Gov. Blanco still wants 1question answered: Where were the 500 FEMA buses?

[Sapphire Blue]

Blanco says feds pledged buses

By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
[e-mail]
Capitol news bureau

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, Gov. Kathleen Blanco still wants one question answered.
Where were the buses?

Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes.

On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.

Even after levees broke and residents were crowding the Louisiana Superdome, then-FEMA Director Mike Brown was bent on using his own buses to evacuate New Orleans, Blanco said.

Continued @ http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/091805/new_blanco001.shtml

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. More evidence HS/FEMA deliberately withheld aid

and to add insult to injury, their response has been to blame the victims.

[Sapphire Blue]

8. ... and the mayor & governor.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. I consider the mayor and governor

to both be victims of these thugs.

The Swift Boating of Nagin and Blanco is sickening.

[Sapphire Blue]

13. They are, and it is.

[Quixote1818]

2. How come Dems were so slow to answer the Right on the bus question?

We are just learning this now? This should have been brought up two weeks ago to shut Sean Hannity up!

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. I think the people who could respond directly

have been a little too busy to defend themselves the last two weeks.

Now that the dust is settling and law and order has been restored, the local and state leaders can begin to tell their story.

Then all the lies and blaming this administration has spewed through this whole thing will look even uglier.

[Sapphire Blue]

10. Why isn't Hannity asking about the 500 buses promised by FEMA???

[Nothing Without Hope]

22. Hannity and O'Rielly are showing their deep corruption now. Some other

seeming GOP mouthpieces on TV news have actually been telling some truth, but Hannity and O'Reilly are still only full of lies and WH propaganda. The difference is clear between the two kinds of reporters/commentators - those who are reporting of at least some facts about Katrina aftermath and showing what appears to be some true outrage vs. the continuing total lack of integrity in Hannity and O'Rielly. I am hoping that they lose more of their audience as a result. They are monsters.

[Sapphire Blue]

24. I wasn't expecting an answer, just expressing my disgust w/his BS.

In regard to the media, here's an excerpt from an excellent report, authored by Walter M. Brasch, that I posted in another thread ("Unacceptable": The Federal Response to Katrina: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4813353)...

The Founding Fathers had hoped the media would be watchdogs upon government, but during Bush’s first term, the establishment mass media were more like lapdogs. Most of the media, perhaps sensitive to comments that they were biased against Bush during the campaign, charges that ran throughout conservative radio talk shows and right-wing blogs, gave the new president a “honeymoon.” And then came 9/11. The mass media, like most Americans, stood beside their president. Soon, they were afraid to question his policies and his decisions, even the USA PATRIOT Act that the Bush Administration rammed down a fearful nation; the people seemed to willingly give up their civil liberties in order to get what they believed was protection. Those who protested the Bush Administration actions were often branded un-American or unpatriotic. As Bush began to shove the United States into an invasion of Iraq, the media focused primarily upon what the Administration was saying, and gave little airtime or print coverage -- or credence -- to the growing anti-war movement. As the United States went into Iraq, the media made a few noises but accepted the Administration’s rules that embedded journalists with specific units. To most, it seemed as if there was greater coverage; the reality was that there was greater manipulation, with reporters so focused upon the actions of the specific unit which they were assigned, and aware of the bundle of rules of what and how to report, they didn’t question the greater issues. Well after the March 2003 invasion, as evidence mounted about the lack of evidence to justify the war, and as the Administration’s statements and plans for the post-war planning were being proven wrong almost every day, the New York Times and Washington Post printed apologies for failing to question the President and his senior staff more closely about the war and its consequences. But, still, the media primarily fell within the web spun by Karl Rove and senior Bush Administration officials who were far better at controlling and manipulating the media and public opinion than the media were at aggressively challenging authority. For the most part, the media practiced stenographic journalism, recording and transmitting what was fed to them. This failure to aggressively challenge policies and practices allowed the deterioration in FEMA to go unnoticed by most of the country.

