L.A.: Report of Gator Capture Is Hoax

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Authorities on Tuesday dismissed a claim that a wrangler had nabbed a 7-foot-long alligator named ''Reggie'' from a city lake, where he had been dumped several months ago and repeatedly avoided capture.

Now how about a report on Ray Nagin's hoax when he said that 10,000 people died in New Orleans due to Katrina?

In New Orleans, Nagin upticked his estimate of the probable death toll in his city from merely thousands to telling NBC's "Today" show: "It wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000."

Just remember, you read about it here on this blog a week and a half ago.

How refreshing it is to see a European who dislikes the Democrats.

EU Trade Chief Chides "Protectionist" US Democrats

CNN is so liberal....How liberal is it? With their (probably) pre-packaged claim that Bush is letting his friends profit from post-Katrina contracts, they pick on an unusual target - The Shaw Group.

THE DEMOCRATS' KATRINA PROFITEER

But in their zeal to embarrass the Bush administration, CNN overlooks one very fat and inconvenient fact--and embarrasses only itself.

The Shaw Group, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, is headed by Jim Bernhard, the current chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Bernhard worked tirelessly for Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's runoff campaign and served as co-chair of her transition team. Another Shaw executive was Blanco's campaign manager. Bernhard is back-scratching chums with Blanco, whom he has lent/offered the Shaw Group's corporate jets to on numerous occasions.

Honestly, if any company employing anyone within six degrees of separation from Bush gets a contract, they're treated as criminals by the media.

Here's the CNN article in question - Firms with White House ties get Katrina contracts

What? You mean you don't remember the Clinton-era national disaster that caused at least 1000 deaths in 1995? OK, so I don't blame Clinton, but even so the post is very interesting history.

The "Chicago heat wave" killed more people than Hurricane Andrew, TWA Flight 800, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Northridge, CA earthquake, combined.

More here and here. "...One of the greatest and least-known American disasters in modern history."

Inexplicable - via Brendan Loy from the Washington Post.

"The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room, and it's a least on the third floor and up," Nagin said [to tourists on Saturday before Katrina hit]. "Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they're probably in the position of riding the storm out."

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

Advisers appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims.

After all, we wouldn't want to remind the Muslim community of the defeat of Hitler, one of their great friends of the 20th century.

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.”

Jewish Population 1939 - 16 million
Jewush Population 2005 - 14 million

My people are still trying to recover from the real geneocide in which the Arabs were willing accomplices.

Palestinian Population 1946 - 1 million +
Palestinian Population 2000 - 8 million

(Numbers from palestineremembered.com)

If the Israelis/Jews are trying to kill all the Palestinians, they're doing a piss poor job.

Best header I've ssen in a long time

The fetid aroma of hindsight by Michael Kinsley of the LA Times

Of course, my job isn't to predict and prepare for disasters. My job is to recriminate when they occur. It's not easy. These days the recriminations business is overrun with amateurs, who are squatting on all the high ground. The fetid aroma of hindsight is everywhere....

Obviously — obviously in hindsight, that is — we should have spent the money to strengthen the New Orleans levees. President Clinton should have done it. Presidents Bush the Elder and Reagan should have done it. As Tim Noah notes in Slate, warnings about the perilous New Orleans levees go back at least to Fanny Trollope in 1832. In fact, the one president who is pretty much in the clear on this is our current Bush — not because he did anything about the levees but because even if he had started something, it probably wouldn't have been finished yet.

"The most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history."

No shame

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 VICTIMS

Luckily we have Jesse Jackson for comic relief. (Although many liberals less silly than he toe the same line).

Racism is partly to blame for the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, calling President Bush's response to the disaster "incompetent"...

Jackson questioned why Bush has not named blacks to top positions in the federal response to the disaster, particularly when the majority of victims remaining stranded in New Orleans are black: "How can blacks be locked out of the leadership, and trapped in the suffering?"

"It is that lack of sensitivity and compassion that represents a kind of incompetence."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, head of the military task force overseeing operations in the three states, is black. His task force is providing search and rescue, medical help and sending supplies to the three states in support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.



New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin calls Lt. Gen. Russel Honore a "John Wayne dude" who can "get some stuff done."

Mayor Nagin, an African-American himself, seems pleased with the choice of Lt. Gen. Honore. However, if you aren't aware of Mayor Nagin's part in the suffering of the poorest of the poor, this is a good start - Blame Amid the Tragedy

After reading this, even I am ready to join those calling for the head of FEMA.

You have got to be kidding me

Michelle Malkin finds another quote where Brown said that "as late as last Sunday he expected Katrina to be a 'standard hurricane' even though the National Weather Service in New Orleans was already predicting 'human suffering incredible by modern standards.'"

Brown's incompetence is incredible by modern standards. And yet Bush thinks he's doing "a heck of job." Jesus Christ.

I am still not convinced that a heck of a lot more could have been done on such short notice, expecially when local authorities (i.e., the mayor) didn't seem to take the hurricane seriously enough until the day before it hit. You can't just move rescue equipment into the path of a potential Category 5 hurricane, especially when the contraflow program was put into effect so that people could leave the city.

I have a gut feeling about the death toll from Katrina which I hope is right. I believe that state officials are greatly exaggerating the numbers (up to 10,000 plus).

I remember on 9/11 people throwing around numbers like this from Reuters:

Officials feared the death toll could climb into the thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - as 40,000 people alone worked in the steel and glass Trade Center towers and a nearby 47-story building, World Trade Center No. 7, which collapsed seven hours later after a raging fire.

I also imagine that the media was pretty much restricted to certain areas of New Orleans - a highway overpass, the Superdome, the Convention Center. They have no way of knowing what will be found in the rest of the city and theories like "dead people drowning in attics" has replaced actually fact-finding.

