It was the aliens. They're watching us..

-----

Anyways.




How the effing heck are you supposed to go immediately right back in and give them what they need?

How...?



Fine. Caytexo, I blame you for the devestation that this hurricane has caused. I blame you for allowing rapes and murders to happen by gangs. I blame you for..ok...EVERYTHING.

There. I gots my scapegoat.

we have these things called planes.

That can't land on a city that's like..all water.

military air drop techniques are such that they can land a megaheavy load (4 humvees) very accuratley, i'd say they could hit a footballfield.

also, like what's happening now, helicopters can airlift supplies.

^ yeah.


One question.

What is the weather like after a hurricane?

i imagine calm... and then sometimes.. rain can come back quickly...

worst case scenario.. rain rain and more rain

im saying that bush is not at fault because he isn't. he didn't make katrina happen, but he is not makin the situation any better. he is takin way too long.

Ok.

For everyone who says that bush is taking too long, go sign up and volunteer your time to make it go faster.

if you dont want to do that, then realize you aren't helping the situation at all.

^

bush himself admitted his actions to prepare for katrina were inadequete, kristina.

when he should have been telling people to prepare for katrina (like he did for florida in charley), he was defending the iraqi war iin san deigo.

and all he could muster for katrina was to cut his vacation short 2 day, not even to tour the destroyed area (like he did for the political battleground state florida), but just to issue a statement about it.

he had at least 24 hours before the hurricane hit where he knew it was going to be significant. but apparently defending his choice for the iraqi war was more important- consequently, he was a couple of days late on rescue operations.

we're not saying he's taking too long... he just took too long to get started.



and the weather after a hurricane is calm, bright sunshine. it's really quite good weather to fly in and drop parachutes. the hurricane blows away all other storms.

If you have a problem with Bush defending his actions, then you should also have a problem with the people who tied him up.

And the rescue operations couldn't begin until the area was secure. Have you ever seen the movie Black Hawk Down? They gave food to the people, but then the people with guns came and stole all the food. It's not unlikely that a similar thing could have happened if the area wasn't secured before they dropped food.

Hum. Yes, people were shooting at the helicopters to get food for themselves..but oh wow, we seem to be able to get through that when we give food to other countries..but not our own?

Anyway, I believe I might've already said this, but it could've been in French class too..

It had already been decided that the Superdome would be a holding place for those that had not evacuated yet. Perhaps they could have thought to have emergency food and water held there for those who came..just in case?

The weather wasn't too bad of a factor. Army planes have flown in much worse than a little rain. The hurricane ended Monday morning and it took .. 5 days to get help to the people dying from starvation in the Superdome? The rain was not that bad that it would take 5 days to get there by plane. Also, they have planes that land on water. The bottom of the plane has two landing "helpers", similar to the bottom of a boat.

your acting like people dont want to help. i wish i could go over and help. i wish i could bring families into my house. if i could help i would. but everybody knows that it should not be taking more than a week to get all the people out of new orleans. its just taking way too lonG!!

Oh, and just..fyi. My family sent clothes down there that we had no use for and signed our house up to house anyone who needed somewhere to stay. I've donated money at my school too. So..I am helping.

Just in case anyone wanted to call me out on that..don't.

^ I did the donating stuff too. I'm helping like that.


Jellybeans- I'm not saying that. I'm saying that i'm sick and tired of random people bitching about it. Celebrities are doing that and just yadda yadda yadda. It really doesn't help.



That is kinda what I was thinking...I just didn't know how to put it into words.




Trueeeee....I was wondering that.

No one was shooting at us during the tsunami relief efforts to my best knowledge (except for some natives who shot arrows at our aircraft, but that doesn't really count).

What if the Superdome collapsed during the hurricane? What if toxic water got in? Bye bye food. They're going to tear it down since it's been so heavily damaged. Having food outside of the danger zone means that it won't be destroyed by the danger.

Yes, they do have amphibious aircraft, but to my best knowledge, there aren't aircraft that can carry large volumes of supplies. The army used to have "flying-boats" and were even testing jet powered planes that could land on water, but aircraft carriers were a more practical solution.

[edit]

The plane I was thinking of, the Catalina, wasn't even a cargo aircraft. It was an anti-submarine aircraft, so it would not be specialized for this type of mission.

What if it did?

You would think if we give millions of dollars worth of food and water to other countries every day, we could spare at least SOME emergency food and water to at least get these people through a day or two until more help got there. If it did get washed away...it gets washed away. Certainly we could spare some bags of rice in exchange for 30,000 people's lives.

