News Unfit

All the news that's unfit to print!

14 September 2005

Blame

Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. has charged Mable and Salvador Mangano Sr., St. Rita's Nursing Home, New Orleans, owners, with 34 counts of negligent homicide. The defendants claim that since they were never informed of the mandatory evacuation, they independently decided that for the safety of the frail patients, it was better not to move them. They called all the families of the patients and informed them of the nursing home's decision, and gave the families the choice to evacuate the patients themselves, which was done for six of them.

Perhaps the blame should be shifted to those families that didn't pick up the patients -- after all, the families are the legal guardians and make the decisions for them. While it is somewhat tragic, it's not overwhelmingly so to me as these are elderly people who didn't have much time left anyway. I want to see the parents of children who drowned get charged -- not that I think they need more pain in their lives, but because once in a while I like a good drama!

Meanwhile, remember that family that stayed behind b/c they couldn't bring their fourteen pets? And then the grandmother died and the wheelchair-bound mother tried to get her daughters to commit suicide with her after three days? And in the end they only saved two of the dogs, but had to leave them behind anyway? Can we bring THEM up on charges please? Negligent homicide, attempted murder (the mother of her daughters), child abuse/neglect, and cruelty to animals. If they had left, abandoning the pets, we'd only get to charge them with cruelty to animals. Man, that'd make a hilarious row on TV.

Yes, I do know I'm going to Hell.


11 September 2005

New Orleans moving right along

On the fourth anniversary of the WTC/Pentagon/PA attacks, NYC firemen working in New Orleans took a break for memorial services.

A bell from a neighboring church, its steeple wiped out by Katrina, was given to the New York firefighters.

(CNN)

Meanwhile, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in the city is being trashed, as in moved to dumps.

At the city's convention center, the once chaotic site where thousands initially took refuge before being evacuated a week ago, bulldozers pushed heaps of chairs, sleeping bags and trash into giant piles to be hauled away.

Tow truck drivers started picking up scores of abandoned cars littering the streets.

(CNN)


Biggest Disaster?

According to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, ""Hurricane Katrina will go down as the largest natural disaster in American history." (CNN) I wonder where he got that from. According to CNN, 2.5 million people were displaced by the Dust Bowl series of droughts and dust storms (1930-1941), while only 1.3 million lived in metro New Orleans, and adding the others would probably bring it to no more than 2.0 million. If you have a more accurate number of how many people were "internally displaced" by the hurricane, I'd be interested in hearing it.


10 September 2005

Media vs. Gov't

I don't think I'm buying the "the media's in the government's pocket" story anymore. I can still think they're voluntarily parroting what the government says because "most" of the population wants to hear that, but the feds aren't controling the media.




U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a "zero access" policy announced earlier in the day by Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is overseeing the federal relief effort in the city, and Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security director.
...

"We don't have any legal recourse to do any kind of law enforcement or anything like that in our role. So the only thing we do is we can control who goes with us; on our aircraft and on our trucks and in our boats, if that applies," [said Army Lt. Col. Richard Steele].
...

CNN filed suit against Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, arguing that the officials who announced the decision were acting on FEMA's behalf.

"For an agency to unilaterally ban all coverage of a major component of its governmental function, that is, recovery of the deceased victims of the tragedy, is unprecedented," CNN argued in its legal brief. "Instead, the agency has made a subjective, content-based determination that publicizing the operation would be 'without dignity.'"

CNN's brief argued, "It is not the place of government to replace its own internal judgment for that of a free and independent media."

Because of controversy about how FEMA and other agencies handled the disaster response, CNN lawyers argued, "it is even more vitally important for the public, Congress and the administration to have an independent view of the conduct of this important phase of the operation."


(CNN)


I guess this's why I haven't seen that many bodies in the news yet. :(


Al Gore saves 270 lives in New Orleans


On September 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, [Greg Simon, president of the Washington-based activist group FasterCures,] learned that Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans....

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights...

He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore's cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.


(CNN)


Meanwhile, Bush was busy slowing down evacuations from the airport via Air Force One. I wonder how many empty seats there were on that plane.


