The Democrat smear machine is still at full tilt with TPM saying “gotcha!” to a Bobby Jindal statement about Katrina. The Jindal statement: (h/t Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher and Hot Air)

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

What’s the gotcha from TPM? That the visit didn’t occur the day after Katrina but a few days after Katrina.

Yup, some gotcha.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

Pathetic.

Oh, here is the Sheriff in his own words describing the help Jindal gave to him:

I can tell you first hand that with Hurricane Katrina, the day after, Bobby was in my office and said “what do you need?” And it wasn’t phone calls, he was in my office.”

Pathetic libs….just pathetic.

UPDATE

Col. John Fortunato, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said Jindal appeared at the sheriff’s offices on the east and west banks several times in the days after the storm. The boat rescue holdup by federal response officials did occur initially as citizens brought their watercraft to a staging area in Jefferson Parish, he said. But the problem was resolved and the great majority of boats were deployed to the flooded areas of New Orleans later that day.

Teepell, who after the storm drove with Jindal to visit various sheriffs’ offices in his district, said he recalled being in Lee’s office in west Jefferson on several occasions in the days after the storm. Teepell said he remembers the phone conversation but did not know who was talking to Lee.

Lee was recounting the boat rescue story to the caller on the line, Teepell said. The phone call was not taking place while the boats were attempting the rescue operation, but some days afterward, Teepell said.

In wake of Hurricane Katrina (which “hated” white people more, or in Kanye’s language, “George Bush hates white people”), let’s revisit the ever-so-politically astute and eloquent Kanye West:
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So after running this bogus Katrina story for a week the AP decides to retract it on Friday night?

In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn’t until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.

Notice how they are still playing word games? Overrun is not the same as overtop, as a reader of Ed Morrissey’s points out:

They are replacing the verb “breach” with the verb “overrun” which means: 1 a (1) : to defeat utterly and occupy the positions of : OVERWHELM, OVERPOWER, CRUSH (2) : to invade and occupy or ravage b obsolete : to run over destructively or harmfully : run down c : to spread or swarm over The word used in all of the briefings was “overtop” or “top” as a diminutive form thereof. Overtop means. 1 : to rise above the top of : exceed in height : tower aboveDefinitions are Merriam Webster Unabridged. They are still using misleading language and really should be renamed, Agitprop Pravda.

Either way you look at this thing any half competent editor would have realized after watching the tape that this story was a hit piece. But they still decided to run with it. I sure don’t smell coincidence here anymore, this was obviously done at the behest of the Democratic party. How could the AP have gone so far into the depths of depravity that they are now a shill for the left?

Mark Noonan at Blogs For Bush brings up the same point:

What we have here is a very strange confluence of events: this story started just as Mardis Gras brought New Orleans back into the public eye. Normally, the story would be about how New Orleans is recovering – but the story instead was a bogus re-write of videos that the Administration had long ago provided to the MSM. I smell a rat here – a DemocRAT, if you ask me. This is simply too beneficial for the Democrats for it to be coincidence – there could very well be collusion, and that would make what the AP did a de-facto campaign contribution to the Democratic Party. I believe that such a donation – which would have to be figured as a value of tens of millions of dollars – would be illegal under our campaign finance laws.

We should have a full hearing in Congress, with the AP and the DNC forced to turn over all documents which may in any way be related to Katrina from the day it went ashore to the day this AP story ran last week. We need to get to the bottom of this, lest the MSM – by getting away with this – merely become an adjunct of the DNC dressed up as an independent media.

You think Keith Olbermann will issue a retraction?

On the Wednesday March 1 Countdown, Olbermann teased the show: “Video of the government-wide Katrina briefing, the one from August 28th, the day before the hurricane hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the one in which the President is warned that the levees could be breached four days before he told the American public no one could have anticipated that the levees could be breached.”

Olbermann opened the show trumpeting the fresh evidence the Countdown host believed contradicted Bush’s public statements: “Good evening. Six months to the day after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, half a year in which the White House has claimed repeatedly that no one could have anticipated how bad it would be, a wealth of evidence, much of it caught on tape, now revealing that President Bush was indeed fully briefed about the storm’s potential and all of the damage it might do.”

