Echo Chamber

At times, I can do nothing better than 'borrow' from other blogs. Today, Ghost Town Orange is an echo chamber:

I'm just going to take this wholesale from a comment below, because I wholeheartedly (and broken heartedly) agree with it:

I wanted to post the following from something I read at DailyKos. The question was, "why did BushCo fumble this so badly?"

The answer from one tcorse:

They deny that we are a community, asserting that we are only a group of competing individuals. They deny that we are hurt or helped by being a member of a community, and thus owe nothing and can expect nothing from that community. They will not invest in the future of the community, in the infrastructure that benefits us all, because to do so would be to admit that we are not all self-made men, and that their own personal wealth is not strictly their own doing. To acknowledge such would place upon them an ethical obligation to share their good fortune, and this they are loath to do. They can not grasp that it is cheaper to prepare for disaster than clean up after, for to do so would be to recognize their own limitations, and to ask them to sacrifice today for a better, shared future for the community they deny exists.

Their incompetence is ideological. We can not expect better. They will not learn from this. Our only hope is to oust them, else this disaster will be repeated - again, and again, and again.

So now we have people being sent to get aid from churches as the ultimate "you're on your own" to the survivors. Now, good people will step up as communities, but, ironically, it signals the death of national community, the fate of the idea of "the common good."

There is nothing but sorrow...
--Diogenes

--rmj

source: Adventus [Read Adventus to learn about the sheer magnitude of the ongoing effort needed to care for refugees from the hurricane.]

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

What exactly has the so-called Department of Homeland Security been up to?

Virtually any terrorist attack with Weapons of Mass Destruction (TM) on a major American city would create thousands of refugees. Why in bloody hell has there been no planning for a refugee crisis? One thing we all know now for certain -- the Bush Administration had no plans to protect the American people in case of a terrorist attack. May every incompetent government official and clueless right-wing pundit rot in hell.

It's amazing that Mr. Bush feels no shame for the lousy job he has done.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Callous incompetence

Why city's defences were down by John Vidal and Duncan Campbell, UK Guardian. An excerpt:

Lloyd Dumas, professor of political economy and economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, criticised the government's failure to oversee a more efficient evacuation. "It's remarkable that with the massive restructuring of the federal government that took place with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, they don't have more well thought-out plans to evacuate a city like New Orleans," he said.

"An emphasis should be placed on plans that have multiple purposes, like evacuation plans for a city like New Orleans that can of course be useful in the event of a terrorist attack but also in the event of a natural disaster like this one ... There were plans during the cold war to evacuate major cities in a few days."

Professor Dumas added that not enough provision seemed to have been made for poor people. "There doesn't seem to have been much attention paid to people who didn't have private automobiles," he said. "I didn't hear anything about school buses or city buses being used to aim people out of town." He said that there appeared to be little forward planning to cater to those on low incomes who would be unable to return to their homes for up to two months but who would not have the money to pay for that time in a hotel. "The Department of Homeland Security says on its website that it deals with natural disasters," he said. "They don't seem to have done a very good job. There doesn't seem to have been any long-term planning."

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Worst President of the United States -- ever

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

--President Bush

Why did anyone vote for this idiot?

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988