And, I would have been MUCH happier if the NEWS ORG that spewed this all over the news, hadn't. I didn't make the big deal about it. Reuters did.
OUCH!
Q. What is George Bush's position on Roe vs. Wade?
A. He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.
Health warning over New Orleans
Doctors in the hurricane-hit US city of New Orleans have warned of a "second disaster" if residents begin returning to the city before it is ready.
Medics backed the view of Vice Admiral Thad Allen, head of the recovery effort, but contradicted advice issued by the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.
Mr Nagin has urged residents of some areas to return home this week.
Doctors cautioned that major disease risks remain, and Vice Adm Allen said the city was vulnerable to a new storm.
"The second wave of disaster is when you welcome the people back and the infrastructure of the city is not in place," said Dr Peter Deblieux, a casualty specialist at a New Orleans hospital.
Vice Adm Allen said the mayor's plans to get 200,000 people back to their homes within the next 10 days were "extremely problematic".
The sooner we get this open, the sooner we will get back to normal life
Gallery owner R R Lyon
He said services such as water, sewage, electricity and health care were not yet capable of supporting a large influx of people.
"If you bring significant amounts of people into New Orleans, you need an evacuation plan on how you're going to do that," he told US TV networks on Sunday.
"The announcement to move the repopulation ahead of any of those completed tasks in our view puts the city at risk."
In a statement, Mr Nagin said: "We believe our re-entry plan properly balances safety concerns and the needs of our citizens to begin rebuilding their lives."
Reports said the pair plan to meet on Monday.
About 40% of the Louisiana city is still flooded.
'Ghost town'
The BBC's Claire Marshall in New Orleans says the displaced victims will be unsure which advice to follow.
Some of those who have started to trickle back have said there is no custom for their enterprises.
"Everyone is anxious to come back and see if their place is OK," Kevin Molony, who runs a company conducting tours of the city, told AFP news agency.
"It's a ghost town. Tourism has been slammed."
Armed police and troops are continuing to patrol the streets in an effort to maintain security and prevent looting. A night time curfew remains in force.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President George Bush said the federal government would assume the bulk of the costs for "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen".
Congress has already approved $62bn for the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast, but costs are expected to total $200bn (£110bn).
Mr Bush has hinted at spending cuts elsewhere to funds the operation, but has ruled out raising taxes.
The president's approval ratings have slumped to 40%, the lowest of his time in office.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4258670.stm
Published: 2005/09/18 19:39:21 GMT
It's a risk, a very big scary one, that has to be taken sooner or later. You just pray that nothing horrible happens and life as the citizens of New Orleans know it slowly and cautiously gets back on track. But risks will have to be taken. No doubt.
From NYT:
September 19, 2005
154 Patients Died, Many in Intense Heat, as Rescues Lagged
By DAVID ROHDE, DONALD G. MCNEIL Jr., REED ABELSON and SHAILA DEWAN
If some of those who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been described as stubborn holdouts who ignored an order to evacuate, then these citizens of New Orleans defy that portrait: The 16 whose bodies were wrapped in white sheets in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center. The 34 whose corpses were abandoned and floating in St. Rita's Nursing Home. The 15 whose bodies were stored in an operating room turned makeshift morgue at Methodist Hospital.
The count does not stop there. Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, were patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes. By the scores, people without choice of whether to leave or stay perished in New Orleans, trapped in health care facilities and in many cases abandoned by their would-be government rescuers.
Heroic efforts by doctors and nurses across the city prevented the toll from being vastly higher. Yet the breadth of the collapse of one of society's most basic covenants - to care for the helpless - suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.
At least 91 patients died in hospitals and 63 in nursing homes not fully evacuated until five days after the storm, according to the interviews, although those numbers are believed to be incomplete. In the end, withering heat, not floodwaters, proved the deadliest killer, with temperatures soaring to 110 degrees in stifling buildings without enough generator power for air-conditioning.
"The statement that you can judge a society by the way it treats elders and the vulnerable is a good way to look at our society," said Alice Hedt, executive director of the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. "I hope this is going to be a wake-up call."
Somehow, no one ever imagined that flooding might force the evacuation of all health care facilities in a city that sits below sea level and is virtually surrounded by water.
There were piecemeal plans. Hospitals were required to have enough emergency provisions to operate for two to three days during a disaster. State officials said it was their responsibility to evacuate patients if necessary. Nursing homes were required to have their own evacuation plans, complete with contracts with transportation companies.