After hearkening back to the “Nixon tapes,” dubbing these the “Bush tapes,” Olbermann continued: “The tapes revealing that Mr. Bush and his Homeland Security secretary were warned in no uncertain terms before Katrina hit shore that the storm could breach levees, could risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome, could overwhelm rescuers.”

Olbermann then brought aboard Richard Wolffe of Newsweek to further discuss the tapes. The Countdown host couldn’t resist another Nixon reference as he concluded the interview wondering if Bush’s dishonesty was as bad as the “actual malfeasance or misfeasance”: “And again, as we said, as Richard Nixon always said, you can be excused for almost any crime, if you will, or failure or error of omission or commission, but if there is tape of you not doing the job and then afterwards boasting that you have done everything that you could do, that’s almost as bad as the actual malfeasance or misfeasance, is it not?”

First there was Rathergate by 60 Minutes II, now there is Katrinagate by a producer of 60 Minutes II.

Other’s Blogging:

• Big Lizards
• Sister Toldjah
• Captain’s Quarters
• Rightwinged
• Narcissistic Views

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So first the reports were “Bush was told that levee might be breached”, but when the transcripts were released everyone saw he was told they might be “topped”. Of course the left in its infinite wisdom decided to argue that it meaned the same thing.

but now the person who briefed Bush has told the MSM that NOONE anticipated the levee’s being breached:

News sources have reported that President Bush lied when he said he wasn?t warned that the levees in New Orleans could be breached during Hurricane Katrina.

But a videotape of a key meeting between Bush and hurricane officials supports the president?s contention that the breaching of the levees was unanticipated.

On September 1, four days after Katrina struck, Bush said: “I don?t think anybody anticipated a breach of the levees.?

The Associated Press on Wednesday claimed that “federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees.?

The Democratic National Committee attempted to make political hay out of the AP report, stating that “during the briefing, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told the president that the integrity of the levees was ?a very, very grave concern? that the president appears to have ignored.?

However, the tape shows that what Mayfield actually told Bush was: “I don?t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that?s obviously a very, very grave concern.?

Mayfield told NBC News on Thursday that he warned only that the levees might be topped ? that is, the storm surge could push water over the top of the levees ? not breached, and that on the many conference calls he monitored, “Nobody talked about the possibility of a levee breach or failure until after it happened.?

Mayfield even told Bush: “The forecast now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the City of New Orleans itself.?

The Washington Times, commenting on what it called a “hit job? on the president, opined: “If it were true that Mr. Bush heard predictions of levee breaches before the storm hit, then that makes a despicable and costly lie of his statement four days after the hurricane.

“The truth, instead, is that no adviser warned the president of the possibility that the levees could fail. Of course, it makes a juicier story to suggest that the president was warned.?

When will the left learn? Every week they think they have the smoking gun and run with it before checking it out, citing it as gospel. But taken with the recent release of Blanco telling Bush the levee’s were fine, this report demolishes the left once again.

The fact is that the MSM is so disconnected from reality they have lost their ability to retain any credibility with those with any common sense. Their obvious leftist agenda shines through in EVERY piece of reporting released.

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Will the left go ape over this video that shows Blanco reassuring the Bush administration that the levee’s had not been breached?

In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana’s governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans’ protective levees were intact, according to new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials.

“We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees,” Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. “We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time.”

In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House’s formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck.

Critics have maintained the Homeland Security Department responded too slowly to the breaches, delaying repair efforts and allowing flooding to worsen. Formal reports of New Orleans’ levee breaches reached the White House by 6 p.m., and the administration confirmed the damage by the next morning, according to the White House’s recount.

In the video of the conference call, Blanco appears uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation “could change.”

Blanco said floodwaters were rising in parts of the city “where we have waters that are 8 to 10 feet deep, and we have people swimming in there.”

“That’s got a considerable amount of water itself,” the governor said. “That’s about all I know right now on the specifics that you haven’t heard.”

Of course this piece is written by the same 60 Minutes producer discussed here, so she HAS to throw in the “Blanco appeared uncertain” bit.

UPDATE

Wizband has uncovered the fact that the writer of this hitpiece was a 60 Minutes II producer around the time of Rathergate…..who would of thunk it?