I bet (hope) the number turns up being less than a thousand (in New Orleans).

Factcheck.org looks into the "Bush cut flood protection funding, people died" argument.

Is Bush to Blame for New Orleans Flooding?

Our fact-checking confirms that Bush indeed cut funding for projects specifically designed to strengthen levees...however..the Army Corps of Engineers – which is under the President's command and has its own reputation to defend – insists that Katrina was just too strong, and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.

Also, I think that there's a general feeling that FEMA funding has been cut, slashed, gutted, etc. by Bush. I'll just direct you to the latest budget which shows actual numbers for 2004 and 2005 as well as the proposed budget for 2006.

This just confirms the fact that all state and local Democrats in Louisiana were helpless to save additional lives and that they themselves are above criticism.

Bush Faces Rising Complaints About Handling of Disaster

"Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, a Democrat, said today that she was so angry about federal failures and second-guessing that if she heard any more criticism of local efforts, even from the president, she might "punch" him."

Needless to say, the Senator will be on 60 Minutes tonight to blame the President for everything that went wrong.

How can there be any criticism after the heroic efforts of the New Orleans police?

Law Officers, Overwhelmed, Are Quitting the Force

The officer said he had also heard of an incident in which two men in a New Orleans police cruiser were stopped in Baton Rouge on suspicion of driving a stolen squad car. The men were, in fact, New Orleans officers who had ditched their uniforms and were trying to reach a town in north Louisiana, the officer said.

"They were doing everything to get out of New Orleans," he said. "They didn't have the resources to do the job, or a plan, so they left."

I don't even know what to make of this report:

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans Police Superintendent Edwin Compass said Saturday, " No police department in the history of the world was ever asked to do " what his department did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And, his officers fought bravely doing it.

Compass said his officers have endured firefights, slept on the streets, run low on water and ammunition, and lacked radio communications during the ordeal.

Compass told CNN that 1,300 of his 1,700 officers are accounted for, and not a single officer was lost in what he termed battle or combat.

The superintendent also said most of the people holed-up in the Superdome and the convention center were "great people." He said there was a "very small criminal element," not much different from what his force deals with daily.

Just saying....before every post-Katrina death, rape and robbery in New Orleans is blamed on ANYONE at any level of government.

From a CNN report on August 18, 2005. I think the headline should win an award for understatement of the year.

Murder Rate Up In The Big Easy

The city's murder rate is still far lower than a decade ago, when New Orleans was the country's murder capital. But in recent years, the city's homicide rate has climbed again to nearly 10 times the national average.

This city was the Wild West even before the hurricane, it's just no one seemed to care.

Anne Rice becomes the latest and perhaps most famous former New Orleans resident to blame literally everyone else in the country for what happened to her city.

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?

And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question......

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Is there any way I can make sure that my donations and tax dollars to do not go to help rebuild her home? (And I've seen it - it was very nice).

I recently finished Thirteen and a Day : The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America by Mark Oppenheimer.

The author of the book attends and reports on bar-mitzvah customs of every type across America, from an Alaskan Chabad celebration to New York City Reform to Arkansas Jewish Renewal. For me, someone who just celebrated their "triple bar-mitzvah" at 39 years old, I didn't actually learn much new about how bar-mitzvahs are celebrated even though I've only been to maybe one or two in the last 25 years. What was interesting though is the reportage on the diverse ways that people practice Judaism and that regardless of their level of observance, the bar-mitzvah is one of the few ceremonies that ties us all together as Jews and keeps our traditions alive.

One custom which seems to be popular in my Conservative congregation is for the parents of the bar/bat-mitzvah to give a short speech with their child on the bimah in order to tell everyone how proud they are of their now not-so-little son/daughter. Personally I'd prefer not to do this when my daughters have their bat-mitzvahs in 2013 and 2016, but that's just me. It honestly makes me uncomfortable to see grown people set up to cry and it seems almost a glorification of self - I won't get into the pamphlets with the Glamour Shot of the bat-mitzvah girl that I recently saw distributed to the congregation. It's nice that the parents want to show their love for their child in public, but to me it's more of an emotional spectacle that belongs on Oprah or a reality TV show.

Tonight begins Rosh Chodesh Elul - the final month before the Yomim Noraim (the period from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur). But you knew that already - didn't you?

Elul - A Time to Reflect
The Month of Elul and Selichot
Rosh Chodesh Elul by Tony Bayfield
ABC's of Elul

If you had an important court date scheduled -- one that would determine your financial future, or even your very life -- you'd be sure to prepare for weeks beforehand.

On Rosh Hashana, each individual is judged on the merit of his deeds. Whether he will live out the year or not. Whether he will have financial success or ruin. Whether he will be healthy or ill. All of these are determined on Rosh Hashana.

Elul -- the month preceding Rosh Hashana -- begins a period of intensive introspection, of clarifying life's goals, and of coming closer to God. It is a time for realizing purpose in life -- rather than perfunctorily going through the motions of living by amassing money and seeking gratification. It is a time when we step back and look at ourselves critically and honestly, as Jews have from time immemorial, with the intention of improving.

There's an interesting article in The Jewish Press on the origin and decision-making process behind the "Prayer for the State of Israel" that is recited in many Jewish congregations.

Our Father in heaven, Protector and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the beginning of our redemption. Shield it beneath the wings of your love and spread Your canopy of peace upon it; send Your light and truth to its leaders, generals and advisors, and direct them with Your wise counsel. Strengthen the hand of the defenders of our holy land; grant them salvation; and crown them with the crown of victory. Bring peace to the land and permanent joy to its inhabitants. Remember our fellows Jews in the whole house of Israel throughout the diaspora. Speedily bring them to Zion, Your city, and Jerusalem, