the wires being picked up by Yahoo! News and all the rest? Why isn't this on Yahoo!'s home page right now, like the original bogus story?

 

scroll for updates

Alright, I've decided to create a new post on this subject in an effort to be more clear and articulate. I understand that in my rush to get the original post out, I wasn't very clear on some points and used terminology the way I defined it in my own mind, rather than the way others were reading it. Here goes...

The AP has launched it's latest attack against the President. This time they hoped to have their smoking gun evidence that "Bush lied" with video evidence. Anyway, basically this is supposed to be based on pre-Katrina briefings in which levee overtopping was mentioned as a concern, and an interview the President had 4 days after the storm with ABC in which he said:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"

My initial explanation was a bit confusing because of my problem with the way the media has been reporting the levee issues for the past few months. Basically they spin (but are careful not to flat out lie usually) when they talk about the levees, using "breach" terminology and trying to say people should have been prepared based on overtopping concerns. The two are totally separate things The overtopping concerns had been around for decades, and this is what was discussed in the pre-Katrina meetings. While the flooding as a result of a massive storm surge would have been bad, it would have paled in comparison to the break/breach that actually occurred. So I confused a lot of people with exactly what I meant to say because I was saying that the levees weren't "breached" while I was saying they did "break"... I was attacking the "breached" usage by the media, but obviously that is what happened, and I constantly point that out as something they try to spin.

Here's a quick experiment... Fill a glass of water to the very top and set it down flat in an empty bowl. Blow on top as hard as you can making all the water you're able to, spill over the edge and in to the bowl. Now reset the experiment, only instead of blowing this time, smash the glass with a hammer. Of course the levees are represented by a glass in this experiment, and the bowl is the city of New Orleans. You can clearly see the difference in damage caused.

So while there were reports of isolated incidents on certain levees of some overtopping, it was minimal at best. What happened was the levees failed/broke/breached as a result of design and/or construction flaws. It was known in the first day or two after the storm that the levees had broken/failed, but it was some time later when all the data came in that the experts figured out why they broke, which again was a design and/or construction problem, not a result of storm surge. It wasn't because of a massive storm. The storm actually hit east of New Orleans, in Mississippi as a category 3 at landfall, and only category 1 to 2 conditions hit New Orleans.

Back to the AP's new video for a moment. If you haven't watched it yet, do it now. Again, notice that Max Mayfield voices the known concerns about flooding as a result of possible overtopping of the levees. No one warns about levee breakage/breaching. So again, when the President said that no one could have anticipated that the levees would breach, on ABC four days later. He was exactly right. This isn't playing semantics, this is an important fact. The old plan had to be scrapped, and the rescue and relief effort needed to start from scratch to handle an unforseen situation.

One could obviously make the argument that DHS wasn't and isn't at the point it should be, but the fact is there simply wasn't planning for the levees to break/breach because there weren't warnings about it. The left wing web sites realizing that the AP article is being busted on their spin have now clung to a NY Times article to try to say that there were warnings about levee breaches, but Captain Ed tears those ridiculous arguments apart here.

So, the libs will never agree, but we've established that Bush didn't lie and was actually very accurate in what he said about no one anticipating the breach. His people would have to have been insane to let him say that no one foresaw overtopping because that was a concern for decades... But breaking wasn't anticipated, plain and simple. No spin, just a simple important fact that destroys the AP's whole "contradiction" and "lie" premise.

Is there anymore to it you ask? It would appear so. One of the two authors of this explosive article is a woman by the name of Margaret Ebrahim. Sound familiar? No? It didn't to me either, but Wizbang recognized the name and points out that a former CBS 60 Minutes II producer shared the same name. What are the odds that this is a different person? Pretty slim. I wonder how a former producer of a show disgraced by their failed smear attempt on the President, feels about the President now? (sarcasm) No axes to grind here huh?(/sarcasm)

So to sum up, this is what we have... We have a former Rathergate era 60 Minutes II producer writing an AP article and an AP video that promise to show that when the President told ABC, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees", four days after the storm, he was lying. Despite the fact that this is the premise of the article and video, they don't come anywher close to backing it up. In pre-Katrina meetings, oncerns were raised that had been known for decades, about levee overtopping potential as a result of Category 3+ hurricane storm surges. What happened was the unanticipated break of levees under category 1 to 2 conditions. Liberals can continue to try to spin and lie about this all day long, but there it is folks.

Now, as a side issue, libs are trying to claim that overtopping caused the levee failure/break/breach. Well not according to this article from the far from conservative Washington Post from 9/21/05:

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

The Army Corps of Engineers has said that Katrina was just too massive for a system that was not intended to protect the city from a storm greater than a Category 3 hurricane, and that the floodwall failures near Lake Pontchartrain were caused by extraordinary surges that overtopped the walls.