Have a look at the byline to the AP story:

By MARGARET EBRAHIM and JOHN SOLOMON

WASHINGTON (AP) – In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Here’s an interesting detail on someone who certainly looks like one of the story authors from the French-American Foundation’s membership roles:

Margaret Ebrahim (2003)
Producer
CBS News, 60 Minutes II

This CBS News page confirms that a Margaret Ebrahim was a 60 Minutes II producer in 2005. Ironically it was Mary Mapes who gave her away…

Not surprising that someone related to 60 minutes is involved in this shoddy piece of journalism

END UPDATE
Everyday there is a new story that the left hopes with all their might will take down Bush, and everyday they go away with their tail between their legs. This Katrina story is no different. Lets take a look at the article:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Get outta here, he knew the levee’s would be breeched and did nothing about it? Once again the MSM bias rears it’s ugly head. What was he REALLY told?

…”I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

Ohhhh, so now the levee overfilling is equivalent to breached? Kinda like my bathtub overfilling or the whole tub collapsing….same thing huh? Wholly Christ is this just too easy or what?

The article attempts to portray Bush as uninterested and uncaring but then tells us he was worried:

Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility ? and Bush was worried too.

Um, huh? So either he didn’t care and didn’t send what needed to be sent or he was worried about the possibility of disaster. Which is it AP?

Another point, who in the hell WASNT warned prior to landfall? Hell, it was non-stop 24/7 updates.

New Orleans braced for a catastrophic blow from Hurricane Katrina overnight, as forecasters predicted the Category 5 storm could drive a wall of water over the city’s levees.

The huge storm, packing 160 mph winds, is expected to hit the northern Gulf Coast in the next nine hours and make landfall as a Category 4 or 5 hurricane Monday morning.

About 70 percent of New Orleans is below sea level, and is protected from the Mississippi River by a series of levees. Forecasters predicted the storm surge could reach 28 feet; the highest levees around New Orleans are 18 feet high.

Of course the article attempts to lay the blame at the federal level, when the response by the fed’s was actually steller:

In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest–and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm’s landfall.Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day–some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, “guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways,” says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.

These units had help from local, state and national responders, including five helicopters from the Navy ship Bataan and choppers from the Air Force and police. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries dispatched 250 agents in boats. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state police and sheriffs’ departments launched rescue flotillas. By Wednesday morning, volunteers and national teams joined the effort, including eight units from California’s Swift Water Rescue. By Sept. 8, the waterborne operation had rescued 20,000.

While the press focused on FEMA’s shortcomings, this broad array of local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary success–especially given the huge area devastated by the storm. Computer simulations of a Katrina-strength hurricane had estimated a worst-case-scenario death toll of more than 60,000 people in Louisiana. The actual number was 1077 in that state.

The problem was the local and state response was a disaster, and they are the first responders. The feds showed up within 3 days, which is to be expected. The local officials should have showed up within hours but thanks to Nagin and Blanco, that was a huge failure.

MR. RUSSERT: Many people point, Mr. Mayor, that on Friday before the hurricane, President Bush declared an impending disaster. And The Houston Chronicle wrote it this way. “[Mayor Nagin's] mandatory evacuation order was issued 20 hours before the storm struck the Louisiana coast, less than half the time researchers determined would be needed to get everyone out. City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan.” And we’ve all see this photograph of these submerged school buses. Why did you not declare, order, a mandatory evacuation on Friday, when the president declared an emergency, and have utilized those buses to get people out?

MAYOR NAGIN: You know, Tim, that’s one of the things that will be debated. There has never been a catastrophe in the history of New Orleans like this. There has never been any Category 5 storm of this magnitude that has hit New Orleans directly. We did the things that we thought were best based upon the information that we had. Sure, here was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren’t available.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Mayor, if you read the city of New Orleans’ comprehensive emergency plan– and I’ve read it and I’ll show it to you and our viewers–it says very clearly, “Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.”

It was your responsibility. Where was the planning? Where was the preparation? Where was the execution?

MAYOR NAGIN: The planning was always in getting people to higher ground, getting them to safety. That’s what we meant by evacuation. Get them out of their homes, which–most people are under sea level. Get them to a higher ground and then depending upon our state and federal officials to move them out of harm’s way after the storm has hit.

MR. RUSSERT: But in July of this year, one month before the hurricane, you cut a public service announcement which said, in effect, “You are on your own.” And you have said repeatedly that you never thought an evacuation plan would work. Which is true: whether you would exercise your obligation and duty as mayor or that–and evacuate people, or you believe people were on their own?

