Quote:
Who's going do the first "Nagin for President" T-shirts?

Someone really should. You could have "Nagin for President" and his picture on the front, and "They're feeding the public a line of bull, and they're spinning, and people are dying down here" on the back.

One way or another, you see a lot of terrible things on television news over the years: in the former Yugoslavia, in Tiananmen, in Iraq. And I'm ashamed to say (though I guess it's only natural) that when they're in the news a part of me says "Well, that's the former Yugoslavia" (sorry Bonzi), "Well, that's Tiananmen", "Well, that's Iraq". But I've walked down Canal Street, along Riverwalk past the Convention Center, right through the backdrop of these events. I mean, I was only in New Orleans as a tourist for a week or so, but it's a great city and I've got great affection for it. And this week on those streets I've walked down, armed mobs have been shaking down hospitals for their food and water. And in that city people I'll have mingled with on Garden District streets, people I'll have been on the streetcar with, have this week been re-enacting the Black Hole of Calcutta, only with two hundred times as many people, and, this time, instigated by their own side. No first-world country treats their citizens like that. No third-world country treats their citizens like that. Heck, no third-world country treats their cattle like that.

You've got category 3 levees versus a category 4 hurricane. The levees were going to fail. And even if officials couldn't foresee, at the moment the levees failed, that widespread lawlessness might result from 100,000 poverty-stricken people with no food or water but a reasonable number of guns, it had already become pretty clear to any viewer of CNN by the end of Tuesday. Troops wanted deploying then, buses wanted lining up then (Houston's 350 miles away, you can organise the shelters while the buses are already moving), every rescue-capable helicopter in the continental United States wanted deploying then. Hundreds of squalid, awful deaths would have been averted.

I'm shocked and angered by the whole thing.

Peter