Addressing the water plane issue...obviously, if people can stay in the Superdome for 5 days without drowning, I think the water around these people was low enough to get things there a BIT sooner than what happened. The landing-on-water planes should have been used to at least keep those who needed medication alive..surely it can move some medicine. Medicine doesn't weigh that much.

Directly, no. Weather was.

Indirectly, yes. The Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama National Guards and state militias were deployed in Iraq so there was no way to quickly and efficiently respond to the hurricane (usually, state militia would be responsible for disaster relief). The Constitution says that the Federal Government may only call upon state militias (such as the National Guard) to crush insurrections and repel invasions. In other words, the National Guards have no Constitutional authority to be operating outside of the US's borders. Had they stayed in the US like they should have, they would have been able to respond much quicker and less expensively to the hurricane.

But since the state militias were already in Iraq, Bush has no further blame beyond this. It's totally unrealistic to expect Federal forces to be able to deliver food and supplies halfway across the country, into what is basically a warzone, in a timely manner. Transporting the planes and helicopters would have required supplying the planes in the first place, which would have involved land transport, and furthermore, just dropping the supplies in the middle of the City would have done little because of the looting and lack of order. It's also unrealistic to expect that a weakened state militia would have been able to handle the crisis by itself.

Furthermore, the levees should have been maintained by insurance companies, not the Army Corps of Engineers. Insurance companies have an incentive to take every possible precaution, since otherwise they will be paying through the nose, whereas the government does not, since they can just tax their way out.

National Guard units may be called to supplement regular armed forces by presidential order, if required, which can include going abroad. I doubt the Constitution has anything to say on the matter, since the National Guard wasn't formed until 1903, and to my knowledge, no amendments have been made to the Constitution regarding the National Guard.

The point, of course, still stands that the intent of the National Guard is to help out at home, and since the National Guard is not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, they are able to act as law enforcement at home, as well as help out with disaster relief--both of which were vital missions in New Orleans. It certainly would have helped to have had more units at home, although I believe there were some Louisiana and Mississippi units at home (but, of course, not all).

Also..France has offered 50,000 of their equal to a National Guard to come here and help us out, as well as many other countries (I only know France because we discussed it today in class), however, Bush has said on TV that we are doing fine on our own without help from other countries...

Certainly, that's not the case. Why are we not accepting help from other countries when OBVIOUSLY, we need it?

We had the food and water. Just no means of giving it to them. And also, leaving the food there is not a good plan. You need people to distribute the food. Otherwise, you'll have the scenario I mentioned earlier, where people would fight over the food.

You have to understand the complexity of logistics and supplying. It's not as simple as you may think it is. Sometimes medicine has to be kept cold, and small passenger planes don't have the space for heavy refridgeration equipment. I'll state again, vehicles were being fired on. Medical helicopters that tried to bring medicine/evacuate people tried to land on helipads, but armed gunmen were waiting to hijack the helicopters. You don't want to put rescuers/relief workers in any more danger than they have to.

And do you have an article on this 50,000 French soldier thing?

As for the talk about National Guards, I do believe that the National Guard should remain on American soil. However, I also think that we shoudn't fight wars without enough manpower. In hindsight, it looks like a bad idea, but it made sense to me when the decision was made.

You wanna know what really pisses me off?

You probably dont care, but bah, it's relevant.

My Spanish Teacher, who isn't even FROM THIS COUNTRY, insisted on going on a 30 minute rant about how our goverment is inept..yadda yadda..


OH! And she says that France and the US are good buddies.


oh. my. god.

As countries, the US and France are buddies, much more buddy-buddy than other countries. Diplomatically, we're bestest buds.

And no, James, I don't; I left it at school, but I'll bring it home tomorrow and take a picture of it for you. (It's on a print-out..in French. If you can read French.....otherwise, it's really no use unless I roughly translate it...)

i can read french well. i'll help translate. if not, there's always dictionary.com tranlations. idioms are beyond me though
maybe sandra could help?

it's a generally known fact that if the government doesn't have aid arriving within 72 hours, people will take matters into thier own hands.

you get aid to them in the first 72 hours and there is no mob.

we're not talking about somolia. this is america. this is where the trillions of dollars the patriot act used insures that the area is secure- at least, isn't that what bush told us? US troops shouldn't have to 'secure' any area.

"Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"FEMA's top three leaders--Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler--arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative." [1]