Friday, August 26: GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA... GULF COAST STATES REQUEST TROOP ASSISTANCE FROM PENTAGON...
Saturday, August 27: 5AM — KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE... GOV. BLANCO ASKS BUSH TO DECLARE FEDERAL STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA... FEDERAL EMERGENCY DECLARED, DHS AND FEMA GIVEN FULL AUTHORITY TO RESPOND TO KATRINA
Sunday, August 28: 2AM – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE 7AM – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 5 HURRICANE... MORNING — LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE... MUCH MORE

"The National Medical Association today called the initial response to the Hurricane Katrina crisis a "national disgrace." NMA leaders called on President George Bush and Congress to immediately lay the ground-work for a thorough and independent investigation... "The initial federal response was stunningly neglectful," said Sandra L. Gadson, M.D., president of the National Medical Association. "The reckless handling of this human catastrophe, at the outset, showed that the racial disparities we see in healthcare also exist at other critical levels of the nation's health system, including disaster services.""

"At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials." She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown."He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said. "'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'" "Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added."

"A Louisiana congressman says more than 100 people died at a warehouse along a New Orleans dock. Congressman Charlie Melancon says they died as they waited for rescuers to take them to safety. And a state lawmaker says 30 people died at a flooded-out nursing home just outside New Orleans. Nita Hutter says the staff had left the residents behind in their beds. A rescue that was supposed to take place never materialized."

"The head of the US Senate budget committee said that the Hurricane Katrina relief operation is costing one billion dollars a day.Senator Thad Cochran said the administration had expected about 500 million dollars a day would be spent on the emergency operation but expenses had doubled as the relief effort gathers pace and the extent of the disaster becomes apparent.

"A horrific snapshot of the environmental apocalypse in New Orleans emerged Tuesday as engineers tackled a hellish brew of raw sewage, corpses, waste, oil slicks, toxins and wreckage. Officials warned some districts would be without drinking water for years, that the sewage system was in tatters and that they had no choice but to pump fetid floodwaters laced with poisons straight back into Lake Pontchartrain."

"Comments about Hurricane Katrina victims by the mother of President George Bush have fuelled the ire of some Americans, who see the Bush family as out-of-touch patricians..."Almost everyone I've talked to says: 'We're going to move to Houston,' " Mrs Bush said late on Monday after visiting evacuees at the Astrodome with her husband, former president George Bush. "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," she said. "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - this is working very well for them.""

"The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents. Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to ``convey a positive image'' about the government's response for victims."

"The federal government's costs related to Hurricane Katrina could easily approach $100 billion, many times as much as for any other natural disaster or the $21 billion allocated for New York City after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001... Administration officials said today that rescue and relief operations in Louisiana and Alabama are costing well over $500 million a day and are continuing to rise."

""DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security... The 40,000 estimate does "not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from ... mausoleums," Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday."

"For God's sake, are you blind?," a woman shouts at the head of the federal emergency management agency (FEMA), Michael Brown. "You're patting each other on the back, while people here are dying." The woman is not a victim of Hurricane Katrina. She is a reporter with US television network MSNBC who is so affected by the misery she has witnessed she can hold back no longer."

"I could not describe how bad the authorities were - taking photographs of us as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own personal photo albums, little snapshot photographs." He said at one point a group of girls was standing on the roof of the hotel lobby and called to passing rescuers for help. "They [the authorities] said to them 'well show us what you've got' - doing signs for them to lift their t-shirts up. The girls said no, and they said 'well fine', and motored off down the road in their motorboat. "That's the sort of help we had from the authorities," he said."

"Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world. The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see."

"In one example reported last week by The Associated Press, a police officer took a dog from one little boy waiting to get on a bus in New Orleans. ``Snowball! Snowball!'' the boy cried until he vomited. The policeman told a reporter he didn't know what would happen to the dog. At the hospital, a doctor euthanized some animals at the request of their owners, who feared they would be abandoned and starve to death. He set up a small gas chamber out of a plastic-wrapped dog kennel. ``The bigger dogs were fighting it. Fighting the gas. It took them longer. When I saw that, I said 'I can't do it,''' said Bennett's husband, Lorne."

"Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said Saturday."

"To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission"

"During the 1990s, Brown served as judges and stewards commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. His job was to ensure that horse-show judges followed the rules and to investigate allegations against those suspected of cheating. "I wouldn't have regarded his position in the horse industry as a platform to where he is now," said Tom Connelly, a former association president. The reporter refer to Brown's stormy years with the horses as a "rocky tenure." Some have claimed that he was fired from his post."

"I want to give you one last story and I’ll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” and he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you.” Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday… and she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night! [Sobbing] Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For god’s sakes, just shut up and send us somebody."

"If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival. Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water. They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this. Period. I mean, reporters and crews are getting to stranded people, and government and military agencies can't? Why doesn't CNN run FEMA? When I saw pictures of black people taking things from stores, my first thought was: "How are those Air Jordans necessary for your survival?" Then it hit me: People needed shoes and clothing. Some escaped the floods with just the clothing on their backs."