Emboldened by a nation that had begun questioning Bush’s policies, the media rose to the level the Founding Fathers demanded. With the federal government slow to react, the media moved into the Gulf Coast and began giving the nation unparalleled coverage of the disaster, free from manipulation, not forced to accept the role of being “embeds”. On the cable news channels, on TV network news, and on the radio, the people were getting almost unfiltered live coverage of Katrina’s destruction of property and lives, of hundreds of thousands of people helping each other, sacrificing for each other, of slivers of hope, of desperate people sometimes being forced to do desperate things, and of criminals who remained in the city to prey upon the victims and to shoot at rescue helicopters and patrolling soldiers. In their newspapers and news magazines, for one of the few times during the past four years, the people were getting far greater in-depth coverage about issues that mattered to them than earlier in the year when the trial of Michael Jackson, the divorce of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston, and the marriage of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner seemed to dominate the headlines. It didn’t take long for the nation and the media to realize that the federal government was displaying not courage in the face of disaster, but ineptness.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Brasch0912.htm

[Seansky]

4. that still shocks me...it makes no sense.

[oasis]

5. Sapphire Blue, I believe you can get better participation on this thread

you would change the title to include Blanco. Otherwise many will think the thread is about Mayor Nagin and the "underwater buses".

Just sayin' :hi:

[Sapphire Blue]

7. Done... thanks!

:hi:

[oasis]

17. Sunday night after dinner kick

[TripleD]

6. Wow! FEMA also sabotaged Blanco's evacuation efforts

"I had security in the knowledge that there were 500 buses," she said. "Mike had emphasized the buses to me personally. That was not my first concern until I realized that they were not there."

Meanwhile, the state continued to send school buses into the affected areas.

One of Blanco's aides, Leonard Kleinpeter, said FEMA told him at one point that the state could stop sending school buses because the agency was going to bring in helicopters and use them instead of the commercial buses that still weren't there.

Blanco told Kleinpeter to ignore those instructions.

"She said, 'I'll be damned. You keep loading the wagons on the school buses,'" Kleinpeter said.

Kleinpeter said he now wonders if FEMA temporarily halted its buses because the agency thought helicopters would work better.

[bloom]

14. It's sickening

Someone on DU suggested I was ignorant for not expecting that our gov't would do this. How could anyone expect that they could be so horrible? It is so over the top. Not merely incompetence, or indifference - but the malicious acts that caused deaths - the turning back of trucks with water - the doctor who was told to stop in the middle of reviving someone - saying they sending buses when there weren't. I so hope someone (a lot of people) goes to jail.


From the article:

"She said she takes responsibility "for assuming that help was on the way" when it wasn't."

[in_cog_ni_to]

9. "Now is not the time to play the blame game."

"Now is not the time to point fingers." Blame game. Blame game. Blame Game. Blame game. The repukes have spewed that meme for weeks! NOW we see WHY. They're guilty as sin. THEY are to blame and they know it. Why else would the idiot volunteer to investigate himself? :eyes:

[Sapphire Blue]

11. It's not a game... it's DEADLY serious.

We've seen one example after another of their responsibility for the horrors in the Katrina aftermath... from slashing FEMA funding for the levee to preventing rescue efforts. Yes, they're guilty as sin... and their sin is a crime against humanity.

[justgamma]

15. Now is the time for the blame game!!

Do the idiots in the government realize that another storm could hit sometime soon? We need answers now! not in 5 years when NO gets rebuilt.
We have to make sure this never happens again.

[oasis]

16. Blanco spoke to WH Chief of Staff, Andy Card about the situation. The

Feds were obviously dragging their feet. I don't believe Bush didn't know that this sluggish response to the disaster was the order of the day.