But with the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

In the weeks since Katrina drowned this low-lying city, there has been an intense focus on the chaotic government response to the flood. But Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease.

"We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said van Heerden, who also runs LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

Read more...

It should be noted that they hadn't even downgraded the storm at this point. WAPO reports that here on December 22, 2005:

Hurricane Katrina will go down in the history books as the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, but not by a long shot the most powerful.

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.

And we can jump back to WAPO's October 24, 2005 article for more on the continually developing story about how it was design and contruction that caused all the problems:

Within a space of 15 hours on Aug. 29, three massive, concrete floodwalls in separate parts of the city suddenly fractured and burst under the weight of surging waters from Hurricane Katrina. The breaches unleashed a wall of water that swept entire buildings from their foundations and transformed what might have been a routine hurricane into the costliest storm in U.S. history.

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.

Now libs don't get all crazy about this article that came months after the fact saying that the failures of engineering "could have been anticipated", because the simple fact is that they weren't.

Where were the anticipitory warnings about a 700 foot section of the levee completely breaking down causing immeasurable destruction of virtually an entire city. I haven't found those warnings, have you?

I wonder if the AP's next big investigative report will provide evidence that Bush blew up the levees to kill black people. I'm sure it's coming, just wait.

I like the way NewsBusters breaks the whole thing down to 3 brief sentences (great roundup too):

The President said that no one anticipated the "breach" of the levees. The Director of the National Hurricane Center said that they couldn't say whether the levees would be "topped." Well, that's the difference between your bathtub overflowing, which makes a mess, and collapsing, which is a disaster.

Many more articulate bloggers have laid the smackdown on the AP on this as well, so check out what they have to say incase I left anything out:
Best Roundups
Wizbang
Outside The Beltway
Powerline
Others who were able to cut through the bull too:
Myopic Zeal, Iowa Voice, Sister Toldjah, Flopping Aces, The New Editor, Two or Three, MacStansbury, LawHawk, Pursuing Holiness

These folks are blogging about the fact that the writer of the story is a former 60 Minutes II producer:
Wizbang, Powerline, Outside The Beltway, Willisms, Flopping Aces, The Jawa Report, Don Surber

UPDATE: 9:27 PM CT
The AP, again with Margaret Ebrahim, has a new story entitled "New Video Shows Blanco Saying Levees Safe". But don't get too excited about any honesty coming from the AP and Ms. Ebrahim... It quickly turns back in to a repeat of the previous dishonest article and video that got all this started, lying about Bush getting warnings in those taped briefings about the potential for levees breaching. Nothing new here, just a new tag line to pull you in to an article that makes claims it doesn't even attempt to back up.

UPDATE: 2:34 AM CT
Jason at Generation Why has a great post up on this situation, with links and insight in to a lot of related issues. He links to Blogs For Bush who is discussing a more recent development which is that the administration called Blanco to ask about the levees and she reassured him that they were fine. Expose the Left has video of this conversation.

Jason also links to this Expose the Left post, with video of Blanco making a campaign promise about emergency response, that she clearly didn't live up to. This may have to do with the fact that her emergency planning agency officials were awaiting trial for blowing up $60 million in federal money on who knows what. I dug that link up earlier, but it was interesting the LA Times no longer had the original story up, and it was mostly just on blogs... But I think that is an important lesser known fact in all of this. Louisiana's emergency planning folks are indicted (don't know what's happened since then) for up to $60 million in federal money. I think we can say that probably played a role in all of this. Especially considering they Hurricane Pam exercise was developed to prevent what actually happened. Where was the planning? Oh right, awaiting trial.

By the way, everyone is using Max Mayfield's brief mention of concern over levees being topped as their way to say "Bush knew", but that is something completely different than breaching which is what the President said that no one anticipated. Yesterday, Mayfield had this to say to MSNBC:

Today, Mayfield told NBC News that he warned only that the levees might be topped, not breached, and that on the many conference calls he monitored, “Nobody talked about the possibility of a levee breach or failure until after it happened.”

UPDATE - 3/3/06 8:31 PM CT

AP releases "Friday Night Clarification" (via Drudge)

AP FRIDAY NIGHT CLARIFICATION ON BUSH/KATRINA VIDEO Fri Mar 03 2006 19:48:29 ET

Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.

Don't expect the media to run wild with this as they did with the original "gotcha" hit piece.

 

SCROLL FOR UPDATES at 12:38 AM March 2, 2006
In the ABC interview, Bush was was referring to the "break" breach that occurred that no one anticipated. The overtopping (that never actually happened) concerns had been around for decades and everyone knew that. Everyone knew about the potential for flooding as a result of high storm surges going over the top of the levees, but that damage would have paled in comparison to the UNANTICIPATED break/breach that actually occurred as a result of design and/or construction flaws. Again, scroll for further explanation/update, but I suspect now that I've sort of wrapped my mind around this, I'll be creating a more clear and to the point post on this

I just noticed that John Powerline Blog sees basically the same thing, and tears down this whole AP anti-Bush campaign, piece by dishonest piece. Props to Ankle Biting Pundits for linking me to that post. ABP assumes, as do I, that the truth won't matter here because in the public won't get as involved as bloggers to find the real truth of this, and they'll buy what they see in the papers and on TV NewsBusters is on to the AP's dirty tricks as well, and like Powerline, they break it down much more articulately than I have. Newsbusters' post is also very brief but right to the point, with a supporting quote from the Army Corps of Engineers. I was linked to Polls and Pundits from a comment on ABP, who is on top of this as well.

(original post starts below)

Here's the new media hype headline I'm sure you've seen by now: Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

I first saw this story on the Yahoo! home page, and I knew immediately what it was attempting to say, and why it was an inaccurate portrayal... and that the media would be jumping for joy over this, and that we can expect all the usual Senate Democrats to be out with their "incompetence" talking points tomorrow, and for at least a week or two to come (vs. doing any actual work.. what's new?) Drudge is running the story as the top headline as well.

Here's the gist... The AP has exclusively obtained video of video conferences involving the President and FEMA that took place during the week of Katrina. This includes video from a day before Katrina where the levees breaching was discussed. This is supposed to be used to bust Bush "lying" when he said a few days later, on Good Morning America:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"

What everyone is ignoring is that the levees never "breached" or "overtopped", they broke because of design and/or construction flaws. This is a known fact. The eye never struck New Orleans, but category 3 conditions were initially reported to have still hit the city. The levees should have been able to handle that. But as the experts have weighed in in the following months it has been determined that New Orleans only experience between category 1 and 2 conditions. I repeat, CATEGORY 1 OR 2 conditions hit New Orleans, and again, the levees were supposed to be able to handle a 3.

The article has quotes, and the video shows clips of things like this:

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing.

Again, what does that have to do with anything? THE LEVEES WEREN'T TOPPED! The "levee concerns" that everyone had HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!! But the media loves to keep pushing the known bogus idea that the levees were "topped" every few weeks when some new development allows them to use it to spin and hurt the administration. By the way, we also know that Louisisiana's emergency people blew millions of dollars on who knows what, and I believe that is still under investigation (trying to get this post up quickly, because I've got to run so I don't have time to find the link... but I suspect you already know the story)

So while everyone may have screwed up, it is still known that the local and state REALLY screwed up, and could have prevented a lot of the pandemonium and death by activating their own plans. The FEDs were obviously unprepared to deal with something this large, especially with such idiotic local officials. But the point here is that this is supposed to be some explosive story, and it's really not.

I think maybe Bush wasn't getting the full story from his people, that's possible... But the point is that AFTER the storm, most people didn't know that the levees had broken (NOT overtopped) so early... actually not for a few days. So I suspect that in that week, as the reports kept rolling in revealing more damage and chaos than most had first realized Bush along with most people thought that the levees had dodged a bullet, which they should have had they not been poorly designed or built and broken down under week conditions that never came close to overtopping them.

This is just more media piling on to a non-issue. The levees were never "breached" or "overtopped" in the way that people were concerned they were. That bullet, technically, was dodged... The disaster was caused by many other factors, but not that. So this whole "Bush Knew" or Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina campaign is a joke. Yeah they were warned at took note... but what they were warned about had nothing to do with what actually happened.

By the way, the FACT that we know it was design and/or construction flaws that caused all the problems in the New Orleans, it is beyond annoying to continue reading articles that say "damage caused by Hurricane Katrina" or "flooding caused by Katrina", etc. etc. These type of statements are totally dishonest and misleading, and always used coupled with misleading statements about warnings about levees overtopping that are irrelevent to the actual story. But don't expect it to end anytime soon.

Again, sorry about not have a lot of links, but much of what I'm missing links on is old but related news that you most likely already know, and I'm in too much of a hurry at the moment to dig them all up.

Ian at Expose The Left wonders where the media's outrage is over another video.