But once the city filled with water, and the plans by hospitals and nursing homes became quickly overmatched, neither state nor federal agencies came to the rescue, and in some cases appear to have thwarted efforts to evacuate patients.
Nearly all communication systems collapsed, leaving hospital administrators to guess if help was on the way. One administrator said overwhelmed state officials waited nearly a day before getting word to him that his hospital was essentially on its own. In the end, public hospitals turned to a wealthy, for-profit hospital chain for help.
Yet when private companies dispatched helicopters, trucks and buses to evacuate hospitals and nursing homes, officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency commandeered some of them for other uses, hospital and nursing home officials said. The rescue of those who had remained in their homes, or were sheltered in an increasingly chaotic Superdome, became the priority.
Natalie Rule, a spokeswoman for FEMA, denied that the agency confiscated any equipment.
Deep water, power failures and looting forced the evacuation of at least 12 hospitals, 2,200 patients, and more than 11,000 staff members and city residents. In all, more than 3,800 residents would be evacuated from 53 nursing homes. In two public hospitals that primarily treat the poor, emergency generators and wiring were located on the ground floor, vulnerable to flooding, because state legislators had repeatedly refused to pay for upgrades. Both washed out in the storm.
For days, individual evacuations by boat and helicopter dragged on, with patients spending up to 12 hours waiting in crowded stairwells and rooftops before being told they would have to wait another day. As military helicopters equipped with seats, not stretchers, ferried healthy adults to safety, patients awaiting evacuation died, hospital staff members said.
State officials acknowledged that hospitals were correct in assuming rescuers would come to their aid.
"You have to have enough supplies so that once the storm passes, you can last until we can get to you," said Dr. Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana's state health officer. But he added that officials never anticipated the magnitude of the storm and were overwhelmed rescuing people in the floodwaters.
"We were competing for resources," he said, stressing that the state did the best it could under the circumstances.
Communication between state officials was so confused that it remains unclear whether the area's nursing homes were even required to follow Mayor C. Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation order, issued a day before the hurricane struck.
Dr. Guidry said it was up to each nursing home to decide what was best for its residents. Even so, the Louisiana attorney general, Charles C. Foti Jr., cited the order in charging the owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home with criminally negligent homicide in the deaths of their residents.
Whatever the requirements, problems immediately arose. Because too many nursing homes had contracted with the same bus companies, or waited too long to leave, there were not enough vehicles. Two homes that were able to get buses fled to a school that ended up being in the storm's path. After the school's power was knocked out, two patients died.
There are clear signs that earlier, better-organized evacuations helped save hundreds of people.
Ten for-profit nursing homes evacuated early, hiring buses, ambulances and in one case a helicopter to safely move more than 1,000 patients. One private, for-profit hospital leased planes to safely evacuate all 200 of its patients.
The state pulled off some evacuations successfully as well. A state mental hospital was emptied before the storm. After the hurricane passed, a fleet of buses and hundreds of heavily armed guards safely evacuated New Orleans's prisons and jails. All of the city's 7,600 prisoners made it out safely.
Weathering Previous Storms
Most of the city's hospitals decided to take a calculated gamble.
They had sturdy walls and backup generators. They had weathered storms before, notably Hurricane Betsy in 1965, when winds of 125 miles per hour killed at least 75 people. New Orleans often flooded, but pumps always took the water out.
The hospitals had plans: They assumed that they could hold out for two or three days, that they had backup electricity, that help would arrive.
They did not assume that they would be marooned in a vast lagoon of water so deep that alligators could cross intersections but military trucks could not, that telephones would break down completely, that state and federal officials would dither days away bickering over legalities, that there would be a chaotic competition for helicopters, that the city would get so dangerous that looters would paddle up to a hospital's doors in a hot tub.
By Monday, Aug. 29, most hospital officials were relieved: the storm had passed, and except for some broken windows they were largely intact.
By Tuesday, Aug. 30, with the levees broken and the city underwater, 13 hospitals were facing a daunting task of evacuating patients, staff, family members and people who had taken shelter inside.
As far as can be determined now, more than 90 patients died in hospitals: at least 35 found dead from the storm in Memorial Medical Center, 16 in Methodist Hospital, about 19 in Lindy Boggs Medical Center, 13 in Touro Infirmary, 8 in the related Charity and University Hospitals. An unknown number died in transit or at triage centers like those at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport or the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge.
There is no suggestion that any patients drowned or were abandoned in their beds.
Bodies were found in odd places, but most were shrouded somehow, and lined up carefully in impromptu morgues by the living before they escaped.
