Can the left please start backing up its slurs of Republicans? I recall the Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin failing to implement the city's evacuation plan, which had been in place for decades in one form or another.  The city had purchased dozens of buses, which sat on a lot unused.  Yet Republican-administered Mississippi (under governor Haley Barbour) was able to get its act together and save thousands of lives.

How could the Republicans have engineered a disaster only in New Orleans?  Through intentional global warming?  The blowing up of levees? This is madness, plain and simple.

Insidious conspiracy theories against Republicans, without plausible evidence, are not fringe opinions on the left.  I recall seeing a poll that something like 33% of Democrats believe Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. I guess when you hate America and all that it stands for, then anything anti-American, and anything against those who defend America, is believable.

pointvcounterpoint.com

Mississippi recovered quite nicely, thank-you, with nary a whimper.  Gov. Haley Barbour will most certainly throw his hat in the ring in 2012 and I'm going to take a serious look at him.  Certainly worthy VP material as well.  "Recovering from Hurricane Katrina will be kids play compared to the clean-up job I now have to do with Hurricane Obama."   Not a quote, but a good campaign slogan.

It was a mercy killing.

Hurricane Katrina only damaged New Orleans. What has killed it is the people who live there. The Dirty Little Secret that no one wants to talk about is that the New Orleans government, in a rush to do anything to make things better, did what good little Liberals, who nothing about business, do. They decided to do a lot of knee-jerk changes to laws.

One of the laws they changed was zoning requirements for a lot of the residential areas. They allowed areas that had been zoned for single-family homes/residential to be rezoned as commercial with no limits. The result is that most of that property has been bought up by investors who plan to use the land to develop condos, office parks, resorts, or whatever they want. This is why years after the storm, you still see news crews wondering around empty houses. It's not because the people who lived in them can't move back... it's because these people sold off their property and moved, and the developers are waiting for further concessions from the government to pay for demolition of the old structures.

they walked out-over mountains and thru rivers-with just the clothes on their backs. it is 60+ miles up I10 to Baton Rouge. why were people walking around in that dirty water? walk out. better yet take  the bus when you were told. these folks were so used to be taken care of, they had no idea what to do. Get Out!!

Many years ago the Indians told the French-do not build here-it floods every now and then -its below sea level.

BHO-  THE PROGRESSIVE PIRATE

No offense to the folks at Daily Kos, but it looks like someone forgot to get their rabies shot.

"I support the President but not his policies" - Blonde

Excuse my rant, but this one is personal for me.  I'm tired of idiots on liberal blogs and their co-horts in the MSM crying about New Orleans being DEAD. 

I'm also very tired of the blame game.  NOBODY "killed" New Orleans; Katrina was an act of God.  And the levees that failed in 2005 were the same levees that existed under Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, and on and on.  If New Orleans had been hit with a category 4 or 5 hurricane in 1993, and if those same levees had failed, would the MSM blame Democrats for the failure? 

See, I live in NOLA suburbs.  May I will give you (and DailyKos readers -- if they can read) a first-hand report?

You may remember that the MSM focused on the 3 hardest-hit areas in the immediate aftermath of Katrina: the Lower 9th Ward, Lakeview, and St. Bernard Parish.  

Of those 3, only one seems to be lagging behind the others.  That being the Lower 9th Ward, where residents are used to having SOMEONE ELSE come to their rescue (and Brad Pitt is working as fast as he can for them).   The other two areas are doing just fine, thank you very much.  They aren't 100% back, but much further along than the Lower 9th.  

The area where I live was hit hard, but you probably didn't hear much about it on the MSM.  Residents had flood water in their homes -- not as the result of broken levees (we were on the side that didn't break) but rather water from the storm itself; many homes had as much as 6-10 feet of water and these residents lost EVERYTHING.  They lived in (toxic) FEMA trailers for a year or more, as supplies and contractors were very hard to come by in the early days of recovery, and waiting lists were long.  But these people in my mostly-conservative, very Republican area have been 100% recovered for about 2-3 years now.  There is virtually NO DIFFERENCE between what my area looked like in July 2005 and what it looks like today.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed Katrina we heard a lot of crying that FEMA response was very slow (mostly from the same people who want to put health care in the hands of the government NOW).  Yes, FEMA response WAS slow, but in the immediate aftermath, private companies were also struggling to provide goods and services for returning residents.  EVERYONE who was working and trying to help with the recovery was struggling, but many of us understood that a huge amount of patience would be required to return and rebuild.  But, as usual, those who depend on government for their very existance preferred to bitch about everything -- even as they were still living in HOTELS provided to them by FEMA. 

Excuse my rant, but this gets under my skin every time I hear it.

I am the mob.

"Democrats; Breeding voters like farm animals since 1962"

                 How many of these kossaks went to New Orleans to help out? I can name about 300 conservatives who went. It is easy to stop the arguing. Let's vote on it & be done.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Do any of them work for a living?  Are they all on the ACORN dole, living in their grandma's basement?

I love New Orleans. The state of LA invited some of us reporters to learn about the disappearing wetlands 2 yrs before Katrina. If these little slackers want to put in some sweat equity down there, I salute them! But you know that isn't what they intend...

bunch of kooks.  No need to keep proving it.  Jim Webster

Still, after all the money that has been poured into New Orleans and a little into surrounding parishes, little has changed. The dikes are still the same as they were pre-Katrina, houses are being rebuilt in the lowest areas, albeit on pilings, etc. Rebuilding should not have meant simply returning to a pre-Katrina situation, it should have meant making it less susceptible to the next hurricane.

Detroit; Philadelphia; Washington D.C.; New York (until Giuliani came along); Chicago; LA; Atlanta; and the list goes on!!!  

Liberalism: The haunting feeling that someone, somewhere, can help themselves.

I live, and have lived, on Galveston Island, Texas for many years.  We got HAMMERED by Hurricane Ike just under one year ago. 

We, specifically Bolivar Peninsula, got scoured off of the face of the Earth!  In total, we had less then 500 deaths.  We were off the news in TWO days!  Yet all we hear about is freakin' Katrina, 4 years after it happened. 

Are you folks aware of what the crime rate in Texas jumped to right after this? Hell, a bunch of 'em are still squatted here on the public dole. 

We (Galveston Island) in the meanwhile, in less than a year, have nearly re-built everything and we are thriving!!

I wonder why this is?  Provide your own answers.  As if you needed further proof of just how idiotic our federal government continues to be, there are about three dozen trailer houses just down the street from me with streets built, porches built, everything ready to go, and not a damn soul living in them!!!

Frankly, we had to get the federalis out of the GD way to get anything accomplished.  We killed New Orleans? Hardly.  Feel no pity for NOLA.  Pity got NOLA where there were and where they are today.  A good swift kick in the ass might help them.  But I can't think of much else that would.

Coming from someone who is ACTUALLY from there, we have been talking about a N.O. disaster since I was a child. I remember going to visit my grandmother who lived there after we moved to Baton Rouge. I remember my dad always saying as we drove into N.O. "New Orleans is shaped like a fish bowl. every year they raise the levies. All it's going to take is for a levy to break and the entire city will be under water. One day it will happen."

And low and behold it finally did! Katrina offered the right conditions! For anyone to blame this on any particluar political party is just down right ludicrous! The City of New Orleans is to blame for the disaster AT LEAST to the point that they never reinforced the levies when they had the chance to. Katrina was the main culprit. And who is going to argue with her?

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will
be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for
pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner."
— Malcolm Muggeridge