Big Brit Blasts Bush Business (BBC)




Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has criticised the US's record on combating global warming in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.

In a speech in Berlin, Mr Prescott took a swipe at the US government, which has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
...
"As a European negotiator at the Kyoto climate change convention, I was fully aware that climate change is changing weather patterns and raising sea levels," he said.

Some commentators have suggested Katrina is an example of the type of storms that will become more common with global warming.
...
But the US government has been reluctant to accept that human activity is to blame.

In his speech, Mr Prescott also hailed the US city mayors who had ignored their federal government's position and had taken action locally to limit carbon emissions.
...
"I'm proud that Britain has already achieved its Kyoto target on greenhouse gas emissions - six years ahead of time, with a growing economy."

(BBC)


Last one's interesting to me b/c of the argument US conservatives put forth that the country would lose money if we signed the Kyoto protocol. I guess it would affect us more than Britain since they don't actually manufacture cars as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), but I still think it's necessary.

Anyone else think Prescott looks scary?


07 September 2005

Conservative Chain of Events

I don't get it. Conservatives don't want people learning about condoms, then they don't want them having abortions when they get pregnant from not using condoms, and then they don't want to let loving gay parents adopt the children who weren't aborted when their teen parents didn't use condoms because they didn't know about them. Maybe they actually support baby-eating by people with extra kids, or who're starving, like those disposessed by Katrina.


02 September 2005

13% of an Ohio HS pregnant

Laws of statistics said this had to happen somewhere.


64 of Timken's 490 female students (13 percent) are pregnant. ...

Experts, parents and students themselves struggle to explain why such pockets of high teen pregancy rates appear. Are teens getting appropriate sex education? Do they have access to birth control and are they using it consistently? Has the stigma of unwed motherhood lost its edge?

"This might be a school that is forthright with its problems while others are not," said Jay Green, chairman of the Education Reform department at the University of Arkansas. "But this is a widespread issue."

Green wrote a study last year for the conservative New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that found 20 percent of urban teenagers have been pregnant, compared with 14 percent of suburban teens.

Urban teens as a whole don't use birth control as consistently or often, according to his research, and often have less to lose financially and socially than those in the suburbs. ...

Joanne Hinton, whose 16-year-old daughter, Raechel Hinton, is eight months pregnant, said she believes the school's abstinence-based sex education program isn't enough.

"It's time to take the blinders off and realize that these kids are having sex," she said. "Obviously, abstinence is not working. If we have to, just give them condoms." ...

Raechel, who plans to return to the 10th grade at Timken after delivering and completing an adoption, said many students are sexually active and need more information about birth control.

(ABC News)


Bush dropped the ball, says FEMA

A December 2001 Houston Chronicle article (hosted at Louisiana State U) summarizes a list of the three likliest national disasters that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released in early 2001. In those top three, ironicially at the time, was a terrorist attack on New York City. Also up there was a hurricane hitting New Orleans. And yet, funding to shore up the levees wasn't increased, but slashed between then and the disaster we see today.

Now that two of the top three have come to pass, standing at the top is The Big One (earthquake) hitting San Francisco. To the Bush Administration: start preparing. This isn't politics, this is LIVES.


01 September 2005

Katrinia Ideas

I've been commenting a bunch on Strange Musings on small, cheap/free things you can do to help people hurt by Katrina. If you want some ideas, go look.


Renegade Bus

I just like the title, "renegade bus."


The first bus -- an Orleans Parish school bus -- pulled up to the gates of the Astrodome about 10:30 p.m. (11:30 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, surprising authorities who were not expecting anyone for several more hours.

Organizers later declared it a "renegade bus," saying it was carrying people fleeing the floodwaters in New Orleans but was not part of the official caravan of commercial buses traveling from the Superdome.
...
It was not immediately clear how the 50 people on board the renegade transportation came into possession of the bus, but officials in the Astrodome said they would be allowed to stay. A 20-year-old man was behind the wheel.

(CNN)


<sarcasm>Do you think it was looted, or found? They don't say if the driver was white or black, so who knows! </sarcasm>