UPDATE - 12:38 AM March 2, 2006

In discussions with liberal commenters on this post, I've come to realize something... "Breach" is the all encompassing word for overtopping, breaks, or whatever. I get annoyed when the press uses it when trying to give a distorted picture of what happened, and make people think the levees were overtopped. But using the word "breach" is still accurate when people are talking about the breaks that actually ocurred, although again I've just not liked the word because of how it's generally used to spin the sitation.

So imagine you're the President in this interview. You're being told that the levees actually broke a day or two after the storm hit, and wasn't overtopped do to an extreme storm surge. Everyone had of course known for decades about the potential for an overtopping type of breach, so that wouldn't even make sense for the President to try to say that no one expected it, right? So if you consider that he was referring to the "break" type of breach that actually occurred, then it makes a lot more sense because no one did anticipate that. The concern that was discussed perviously had been about the levees being breached by high storm surges that couldn't be contained by the levees... not worry of them flat out breaking down under conditions they were supposed to be able to handle.

You can call this spin or you can disagree all you want... but I actually just realized that angle that made it all the more clear in my mind. Again, why would he be so stupid as to say no one anticipated the levees breaching when it has been talked about for decades and especially all the days leading up to the storm? Because he meant the "break" type of breach that happened, not the overtopping by storm surge that had been antcipated (but didn't occur). So we've got a country who had for about 24-48 hours breathed a sigh of relief that New Orleans had been spared the worst, and the levees hadn't dumped a bunch of water in to the soup bowl city, but then unpredictably the levees flat out broke down and caused immeasurable damage.

So yeah, the overtopping concern had been raised for many years, but the damage would have paled in comparison to what happened as a result of the break. We were all totally unprepared, especially after Nagin didn't use the buses to evacuate and Blanco didn't force a mandatory evacuation, to deal with the unprecedented amount of damage. I think that's what you libs are confused about. The damage from overtopping levees wouldn't have been anywhere close to the break that occurred. Try this experiment to understand the difference, fill a cup to the very top with water and put it in and empty bowl. Blow on it and notice some water come over the top and in to the bowl. Now do the same thing except instead of blowing this time, shatter the glass with a hammer.

Get it now? An overtopping causing bad flooding had been a concern... A flat out breakdown breach of the levees hadn't been considered and the flooding caused by it was beyond anything anyone could really wrap their minds around.

So to sum up, it is my belief that the President meant "breach" in the "break" sense of the word, and this was accurate. Yeah, I know I'm a shill for Bushy and trying to cover for him, but it seems clear when you look at the fact that a "breach" from overtopping had been a concern for decades, so he would have to be insane to have made the comment meaning it in that sense of the word.

 

This isn't the first time we've heard of evacuees improperly using money they received for Katrina relief, but it seems we've got evacuees (remember, "refugees" is racist) buying guns and going to strip clubs on their tax payer funded debit cards. Remember the Louis Vuitton bags?

On a quick side note, I work one night a week at a club/bar in downtown Nashville and we actually just had some New Orleans evacuees trying to buy drinks with their card this past weekend. We've gotten a lot of New Orleaneans since the hurricane, many claiming to have lost their IDs because of the hurricane (still can't let 'em in), others using horrible fakes. But this was the first time I'd heard of them trying to pull this in our place.

The Smoking Gun has details and document scans.

FEBRUARY 14--Some victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita used federal assistance money to pay for "adult erotica," a pistol, strip club fees, and at least one $450 tattoo, according to a new government audit. A Government Accountability Office review of weaknesses in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's distribution of aid describes some of the abuse connected with FEMA's dispensing of $2000 debit cards. While most of the February 13 GAO report addresses the use of multiple social security numbers to secure unwarranted handouts, auditors also examined where some of those funds were expended. An excerpt from the federal audit can be found below. (2 pages)

more:
Slublog,

 

This just in from Drudge:

White House seeking a retraction from NYT: Bush was 'on vacation in Texas' Fri Feb 10 2006 09:46:25 ET

NEW YORK TIMES’ Eric Lipton today writes that President Bush was “on vacation in Texas” on August 30th but their own reporter filed a pool report that day from San Diego where POTUS giving a speech on the War on Terror and was visiting soldiers and families of the fallen. Sources tell DRUDGE that the original story filed by Lipton did not contain the sentence about Bush being on vacation and that it was added by an editor.

The White House is seeking a retraction.

Developing...