Tony Carnes, a journalist with Christianity Today, was with a flotilla of rescue boats on Sept. 5 when they pulled up to regroup on a Memorial hospital ramp.
The hospital's doors were wide open, he said in a telephone interview, and, curious, he went in. There were no signs of looting, but in the second-floor chapel, guarded by only a handwritten "Keep Out" sign, he found 16 bodies. They lay on gurneys, covered, but with hands and legs and the crowns of heads poking out.
On higher floors, he found several more. "One was draped over a chair like a coat," he said. "They were all wrapped in blankets, or sheets, or that exam table paper."
Autopsies have not been conducted, but many hospitals said patients were elderly, in organ failure or had just had serious surgery. When the power went down, they had to endure days of 110-degree temperatures with high humidity, and the most desperate had to be manually ventilated - air squeezed into their lungs by hand for hours at a time. Some were on heart pumps running on batteries.
The hospitals were not required to follow the evacuation order issued by Mayor Nagin on Sunday, Aug. 28. "Hospitals don't evacuate," said John A. Matessino, president of the Louisiana Hospital Association, a trade association. "Hospitals stay in place."
In each case, administrators took their best guess as to whether it would be safer to keep patients in a strong building, or to risk their dying in a helicopter or in an ambulance caught in a traffic jam.
Making that calculation harder, the weather reports kept shifting.
"How many times have we heard that storms are going to hit New Orleans, but they veered to the east?" asked Virginia McCall, director of the intensive-care unit at Methodist Hospital. "We got lackadaisical."
Her hospital, she said, would definitely have evacuated in the face of a Category 5 hurricane. But it was reported to be dropping from a Category 5 to a Category 4 as it neared land. Some predictions said it would miss the city and blow into Mississippi.
After discharging as many patients as possible, the largest hospitals decided that letting their sickest patients stay was safer.
At the Ochsner Clinic, a private hospital housing about 400 patients before the storm, that gamble worked. Built near the edge of a levee in Jefferson Parish, it perches "on the lip of the bowl of New Orleans," said Warner Thomas, president of the foundation that runs it. When the levees broke, water came up to its front steps, but no farther.
The generators, behind high retaining walls, kept running. Winds knocked out a cooling tower, so the air-conditioning was weak, but not off. City water stopped, but Ochsner has its own well.
Incoming calls stopped, but a direct circuit to a sister hospital in Baton Rouge allowed outgoing calls and e-mail.
The Jefferson Parish emergency center sent over National Guard troops when some of the people streaming past the hospital tried to break in, Mr. Thomas said.
Eventually, it decided to remove about 25 patients, including babies in incubators and adults on ventilators. Although ambulances could have driven up, Mr. Thomas said he was doubtful about the roads, so he called in private helicopters, which took patients to Houston and Birmingham, Ala.
"We did not lose one patient," he said.
Other hospitals were not as lucky. Methodist was on the low-lying east side, and smaller hospitals in the area brought their patients there before the storm because it was taller.
Ms. McCall, in an interview from her sister's home in Wichita, Kan., said Methodist tried to evacuate 20 critically ill patients on Aug. 28, just before the storm, but no ambulances were available. "There was no getting out," said Ms. McCall, who runs Methodist's intensive-care unit.
After the levees broke, five feet of water filled Methodist's reception area within 15 minutes. Fires started when the main generator shorted out. But people kept arriving. "We had one woman who was a post-op kidney transplant swim in," she said.
The 827 people inside - 137 of them patients - stayed relatively calm until Wednesday, when food and water ran short and the heat reached 110 degrees. "You get a feeling of, Does anybody know we're here?" Ms. McCall said.
She was told by top officials at Universal Health Services, the company that runs the hospital, that they had rented two trucks with food, water and diesel fuel and sent them on, "but they were confiscated by federal authorities," she said. The company also hired two helicopters, but officials refused to let them fly, she said. Company officials declined to comment.
A police officer who is the husband of a Methodist nurse made his way home to get his boat and Jet Ski, Ms. McCall said. On his way back, she said, federal authorities commandeered the Jet Ski for attic rescues but let him keep the boat, with which he brought food, water and dry clothes.
By the time helicopters and FEMA evacuation trucks arrived Thursday, Sept. 1, people were so frustrated that one man who was not even a patient slipped into a hospital gown, trying to get out, she said.
When it was over, 16 patients had been put in an operating room designated as a morgue.
So you don't think that this is another extremely good outcome due to the big efforts of your President like it is presented elsewhere :wink:
Walter Hinteler wrote:
So you don't think that this is another extremely good outcome due to the big efforts of your President like it is presented elsewhere :wink:
Let's just say I trust Kim Jong-Il nearly as far as I can throw his fat, meglomaniacal body.