No independent commission. :eyes:

[Nothing Without Hope]

23. Note that she TRIED TO TALK TO BUSH BUT COULD NOT REACH HIM

That's the same thing that happened when Nagin was desperately trying to get the promised helicopters to seal the levee breach that drowned New Orleans. He tried to reach Bush to overrule whatever was preventing the helicopters which could move the sandbags from coming. He COULD NOT REACH BUSH. The Black Hawk helicopters that were promised for repairing the breach did not come until AFTER the city was drowned. (After all, the levee had to be repaired to drain the city for "reconstruction" and redevelopment, which will be - indeed, already IS, very, very profitable for the GOP cronies.)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4523783
thread title: CNN/New Orleans:"Mayor blasts failure to patch levee breeches" and that's {only the beginning}

Anybody STILL think all of this was accidental or just incompetence? Earlier in this tragedy DU threads were disappeared for even suggesting the possibility of LIHOP despite the evidence. I hope that situation has changed.

[oasis]

27. Thanks for the link and the link series therein.

:thumbsup:

[converted_democrat]

18. .....

[oasis]

19. kick

[Nothing Without Hope]

20. All Dem spokespeople need to see this and remember it. NO MORE SPIN!!

I was very disappointed by one of Wolf Blitzer's interviews of Howard Dean - The Beard put up that over-familiar photo of the New Orleans school busses and demanded to know why Nagin hadn't used them. This was and is, of course, the GOP spin to "prove" local and state officials were responsible for people not getting out of New Orleans.

Howard Dean totally bungled the answer, thus allowing Blitzer's "proof" to stand. That school bus photo had been used so often, that argument had been used so often - why aren't the Dem spokespeople better prepared to debut these lies and the spin? It seemed like Howard Dean went out there cold, totally unprepared for what was already standard GOP spin and trick question. The result was to give the impression that he didn't know what was going on and that Blitzer's photo of the school busses, for example, "proved" that local rather than national authorities were responsible.

The story in this opening post rebuts the school bus "proof." Unfortunately, the people who watched Blitzer win that argument for lack of prepared rebuttal don't know about this.

Recommended. This story needs to be publicized.

[Nothing Without Hope]

21. Note that Blanco TRIED TO TALK TO BUSH ABOUT THE BUSSES BUT COULDN'T

REACH HIM:

On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.

[jarnocan]

25. this is so important

Because on some discussion boards this seems to be the ONE thing they WAVE about the MOST to "prove" their point.
The hypocrisy of the BU**SH**INc. saying NOT ot play the blame game while not just blaming folks but using LIES to do so is so sickening.

Then this Bush BU**SH** sort of accepting responsibility "as far as the feds'" whatever.. crap was just a desperate attempt to squelch the outcry for an independent commission.
an initiative to sign as well. sounds better than BU**SH**'s plans to let Haliburton and etc. rebuild and pay lower wages.

http://ga3.org/campaign/new_america please see and sign if you like
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2099004#2099054 from this discussion -just in case ya'll missed it.
http://jarnocan.blogspot.com No BU**SH**zone

[The Backlash Cometh]

26. OH, FEMA was PRAYING for air conditioned buses?

[MsUnderstood]

28. If the school bus thing is right

then I'm really annoyed cause the news splayed images of school buses under 10 feet of water and asked the mayor "why didn't you use those?" and he had no answer.

So fema refuses help from the state then pushed the blame on the mayor for not evacuating using the same buses?

[feminazi]

29. this quote struck me, too

"....President George W. Bush met with Blanco on Air Force One and asked her for control of the troops that were finally pouring into the state. Blanco asked if Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour would be under the same regime. The answer was "No."

why was blanco asked to cede control of the troops, but barbour wasn't? this is the first indication i've seen that blanco actually asked this question.

[cornermouse]

30. On NPR while coming home this afternoon.

FEMA was confiscating the rescue buses according to the interview.

[renate]

31. OMG, confiscating?

What a 1) waste of their time when they should have been doing something constructive, and 2) horrible and pointless thing to do.

[Nothing Without Hope]

32. kick for thiis important story n/t