Thanks for this new section!!!!!!!

[troutfarm]

If you don't like politics or Michael Moore then no need to read the following letter from Moore to Bush but if you like Michael Moore or don't mind reading a different view from your own read on....

trout

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the d**e?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
[e-mail]
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

[cinderella]

who is Michael Moore for the benefit of us non americans? I think Mr Bush may have lost the black vote after this.
I watched some stuff on New Orleans on TV today, mainly about helpless babies and i wept. rescue should have been quicker, i agree with that.

[sbgimp]

Trout ... very cool beans ... sbgimp

[troutfarm]

Michael Moore is a movie maker and activist. He made the movie called 9~11 and has done others as well.

Bush never did have the black vote. In Florida in 2000 Black voters were given a hard time when they went to the voting polls. Jeb Bush is the governor in that state ~ what a surprise........

The rescue efforts continue to be bad. People are dying in their bed in hospices waiting for help. I have a friend worried that his 90 year old Aunt who raised him is dead in New Orleans... he thinks her house flooded. Castro made sure all his people got out of a hurrican's path in Cuba along with their pets but in the United States of America we can't do it and we had warning..... it is a shame and they are not letting people take their pets with them. Congress knew the levees needed fixing... we can spend money on a war for oil but not to keep New Orleans from flooding.

trout

[justcajun]

GoOOOOOOOOOOO Michael. I couldn't of said it better myself. We need to get Bush's ass out of the White House before we have any more tragedies. This is my home state and I couldn't have said it better. May God send blessing and help for my people.

Love and Hugs
Marla

[Kimberanne]

You are welcome!

[steffy1usa]

I was born and raised in La , so it hit home so to speak, I too was appalled by the lack of attention giving to this in the beginning..

[justcajun]

Steffy what part of Louisiana are you from? I am from Lafayette area Born in Scott, lived in Carencro from 12 yrs old and on. Moved to Missouri 9 yrs ago .

Love and Hugs
Marla

[steffy1usa]

Coushatta , La ( hour south of Shreveport) .. lived there most of my life, lived in Eunice for a little while .. have family all over though.. moved to Texas several years ago, still have family there ...although i live in Texas, I can look back and think La was a wonderful place to grow up and I do miss it.. still love gumbo

[justcajun]

Ahh near the casino. Been there a couple of times. I have family all over as well. Thank God that none of them were hurt from all this disaster!!! What part of Tx? My sis lives in Anahuac. Near Winnie. Yes the food, music and good ole cajun's can't get no better than that. I sure miss it each and every day and hate that I had to move away because of no jobs. I cook all the foods had a great teacher (Mom) Just makes it a bit hard to cook all the stuff becuase can't find the smoked sausage here in Missouri or fresh seafood. When I do go home I load up major!! LOL last time I flew home I was over weight on my bags and it cost me $40 Extra dollars for being so heavy LOL! Oh my family name is Thomas....Married to a Trahan.

[steffy1usa]

oh wow , no fresh seafood , and sausage, thats a crime !! lol
I knew some Thomas' is winsboro , one in coushatta.. my madien name is gates.. ive been married but took back my last name in the divorce , if anything i got out of it was my last name back , lol

[steffy1usa]

This is another view..



It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

[troutfarm]

Who wrote this steffy?

I must say I find this letter tasteless and shocking along with the term "welfare parasites". I also find it shocking that whoever wrote this looks to Fox for "Real News".

The author needs to remove his bed sheet from his head and stop burning crosses on people's lawns.

Just wondering what other people think aobut this?

trout

[steffy1usa]

that was written by robert tracinski , I can only think from his letter he might be in the chicago area? im not sure.. i hadn't heard they had just let the prisoners out,, could that be true? that would be horriable if that was the case , no wonder the rapes and beatings, etc..I do know that my ex sweeties unit was delayed going in untill the other troops went in and took control , his unit is logistics , getting the equipment ect ready and move in.. the supplies were delayed because they were being shot at, i guess that would be why .. another friend of mine was delayed going in , his job is making sure enough man power is there to rescue people. because they were being shot at. I didn't post this to ruffle any feathers, nor is it my personal opinion that these people are parasites. I do know though , because this is my home state, there isn't alot there as far as work , I left Louisiana myself because I could not get a good job. It is very poor, large amounts of people on welfare, simply because of the lack of good jobs, I don't per say agree its because they are lazy.. but i do belive the state government failed these people. Now that they have a new start, I pray they can find a job , and they can start fresh where there are more oppertunites for them, bless their hearts , I hope they can find the blessings in this horriable tragedy.

[astrologydetective]

These are people that were already poor that have had what little they had totally destroyed, left to suffer under miserable conditions during/after the hurricane and are now being dragged through the mud by elements in the media and being blamed for their poverty. It is so sad - talk about kicking someone when they're down, nobody deserves that...

I mean I wonder how a bunch of 20,000 "well off" people would do if they were living in excrement for 5 days with no food or water or relief in site - I find it hard to believe things would not degenerate. Any one read Lord of the Flies back in middle school - and those were private school kids ; )

For every looter and shooter, how many thousands of normal people were there? How is someone without a car, no public transport available, and children (or no children) supposed to evacuate? Walk - in a hurricane warning? How far could their feet possibly take them? SInce when did poverty become a crime of the individual instead of sign of an uncaring society? This hurricane is unleashing alot more than just damned up water - its like a whole load of suppressed social and environmental issues that we have been ignoring since the 1970s.

Also sad is the repeated use of the term "refugee" - it's subtle , but it creates this us/them mentality. These people are americans, and you can't technically be a refugee in your own country, I dont ever recall this term being used in other tragedies on our soil.

I did wonder about the prisons and what was done, and it is sad if these are the ones causing all that crime. Thanks for sharing your experience in the region steffy.