First the lefties are screaming that the US Military didn't enter NO soon enough, now Momma Sheehan's bitching because they are there ...
Quote:Sheehan: Get troops out of 'occupied New Orleans'
Mother of slain soldier decries 'military and governmental fascism'
Posted: September 16, 2005
3:29 p.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Fresh from a visit to hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, anti-Bush activist Cindy Sheehan is demanding the U.S. military be removed from "occupied New Orleans."
In a dispatch on leftist filmmaker Michael Moore's website, Sheehan said she was troubled by the "level of the military presence" in the Gulf Coast state.
"George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration,
pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power," she said. "The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don't fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest.
The Vacaville, Calif., woman, whose son was killed fighting insurgents in Iraq, launched an anti-war movement last month when she camped outside Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch and demanded to meet with the president, drawing national media attention.
In her Internet posting today, Sheehan said she had "imagined before that if the military had to be used in [continental U.S.] operations that they would be there to help the citizens: Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and protect them. But what I saw was a city that is occupied."
Describing the scene, she wrote, "I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me. Sand bags were removed from private property to make machine gun nests."
The activist insisted there was no reason for the security presence, because "the vast majority of people who were looting in New Orleans were doing so to feed their families or to get resources to get their families out of there. If I had a store with an inventory of insured belongings, and a tragedy happened, I would fling my doors open and tell everyone to take what they need: it is only stuff."
She commented: "When our fellow citizens are told to 'shoot to kill' other fellow citizens because they want to stay alive, that is military and governmental fascism gone out of control."
Sheehan came under fire last month after WorldNetDaily broke the story that she had called enemy terrorists "freedom fighters."
"But now that we have decimated the country," she said, "the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in, and they [American troops] have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country, devastating the country and killing innocent people in that country."
In this case, I do agree that Cindy S probably didn't need to get involved. Not that she's necessarily wrong, but her opinion on this is hardly relevant...
dyslexia wrote:Yeall yeah, I would be nice to see a more fair and balanced question, something like "Do you think Bush was born stupid or was his stupidity caused by excessive use of alcohol and drugs?"
Clearly a typo:
"I would be nice..." but certainly in keeping with the level of intellect underscoring the sentiment.
But then again, what allegiance do self professed anarchists have to the rules of grammar?
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:Ticomaya wrote:Finn d'Abuzz wrote:I didn't see the piece. but in reading the transcript, it is irrefutable that Reynolds was asking leading questions. In a court of law virtually all of these questions would be disallowed. What his motivation might have been is open to conjecture, but that he was strongly steering the interviews is not.
So you think his question, "
Do you think Bush is the worst President ever?" was a bit over the top?
Just a tad.
I have to agree here . Bush is not the worst president ever.
Worst American president, yes without question , but not the worst president ever.
LTX, Your clarification is concise and to the point. LOL
LionTamerX wrote:Finn d'Abuzz wrote:Ticomaya wrote:Finn d'Abuzz wrote:I didn't see the piece. but in reading the transcript, it is irrefutable that Reynolds was asking leading questions. In a court of law virtually all of these questions would be disallowed. What his motivation might have been is open to conjecture, but that he was strongly steering the interviews is not.
So you think his question, "
Do you think Bush is the worst President ever?" was a bit over the top?
Just a tad.
I have to agree here . Bush is not the worst president ever.
Worst American president, yes without question , but not the worst president ever.
Well, now there's an opinion without hyperbole.
Tico, we need to fold our tents before the overwhelming force of LionTamer's argument.
Bush is the worst American president ever: Worse than Richard Nixon, worse than Jimmy Carter, worse than Herbert Hoover, worse that Warren G Harding, worse than Millard Fillmore, worse than Andrew Johnson, worse than William Henry Harrison, worse than Franklin Pierce, worse than US Grant.
Clearly LionTamer is a presidential scholar to whose opinions we must concede. After all, he has CI's endorsement.
What other US president before Mr Bush has done as much damage to the ideals, laws, and status of the USA, and to the international community?
McT, That explains more than enough, but not everything this president has destroyed/damaged. Karl Rove had to play with a puppet with a wooden heart and a smirk that seems to have disappeared in the past 12 months.
Richard Nixon's approval rating was down to 24%, but he paid dearly for Watergate; the only US president that resigned.
Carter was down to 24%, but he never had an approval rating above 70% like GWBush.
http://field.com/fieldpoll/presidents.html
