I think our Federal goverment is now a cluster- f*ck of incompetence and waste thanks primarily to uninformed people easily suckered by cynical campaigns of lies and smears, as so painfully demonstrated by how someone like Bush gets elected not just once but twice.
And having a bad President isn't all about just having bad foreign and domestic policies, the residual effect is that an awful lot of incompetent people are brought in and given important jobs that they have no competence in. How problems like hurricanes are planned for and dealt with afterwards noticeably show the consequences of having the wrong people at the wrong place at the wrong time. Call it trickle-down incompetence.
Oh really? Go take a gander here: and here
Although they seem to be a bit too pre-occupied with WMD attacks for some reason....
Declaring an area a disaster before it happens, but without any real help with the preparation is lazy-butt government at its worst. That's not planning any more than offering to bring your cousin to the hospital before he goes diving off a cliff into water you know is shallow.
I agree with you there.
Bad government is bad government and the further up it starts, the more widespead it speads out below.
Already answered elsewhere -- you just needed to get them away from the core of the storm. And if there really was no capability to do that and if the Superdome really was an official shelter of last resort, it should have been outfitted and maintained a such a long time ago: emergency generators with fuel, stockpiles of water, medical supplies, MRE's, cots, etc.
My core point is that if the Superdome was always a shelter of last resort, as seems to have been the case judging from Hurricane Ivan last year, then it should have been rated and prepared as such. This wasn't done, though, so sticking all those thousands of people in there like they did was an irresponsible gamble of the highest order. The feds generally have the best resources to at least advise on the best disaster planning and catch anything as stupid as the Superdome scheme, so where were they?
One very bad apple, especially at the top of the pile....
-BC