[...]MR. RUSSERT: Since 2002, the federal government has given New Orleans $18 million to plan and prepare for events like this. How was that money spent?

MAYOR NAGIN: It’s my understanding that most of the money–I’ve only been in office about three years. So we’ve mainly used most of the money that we get from the federal government to try and deal with levee protection and the coordination of getting people to safety. That’s primarily what we use the money for.

Either way it’s obvious the concern was that the water could flow over the levee due to the winds and amount of water. EVERYONE sighed with relief that first day because everyone thought they had dodged a bullet, but then the actual BREACH occurred.

The best post I have seen yet comes from Wizbang who had a local engineer at the scene the day of the disaster:

I invite you to look through our Katrina archives from the beginning – you can learn a lot about what actually happened and when. Wizbang was in the unique position to have one of our bloggers, Paul – an engineer by trade, who just so happened to live in New Orleans. That provided us with a unique local angle on the story.

On August 27, 2005 Paul noted everything discussed in the briefings seen on the AP video and more. How did he know this? Well for starters the entire New Orleans area had avoided a similar fate in 2004 when it looked like they were headed for a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane (Andrew). The Katrina being discussed in the AP video is the monster Category 5 version of Katrina that was bearing down directly on New Orleans.

And that’s where the dishonesty in the AP story really lies. Contrary to popular belief New Orleans DID NOT take the brunt of Katrina. The Gulf Coast in Mississippi had that honor. As it veered east of New Orleans the force that Katrina hit the New Orleans area with was the equivalent of a Category 1 (or possibly Category 2) hurricane. On the video those officials are discussing a direct hit of a Category 5 storm, just as Paul was. A Category 5 storm didn’t hit New Orleans…

When the President said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” he probably should have been more specific for the casual arm-chair quarterbacking of the left. What he should have said was, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees in New Orleans from a Category 1 hurricane, since the levees were built to withstand the storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane.”

On August 29, 2005 I noted from U.S. Army Corp of Engineers data that the levees did not top. Less than 24 hours later Paul noted that New Orleans was 80% underwater and was for all intents and purposes destroyed.

What changed in the interim? We all know now that the levees were not topped, they crumbled in many spots (most of which were less than a decade old) were they could not withstand the surge they were designed to contain. As Paul noted November 11, 2005, Katrina did not flood New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did.

Absolutely no one in the AP story mentions the possibility that monumental incompetence, generations of corruptions, and shoddy engineering would doom New Orleans even if it did manage to avoid a direct hit…

Puts a little more context into a obvious hit piece by the AP doesn’t it?

One other thing. Who leaked this stuff? Heeere Brownie Brownie Heeere.

Other’s Blogging:

• Newsbusters
• Macsmind
• Say Anything
• Expose The Left
• The Kellino Zone
• RightWinged

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Mayor Nagin really needs bite the big one. Now he is whining about the Hotels in his city:

In a brewing dispute over next year’s Mardi Gras, the hotel and tourism industry on Wednesday spoke out against Mayor Ray Nagin’s suggestion that hotels donate a portion of their profits from Mardi Gras to help refugees return to the city.

Darrius Gray, the head of the Greater New Orleans & Lodging Association, belittled Nagin’s suggestion, saying hotels have been losing money since Hurricane Katrina and are in no position to hand out money.

“Profits are hard to come by these days to tell you the truth,” Gray said.

[...]The mayor also said the city’s hotels could do more for the refugees scattered throughout the country by putting aside a quarter of their rooms for refugees.

Gray said hotels are doing their part already and that between 25 percent and 30 percent of hotel rooms are occupied by people with Federal Emergency Management Agency housing vouchers.

J. Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, lashed out at the mayor for suggesting that the tourism and hospitality industry has not done enough to help the city recover.

Perry said hotels played a key role in the early days after Katrina hit when they were able to provide housing to recovery workers by bringing in potable water and generators.

“Many of the hoteliers were on the ground when water was lapping down Canal Street and parts of Poydras (Street), and I’ll tell you, they’ll be here forever,” Perry said.

Perry attacked Nagin for what he called his “fractured message.” He challenged Nagin to send a more positive message to the country about the viability of holding Mardi Gras and enjoying the city for its touristic value.

“There’s frankly no more patriotic message in America than to come and enjoy the most unusual, authentic, historic, walkable city on this planet — New Orleans,” Perry said.

Nagin is definately stuck on stupid. All they care about is getting those New Orleans residents back so they can win the election they put off. Day in and day out that is all these two, Nagin & Blanco, talk about.

I guess this kind of stuff is inbred into the liberals. Freely spend other peoples money.

These people have got to be some of the most ignorant people on the planet:

WASHINGTON – Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust.

Holy bejesus are they stupid. As Iawhawk points out, this is a concentration camp:

If you don’t know what the above picture is, it’s bales of human hair found in Auschwitz

The children of Auschwitz

The comparison is inappropriate, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla. ?Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed,? Miller told the survivors.

?They died from abject neglect,? retorted community activist Leah Hodges. ?We left body bags behind… The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die.?

It appears all the intelligent human beings were able to evacuate the city because if you watched any of these proceedings yesterday you get the feeling that those left behind were grade school dropouts.

This kind of thing makes me so freakin angry, as you can tell. The gall of these people to compare themselves to those in concentration camps. I’m sorry, my wallet is closed for these people now. They deserve NOTHING. All the proceedings did was prove to the world the result of decades of liberal entitlement. NOTHING is owed to these idiots.

Is it a coincidence we are not hearing this kind of crap from those in Mississippi, Alabama, & Florida? Nope. You only hear this coming from this corrupt state who has made entitlement an artform.

?No one is going to tell me it wasn?t a race issue,? said New Orleans evacuee Patricia Thompson, 53, who is now living in College Station, Texas. ?Yes, it was an issue of race. Because of one thing: when the city had pretty much been evacuated, the people that were left there mostly was black.?

Hmm, why let some facts get in the way, facts such as:

(St. Gabriel, LA) — Analysis of the people killed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita shows a nearly even split along race lines and gender. Medical examiners say of the more then one thousand victims, about half are white and half are black. About half of the people killed were men, about half were women. In all, the morgue set up to process bodies after the hurricane has recorded one-thousand-90-deaths. Of those, less than five-hundred have been returned to next of kin. Officials are still finding bodies.

Want another great quote from these idiots?

The military took them to an evacuation point on a highway where they spent the night, awakening to a “bunch of hard red necks scowling and growling at us in military uniforms … pointing guns at us and treating us worse than prisoners of war,” she said.

Sigh.

Finally I will leave you with this simple fact, it appears we, the taxpayer, are still footing the bill for these whiners:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying an estimated $3 million a day for nearly 50,000 hotel rooms for hurricane victims. The agency had set a Dec. 1 deadline for moving families out of hotels and into more permanent housing, but later extended the deadline to Jan. 7.

The hotel program has cost the agency at least $300 million since Katrina hit on Aug. 29, followed by Hurricane Rita on Sept. 24.

Blanco and Nagin have blood on their hands but they now want the rest of the Country to trust them:

Louisiana has been painted broadly and regularly as a state teeming with corruption, a place where politics is a sport that many unethical, roguish and thieving people like to play.

Now, the reputation that many of Louisiana’s own residents reveled in – or at least joked about – is the state’s albatross as leaders try to persuade the rest of the nation and the holders of the federal purse strings that Louisiana is worth repairing.

The struggle was never more evident than last week when Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appeared before congressional committees asking for help to rebuild after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in a series of speeches that each included a defense of the state.

With several members of Congress openly suggesting since Katrina that Louisiana isn’t trustworthy enough to handle billions of dollars in disaster relief aid, Blanco pledged accountability in spending.

She said the state was hiring a nationally recognized accounting firm to review the flow of federal dollars through Louisiana and that she would hire another accounting firm to audit those first auditors.

[...]The problem is Louisiana officials have gone to jail over the years. One of its congressmen currently is under investigation. Federal prosecutors set up shop before the hurricanes in the Orleans Parish school board offices. Jefferson Parish judges have been convicted recently as part of a wide-ranging corruption investigation.

Unfortunately, the list tends to go on, so Louisiana officials will have to keep pleading their case – and promising to be more ethical and upstanding than many of their predecessors.

Louisiana and ethical in the same sentence, now that’s funny.

Instead of accounting for “every single penny” given since Katrina how about accounting for “every single penny” given in the last twenty years to this corrupt state?

Once again comes proof that the MSM are complete and utter liberal cheesedicks: (h/t Captains Quarters)

The city’s two worst-hit neighborhoods, the data show, were the Lower Ninth Ward, the predominantly black, working-class community east of the French Quarter, and Gentilly, a fast-gentrifying area where homeownership rates among middle-class blacks had been rising before the storm. Each neighborhood accounted for 31 to 75 deaths, according to the mapping data, which assigned a range of deaths for each region of the city, rather than an exact figure.

More surprising were the high death figures in upscale neighborhoods once considered less vulnerable to flooding deaths because residents had the means to escape, particularly along Lake Pontchartrain in Lakeview, a predominantly white neighborhood where 21 to 30 bodies were recovered on streets where homes routinely sell for $1 million. Nearly all of Lakeview is uninhabitable, and several thousand residents, most relocated to neighboring cities or states, gathered Saturday in a church parking lot to seek answers about a recovery process expected to take years.

Guess those bombs placed by the Government to kill the poor black folk didn’t work out to well huh?

Hmmm, sound a little suspicious to you?

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said Friday he is moving to sack the head of the East Jefferson Levee District, who publicly questioned the Broussard administration’s decision to evacuate drainage pump workers as Hurricane Katrina hurtled towards the Gulf Coast.

Broussard sent a letter asking Gov. Kathleen Blanco to remove Patrick Bossetta as Levee Board president and to install Bobby Bourgeois, one of Broussard’s executive assistants, as an interim board member.

The request was the latest sign that the Aug. 28 evacuation of the pump operators has become a political powder keg for Broussard. While Bossetta was among the first to go public second-guessing the administration, other critics have come forward in Kenner, on the Parish Council and especially among the myriad residents whose homes Katrina flooded.

Broussard cited Bossetta’s questioning in a written statement disclosed that he had written to Blanco. He also criticized Bossetta for failing to inform him that Metairie was flooding after Katrina passed Aug. 29.

Bossetta suggested at a Levee Board meeting Oct. 4 that the Levee District take responsibility for pump stations to ensure they are staffed during hurricanes. He said pump workers are essential employees who should be required to remain at their posts, or at least be sheltered nearby, so they can return quickly after a storm subsides.

When he found out Friday he would be removed – through rumor rather than official channels – Bossetta redoubled his critique of the Broussard administration.

“Everyone makes mistakes. The mark of a true leader is admitting his mistake,” Bossetta said. “The mistake was sending the pump station personnel out of East Jefferson. The half truths being perpetrated on the citizens of Jefferson by the emergency operations center under the direction of Aaron Broussard are truly a travesty.”

He’s got that right, a total travesty! You know that Bossetta is done tho because what he is saying makes WAY too much sense.

Why does this not surprise me?

Spike Lee is to produce and direct a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for HBO, Variety reports. Provisionally entitled When the Levee Broke, early indications suggest it will continue Lee’s tradition of polemical films addressing the US’s fraught race relations.

Lee has never been one to shy away from controversy, with films such as Do The Right Thing, about a race riot in Brooklyn; Jungle Fever, taking a contentious look at mixed-race love affairs, and his eponymous Malcolm X biopic.

When the Levee Broke is currently waiting to go into production while Lee completes work on thriller The Inside Man, starring Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen. But an interview earlier this week gave an early pointer to the line he is likely to take.

The poor, black neighbourhoods of New Orleans suffered particularly badly after the devastating hurricane struck at the end of August. During an appearance on CNN this week, to promote his memoir That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It, Lee was asked about the conspiracy theories that the largely black Ninth ward of the city had been deliberately flooded by authorities.

He said: “I don’t put anything past the United States government. I don’t find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.”

The film will be Lee’s second documentary for the cable TV and film producer HBO. It follows 1997’s 4 Little Girls, which revisited the 1963 bombing of a black Alabama church that killed four children.

Hopefully he can finish this movie before the mother ship arrives to carry him away.

Funny how almost every one of the Media stories of horror that came out of New Orleans has proven to be false, but Lee still wants to talk about a myth. A myth put out by racists.

Imagine any white director making these kind of comments toward the black community and they would be ran out of town. But he still finds work. He makes comments like:

During the promotion of his film Jungle Fever, about a black/white interracial romance, the black filmmaker stated that he disliked interracial couples! Incredibly, he said, “I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.”

But still, he finds work. Not surprising in Hollywood, but still pisses me off.

Check out Moonbat Central for more.

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Holy crap, I almost fell out of my chair laughing at this one:

Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition brought about 200 people to town Tuesday to find jobs reconstructing New Orleans, but most of those talked to by Eyewitness News were not displaced residents.

Jackson organized the bus tour, which began in Chicago Monday, as an attempt to bring displaced residents back to participate in the rebuilding of the city. When pressed as to how many of the job seekers were from the New Orleans area, Jackson said he didn?t know.

?I thought it would be more New Orleanians,? said Councilwoman Renee Gill Pratt, who nevertheless welcomed those looking for work. ?Since we have jobs available and since people are looking for an opportunity, we welcome them.?

How pathetic can this guy be?

Why are residents of NO staying away? Because the left has instilled in them the laziness of dependency. They now require the Government to provide everything they need. It’s been going on for decades in that State and now those people would rather wait for the government dime rather then go back and work. Burger King is offering a 6,000 dollar signing bonus for christ sakes.

Rick over at Rightwing Nuthouse has a great post summarizing the latest greatest MSM failure. This time it’s the failure of the media to get the truth about the Convention Center in New Orleans:

Rather isn?t the only media apologist who is excusing the MSM?s shockingly bad performance during coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs is pleading for understanding because of ?conditions

Media analysts noted that conditions in New Orleans were chaotic and that reporters relied on fragmentary accounts, collected from often unverifiable sources.

?The fog of war and the gusts of a hurricane both cloud and obscure vital truths,? said Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

?What we?re seeing here is no different than the reports of museum looting right after U.S. troops entered Baghdad. It?s not that different from election night 2000 when some journalists prematurely declared a winner. In all three cases, the public would have been served by a bit more patience and less feigned certainty.?

Note that Mr. Felling excuses the numerous factual errors and rumormongering by reporters as he pleads that journalism is too difficult to get right when things are confusing and besides, it?s happened before so it?s okay.

Contrast this attitude with the attitude of Mr. Reynolds following his faux paux and you get a perfect summary of what is wrong with journalism. News today is about ?the story? not ?the truth.? Part of the story of Katrina was the chaotic and violent conditions at the Superdome and Convention Center. Any information that contributed to that storyline was run without first being filtered through any kind of fact checking or confirmation process. Television producers and executives today want ?flow? to the news, as if events unfold in a nice, tidy sequence. The broadcast should ?march? at a swift pace. This contributes to the ?drama? of the news. In short, the more entertaining we can make the news, the more viewers we will attract.

What happens to the truth in all this show-biz is predictable. When a bystander comes up to a reporter and tells a story of a 7 year old girl being raped and murdered in the bathroom of the Convention Center, since it fits into the storyline of the narrative, it is passed along and becomes part of ?the first draft of history.? Except this draft is of a TV drama script, not a history book.

But other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl ? whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 ? who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.

Many evacuees at the Convention Center the morning of Sept. 3 treated the story as gospel, and ticked off further atrocities: a baby trampled to death, multiple child rapes.

Salvatore Hall, standing on the corner of Julia Street and Convention Center Boulevard that day, just before the evacuation, said, ?They raped and killed a 10-year-old in the bathroom.? Neither he nor the many people around him who corroborated the killing had seen it themselves.

This widely reported story was a rumor. Part of the problem was the irresponsible behavior of Mayor Nagin and Police Chief Compass who continuously passed along rumors of the most spectacular atrocities including the rape of babies:

Compass told Winfrey on Sept. 6 that ?some of the little babies (are) getting raped? in the Dome. Nagin backed it with his own tale of horrors: ??They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin? Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.?? But both men have since pulled back to a degree.

?The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible,? Compass said, conceding his earlier statements were false.

Asked for the source of the information, Compass said he didn?t remember.

Nagin was also the originator of the ?10,000 dead? speculation, a figure that the Mayor still refuses to say who gave him.

It’s amazing that the people of Louisiana actually voted these people into office. Nagin and Blanco helped the MSM push these false stories from the beginning with their own lies and the media just treated everything as gospel. They WANT to believe its true so they tell their audience that it is true. No fact checking, no investigation, just put it out there.

And it was all bullshit.