"The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them... We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore."

"'LET them know I'm a human being," implored Yolanda Harris. Standing amid urine-soaked trash on the floor of the convention center and wearing two left-foot shoes, Harris recounted the horror she had seen since this city was buried under billions of gallons of water. "I'm about to lose my mind, I saw so many dead people," she said."

"Instead, while a flood of sewage and corpses filled lawless New Orleans, Bush found himself in an awkward photo op in an airport hangar, accepting hosannas from government officials and a pair of Republican governors. "Thank you for all the help," Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said. "Your people have been great," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said. When it was his turn to talk, Bush congratulated the governors, then turned to FEMA Director Mike Brown and said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Addressing another member of his party, Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.), Bush promised: "Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house -- he lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.""

"This is a crisis in full spate - as shown by shocking images of bodies floating in putrid water and desperate refugees scrabbling to catch supplies dropped by helicopter. America is the richest and most powerful country on earth. But its citizens, begging for food, water and help, are suffering agonies more familiar from Sudan and Niger. The worst of the third world has come to the Big Easy."

"FEMA's chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department, which is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All that has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say. The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for seemingly mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

"The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans," said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross. "Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders."

"I'm not asking you why the city didn't have buses available. I'm asking you why you didn't have National Guards with trucks to get them out of there. Why you didn't have people with flatbed trailers if that's what you needed. Why you didn't simply get as many Greyhound buses from surrounding states as you could lay your hands on to get those people out of there. Why you haven't done it TO THIS DAY."

"The weasel Brown said the anticipated high death toll is "going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings" and get out. Such compassion. Such stupidity. Many of them had no means of escape. And so they stayed behind, trapped in a doomed city as the lights went out and the poisoned waters rose. As for Chertoff, if this is the best his department can do, the homeland is not very secure at all"

"Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This is what "starving the beast" looks like."

"The world's press reacted with disbelief on Friday to mayhem overrunning the hurricane disaster zone in the United States, describing the chaos as reminiscent of a Third World crisis and as a humiliating episode for the superpower. "Here is a superpower that can crush at will a tinpot dictatorship but then becomes so bogged down in the grisly aftermath of war that it finds itself unable to respond to anything like adequately to the plight of tens of thousands of its own citizens engulfed by a natural calamity," said Britain's Daily Mail newspaper."

"The offers of foreign aid keep pouring in: helicopters from Canada, cash from Japan, tents and military aircraft from France -- even oil from Venezuela, a political foe. At least 25 countries have offered humanitarian assistance to the United States to recover from Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in US history. But despite the increasingly desperate situation on the ground, the Bush administration has sent mixed signals about whether it will take these global well-wishers up on their offers."

"As New Orleans descended into anarchy, President Bush and his emergency-response team congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city. Television pictures told a different story. "What it reminded me of the other day is `Baghdad Bob' saying there are no Americans at the airport," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant in Washington."

"America, welcome to your planned future as a domestic, internal third world. Welcome to personal and public chronic indebtedness. Welcome to a bloated "defense" budget that cannot assist you, let alone "defend" you from a hurricane in the age of science. Welcome to the offensive budget that makes your country dependent on China for daily loans. Welcome to the multicolored ribbons in support of a war that kills your troops—your children, who are not here, not at home to help with their strength, their youth, their bravery, their idealism in pulling you out of the toxic flood waters. Welcome. Dr. Frankenstein's monster's vengeance is at our door."

"I've gotta tell you, I thought I'd seen it all, but just when you think you've seen it all, you go into another situation and you see something horrific. I've never seen anything in my life like this. ... I can't put it into words the amount of destruction that is in this city and how these people are coping. They are just left behind. There is nothing offered to them. No water, no ice, no C-rations, nothing, for the last four days. They were told to go to the convention center. They did, they've been behaving. It's unbelievable how organized they are, how supportive they are of each other. They have not started any mêlées, any riots ... they just want food and support. And what I saw there I've never seen in this country."

"This is the culture of life. The culture of life wants to save brain dead white women and unborn children. The culture of life wants you to watch endless non-news about the disappearance of one white teenager in Aruba. The culture of life wants you to support your nation as it kills tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in its Quixotic quest against a non-threat. The culture of life wants a zero-tolerance for looters policy to sound authoritative as babies die of dehydration. The culture of life expects you to take care of yourself, and if you can't, then it is your own fault for getting into that situation in the first place. Fuck off. You had your shot. Station in life, where you hang your hat, and whether you have the $40 at the end of the month to pay for the overpriced gasoline to get out of that home in time is all up to you."

"A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away. Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence."

"Yesterday, Rice went shopping at Ferragamo on Fifth Ave. According to the Web site www.Gawker.com, the 50-year-old bought "several thousand dollars' worth of shoes" at the pricey leather-goods boutique. A fellow shopper shouted, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" - presumably referring to Louisiana and Mississippi."

"One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

"In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war... In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent."