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…went in dumb, come out dumb too.” LSU is doing its best to make Randy Newman right about this, with a remarkably ham-handed firing to shut up one of its most distinguished faculty (more here). Apparently, like so much of Louisiana, they would rather have a nice steady flow of federal money coming [...]
Archive for the ‘Katrina’ Category
April 19th, 2009
September 1st, 2008
Category: Katrina
We got away with it: this time. But the levees aren’t going to be back in shape for another three years. Dumb luck. Sheer dumb luck.
November 14th, 2007
Here’s a Cat4 cyclone (called hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico) drawing a bead on Kolkata and Bangla Desh. Satellite photo here. It reminds me of the days before Katrina, with some interesting differences:
(1) The people in the path of Sidr are poor as churchmice.
(2) They live in one of [...]
October 21st, 2007
Category: Katrina
Just as the White House planned, a Republican is now Governor of Louisiana. And none of the people who died in the process was a significant Republican contributor. Mission accomplished!
January 20th, 2007
Category: Katrina
Shortly after Katrina, this blog had a discussion of whether pre-hurricane New Orleans could recover, and whether it should be encouraged to do so. On the whole, we said no, and no. Here’s some indication that we were right, and here’s some more.
June 9th, 2006
Category: GWB, the Beloved Leader, Katrina
If GWB said that he’d rather have Heckuva Job Brownie criticized than take the criticism himself, that was a vulgar thing to say, though not an unreasonable thing to think. But to have an anonymous spokesgeek half-deny it is beneath contempt.
March 3rd, 2006
Category: Katrina
No, no one “anticipated” a levee breach, if “anticipated” means “thought it was more likely than not.” But a competent chief executive, having been told that the levees might be topped, would have asked what the risk was that they would fail entirely. And an honest human being wouldn’t have pretended, afterwards, that the failure to plan for the worst wasn’t ultimately his fault.
January 24th, 2006
Category: GWB, the Beloved Leader, Katrina
If the Congress won’t do its job, the voters will have to do theirs.
January 23rd, 2006
Category: Katrina
The White House was warned that Katrina might breach the levees. The President stayed at the ranch, then said “no one anticipated the breach of the levees.”
September 26th, 2005
Category: Katrina
Here’s new evidence of the complete moral breakdown of the New Orleans underclass. While everyone else was working day and night to construct a really good story of raping, killing, and looting, the undisciplined savages in the superdome and elsewhere apparently ignored the roles assigned to them by Fox News (and their own police chief), [...]