Pool Report #2 (from August 30, 2005) Chaos briefly reigned. After conducting an interview with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service at a cargo plane hangar near the previous event, President Bush arrived at the Naval Medical Center San Diego on schedule, and proceded to the first event, a meeting with health care providers that was supposed to last a half hour and include a photo op at the bottom. Instead, moments after arrival, the pool was rushed to the door and told the photo op would take place immediately. Then, just as suddenly, it was canceled without explanation. Minutes later – about an hour ahead of schedule, and equally suddenly – the pool was rounded up and rushed back to the motorcade for departure. It is now 11:21 AM local time and we are heading toward the airport. More to come.

Anne Kornblut

END

 

Okay, I just mentioned all of what I'm about to talk about in the previous post, but I felt it deserved it's own post. Basically I didn't realize where I was going with that last post until I got there, and I think that the information is definitely important enough to deserve it's own post.

You probably think that Katrina (or actually, the crappy levees that should have held up against the category 1 or 2 conditions that struck New Orleans) discriminated, and affected mainly poor black people. You probably think all the whites got out and left all these poor blacks to sink or swim. Well you couldn't be more wrong.

If you're reading the right blogs, you would have caught this post by Michelle Malkin from December 12, 2005. In it she links to this report from Louisiana's Dept. of Health and Hospitals, dated November 14, 2005. Basically the gist of it is, of the 883 bodies processed at the St. Gabriel Morgue, 562 had been identified by race. The shocking thing (at least for the media... so shocking they forgot to report it) was that at that point 48% were black and 41% white. Why is this shocking? Well because New Orleans was 67% black and only 28% white.

WHITES DIED AT A DISPROPORTIONATELY HIGH RATE, WHILE BLACKS DIED AT A DISPROPORTIONATELY LOW RATE.

At the time I remember feeling the way I do now, but thinking at least "maybe all thos others they haven't counted by race will be black and the race baiters will get some ammo back...." But that wasn't the case. I just dug up the latest figures, dated January 18, 2006.:

So out of the 910 bodies now processed, we have 786 identified by race. The black percentage has risen to 50%, and the white percentage to 42%. So to be clear again, we have a city that was 67% black, and 28% white that lost disproportionately HIGH number of whites and disproportionately LOW number of blacks. Ask yourself if this is the way the media has reported the tragedy? Or have they reported this thing from day one, and contine through today, to report it as a largely "black tragedy"?

I almost hate to pick on this AP article though, because this lie has been pushed by almost all media outlets. This lie that Katrina was a racist storm. What say you Louis Farrakhan? You seemed so sure that the levees were blown up to get the blacks. Luckily you don't live in a world of accountability where you get busted and actually have to explain yourself. Since the percentage of whites dead is shockingly high and out of proportion, should we accuse whites of blowing up the levees now Mr. Farrakhan?

Anyway, If Katrina was a racist, she was racist towards whites.

 

The way this is reported, it seems like they're trying to say this is supposed to be some great thing. But

via AP by way of Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - The racial divide exposed by Hurricane Katrina has united minority lawmakers in Congress who hope to leverage their numbers to aid overlooked communities.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the
Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus are creating a new group that will include all of their members. The Tri-Caucus will not replace the existing caucuses.

For starters, that's nothing if not divisive. Just more defining by race. It's not the worst thing, but this attitude is what keeps racial lines drawn. It's these liberal minority groups that define themselves by race that hinder the "progress" you're always hearing them say they hope to achieve. But again, this small story isn't the biggest deal. I'm more irritated at the tone of this AP story. They continue:

Many of those who were unable to escape Katrina and the flooding it caused in New Orleans were black and poor. The Aug. 29 storm also greatly affected the Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities in the Gulf Coast states.

"Many of those" were "black and poor"? "Many of those" were "black and poor"!? "Also greatly affected the Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities!?" So I guess all the white people drove away in their golden boats to their platinum mansions that float on water huh? Plus "poor and black"!? Wow, could you be trying to draw any more of a divide AP? Not to mention that it is very reminiscent of Wolf Blitzer's "So poor, and so black..." comments (video) (Can you imagine if that was O'Reilly or Hannity who had said that!?)

HERE COMES THE IMPORTANT PART

Now most people would find this to be nitpicking, because most have bought the idea that Katrina was racist towards blacks. Obviously this AP article is still sticking with that tone. Well check out this Malkin post from December 12, 2005. According to this report from the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals - of the 883 bodies processed by the St. Gabriel Morgue, 562 had been identified by race with shocking (to the media anyway) results.

On December 12, 2005 of the 562 dead identified by race, 48% were black and 41% were white. You might say, "hey Randy, 48% is more than 41% so the media is right". To which I say, "Not when 67% of the city was black, and only 28% white (or chocolate if you prefer.) The FACT is that a disproportionately high number of WHITES DIED! Once again, why do bloggers have to do this research, when the AP is arguably the largest news organization on the planet.

BUT THAT'S NOT IT - WE HAVE AN UPDATE

In this updated version of the same report, dated January 18, 2006 we have the latest figures:

So out of the 910 bodies processed, we now have 786 identified by race. The black percentage has risen to 50%, and the white percentage to 42%. So to be clear again, we have a city that was 67% black, and 28% white that lost disproportionately HIGH number of whites and disproportionately LOW number of blacks. Ask yourself if this is the way the media has reported the tragedy?

I almost hate to pick on this AP article though, because this lie has been pushed by almost all media outlets. This lie that Katrina was a racist storm. What say you Louis Farrakhan? You seemed so sure that the levees were blown to get the blacks. Luckily you don't live in a world of accountability where you get busted and actually have to explain yourself.

 

I'm sure we've all read stories in recent months, about the studies done showing the drastic changes in racial make up of the city of New Orleans. This Story from The Brown Daily Herald isn't really much different, but I thought their headline was hilarious:

New Orleans Could Lose 80 Percent Of Black Population, Brown Study Finds

Personally, I think it should have been called a "chocolate study", but that's just me...

Previous:

Mayor Nagin's New Orleans Chocolate Factory Explained...

NOLA Mayor Nagin Wants A Chocolate New Orleans

Remember these? Just thought I'd toss 'em back up again:

 

Okay, we all know FEMA director Brown should have done a better job. But we also know, if we choose to seek the truth, that New Orleans's milk chocolate Mayor Nagin and Louisiana Governor Blanco should (but aren't) shoulder most of the blame. For starters because they ignored their own evactuation plan that called for using school buses to evacuate people, and secondly because Blanco's people blocked the Red Cross from going in with supplies they had amassed on the outskirts of the city, because she didn't want to create a "magnet" to the Superdome (at the same time she was on TV screaming at the President). We all heard all the stories of bodies piling up, rapes, and murders turned out to be lies created only to make the bad situation seem worse, in an effort to further attack the President.

Anyway, setting aside what those of us who choose to be informed already knew about who is most responsible for the post-Katrina mess, we now have some new information that, once again, looks bad for Louisiana officials.

(via AP)

A ranking Louisiana health official turned down federal offers to help move or evacuate patients as Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, a newly released document shows.

more

Two days before the Aug. 29 storm, HHS was told by the state's health emergency preparedness director that the help was not needed, according to an e-mail released Monday by a Senate panel investigating the government's response to Katrina.

The state official, identified in the Aug. 27 e-mail as Dr. Roseanne Pratts, "responded no, that they do not require anything at this time and they would be in touch if and when they needed assistance," wrote HHS senior policy analyst Erin Fowler.

more

The committee also released a Senate interview of Louisiana Transportation Secretary Johnny Bradberry, during which he told investigators "we have done nothing to fulfill this responsibility" of ensuring evacuation plans are in place for at-risk populations.

"We put no plans in place to do any of this," Bradberry said in the Dec. 21 interview, 12 pages of which were released by the Senate committee.

What's annoying is I heard this during a headline break on Fox News last night, but didn't find an article on the internet about it until I was looking at the Drudge Report a little while ago.

Even more annoying is that the AP is still pushing the lie of the storms impact, versus the reality of the design and/or construction flaws that caused all of the flooding:

At least 40 bodies, many of them elderly patients, were found inside a flooded New Orleans hospital after Katrina hit. Thirty-four patients at a nursing home near New Orleans died Aug. 29 in the wake of massive flooding brought by the storm's surge. The nursing home's owners have since been charged with negligent homicide for failing to evacuate the patients.

I'm not certain that this is an intentional lie because most people are still under the impression a massive category 4 storm hit New Orleans and a storm surge overtopped the levees, etc. etc. When the fact is that the experts say that it was only a 3 at landfall, and only a 1 or 2 in New Orleans, which the levees were supposed to be able to handle. The levees actually physically broke, and never even came close to being overtopped by the surge. But as I ask here, why is it I and other bloggers have to report this? Why does the AP have such a hard time finding this information?

 

The headline from the AP picked up on the wires today was: Documents Show Govt Forewarned on Katrina. The article attempts to make the case that the media has from day one, "The Feds dropped the ball!" Well first of all, I don't think we need to rehash Mayor Nagin ignoring their own evacuation plans which called for using school buses to evacuate people, or Governor Blanco blaming FEMA while she blocked the Red Cross from entering the city, or any of the other things we now know, that place almost all of the blame on state and local officials. Setting that aside, sure the Feds might have been able to move quicker, but again, that wasn't the main problem... It's also not new news.

The AP here tries to create some new news story by saying these newly released documents show that "the government" screwed up, even though the "Hurricane Pam" exercise gave them "forewarning". It basically tries to blame the government for knowing that water would "surge" over the levees in any storm greater than a category 3. What the article doesn't focus on, and only partly mentions, is the most important part of the story: Katrina was only a category 3 at landfall, and in New Orleans specifically it was only between a category 1 or 2. Beyond that, water never "surged" over the levees. The levees broke as a result of design and/or construction flaws.

excerpt from the AP article in question

Pam, a "tabletop" exercise that began in July 2004, focused on a mock Category 3 hurricane that produced more than 20 inches of rain and 14 tornadoes. It found, among other things, that floodwaters would surge over New Orleans levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leaving drainage pumps crippled for up to six months.

Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, though some weather experts downgraded it to Category 3 or even Category 2 by the time it reached New Orleans.

So they sort of mention the downgrade (although many experts feel it's even lower), but they don't acknowledge that the levees broke and weren't surged over by water, an extremely important fact.

More:

An Aug. 28 report by the department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week.

"Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative," stated the report, which was sent to Homeland Security's office for infrastructure protection.

"Any storm rated Category 4 or greater ... will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months," said the report.

The documents are the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of the catastrophic damage that a storm of Katrina's magnitude could cause. The Bush administration has been lambasted for its lackluster response to Katrina and its aftermath, including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it.

They ramble on about category 4 and 5 storms (irrelevant to Katrina), and talk about what the "government knew beforehand" (again, irrelevant when talking about categories 4 and 5), even using the line: "including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it." Again, AP, we aren't talking about a category 4 or 5 storm... so what you're doing is no better than lying.

Basically it's a weird form of a strawman (for lack of a better term) that the AP creates here. They make a case/argument about how the government knew what would happen in the event of a category 4 or 5, and then bring in criticisms of the government's handling of it, all the while turning a blind eye to the fact that what hit New Orleans was category 1 to 2 strength. Thanks for playing AP.

This from the Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2005:

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.

and

"This is a further indictment of the levee system," Ivor Van Heerden, an LSU professor and leader of a team of Louisiana investigators probing the cause of the levee breaches. "It indicates that most of the flooding of downtown New Orleans was a consequence of man's folly."

Other engineering experts agree: Considering Katrina's weakened state at the time it reached New Orleans, the failure of the city's 17th Street and London Avenue canal floodwalls can be explained only as a failure of design or construction, said Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"The water level in the canals wasn't that high when the floodwalls breached," said Bea, a member of an investigating team funded by the National Science Foundation. "We had a premature failure of the defense system."

An even earlier Washington Post article, October 24, 2006:

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.

Hey AP! Why do I have to do this research? Heck, it wasn't even research, just the facts as we know them. I only did the research to support my statements if any libs choose to challenge them. Why is it that the AP, arguably the biggest news organization on the planet, can't find these facts before writing an article!? Why do bloggers have to do this?

For the record, President Bush declared the emergency on Friday afternoon, August 26, 2005.. The storm struck almost 3 full days later, on Monday morning. Everyone can argue about FEMA's response all day long. I don't think FEMA were heros, but they've certainly had almost the entire blame placed on them by almost all of the media, when the facts are that state and local officials really dropped the relief ball. Red Cross please Governor Blanco. Buses, buses, and more buses Nagin... remember the plan?

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

(see Rightwing Nuthouses's Katrina Response Timeline for other information. Great resource)

And again, these are AP stories on the wires so they're getting picked up everywhere. So the influence of this misleading story is far reaching. Just to give you an idea of how far this story is spreading, a couple sample searches: Yahoo! News - Katrina forewarned, Yahoo! News - Katrina Warnings, Yahoo! News - Katrina warned.

 

First of all, thanks to The Political Teen for using my photoshop and linking to me, in addition to a couple others I've seen out there. The image is from my original post on the Nagin "Chocolate" city comments. Read up about the situation there.

First of all, as predicted, the misleadstream media largely gave him a pass on his "God" brought the hurricanes against New Orleans's black people, and that they'll rebuild the city a "chocolate" (read: black) city. Only a few reporters pursued it, compared to the week long "scandal" that was created over Pat Robertson's remarks that paled in comparison to the outrageous way Nagin invoked the will of God, plus Nagin through in a racial component.

Again I have to ask what would have happened if this were some white Republican mayor in a white city calling to rebuild it as a "Vanilla" city?

Now, assuming you're up to date... Let's see what Nagin has to say now. The Political Teen has the video, and you can also find it here via WSDU.com.

Basically the reporter asks for clarification on just the chocolate comments. And Nagin's response would be hilarious if the media hypocrisy surrounding this wasn't so serious. Nagin makes the worst attempt to spin, with no way to backtrack on those comments (transcript also via The Political Teen):

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: Do you know anything about chocolate?

REPORTER: I’m asking you.

NAGIN: I’m asking you.

NAGIN: Do you know anything chocolate? How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That’s the chocolate I’m talking about.

He rambles on a bit more trying to say that "chocolate" means "white and black" working together and "diversity", etc. I don't even think the most dishonest and/or stupid of liberals could possibly buy that. I wouldn't be shocked that some nutty lefties would defend his initial statements, but I don't think that anyone could say that "chocolate" is a statement of "diversity" and "white and black" working together.

He did apologize for the God comments today, but it wasn't like they were a slip or something that we should just let slide with a simple, "I'm sorry" from Nagin. They were a calculated series of comments in which he spoke of God's will, as it pertained to Katrina and black people.

Mayor "Buses" Nagin: ...That is why Nesquik will be the official sponsor of New Orleans.
President Bush: And they call me stupid?! Seriously, who is this guy?

More blogger reaction:
The Political Teen, Michelle Malkin, LaShawn Barber, Conservative Outpost, Everything I Know Is Wrong, Outside the Beltway, The Protestant Pub, Conservative Dialysis, The Florida Masochist, Tidbits and Treasures, I Am, Therefore I Think, The Nose On Your Face, The Moderate Voice, California Conservative, Sister Toldja, Brutally Honest, A Blog For All, Faith At The Front, Rhymes With Right, Texas Fred, Wagner Communications, MacsMind, Booker Rising, American Daughter, Sundries Shack, Right Track, The Jawa Report, Alarming News, MacStansbury, The Kellino Zone, Crab Key, Independent Conservative, Most Certainly Not, Stuck On Stupid, Blogs For Bush

 

Trying to get away from the blog for a while, but I've got to direct everyone to this post by The Political Teen. As always, he's got the video... In this case of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin insisting that New Orleans should and will be "chocolate" (read: black.) Of course saying such a thing is okay, partly because he's a Democrat, and partly because he's any race but white.

Think for a moment if a white mayor of some predominently white city said that, only using the adjective vanilla or something.... especially if he were a Republican. You know it would go as far as demands that the White House distance itself and make a public statment condeming the comments, etc. And don't accuse me of blowing my hypothetical situation out of proportion, you know it happens everytime any Christian or Republican makes an politically incorrect comment.

Anyway, someone should tell Nagin that he'll have some competition from the reigning "chocolate city", Hershey, PA. I actually went on the lame little tour of the Hershey's Chocolate World on a drive through PA one time years ago.

Anyway, who wants to bet the media totally ignores this and doesn't excoriate him the way they might if the candy simile were on the other.... uh.... sweet tooth? Whatever, you know what I'm saying.

UPDATE: As I was typing this, I quickly jumped over to Drudge who had a link to this AP story.

Excerpt:

"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.

"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves."
Nagin also promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina.

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans _ the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

As I was saying... Does anyone expect the media to come down on him, or even question him at all about this? It wasn't but a couple weeks ago that Pat Robertson was being condemned by, what seemed like, everyone on the planet. The White House, right to left bloggers, elite media, Israelis.... Everyone.

Please explain to me why Nagin's comments aren't the same if not worse than what Robertson said. In fact, Robertson didn't say "surely" this was "God" the way Nagin is. He basically said cautioned any Israeli PM, based on scripture (or at least his view of it), not to divide God's land, but barely even went as far as suggesting the possibility that Sharon's illness was linked to him doing that. Watch the video for yourself of what Robertson said. Remember how Bush had to publically distance himself and how it made world headlines for about a week? The Washington Post called Roberston and Iranian President Ahmadinejad a "duo", etc. Let's see what the press says about Nagin.

And by the way, who is this joker to be commenting about Iraq and "false pretenses"? Perhaps he should have his nose in business where it belongs... Maybe trying to figure out why he didn't use his own evacuation plan to use school buses to get people out of the city when thousands were readily available. For anyone who hasn't seen the pictures, a quick search turned up this Free Republic thread that has a number of them... not sure about the "famous" one we've all seen though.

More:
Michelle Malkin, The Political Teen, Publius Rendezvous, flyairdave, ArtieFishill Thoughts, Cutting Edge of Ecstasy, Slobokan, E-Furball, Right Voices, 1L Blawg, Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Riehl World View, Narcissistic Views, Independent Conservative, Pundit Guy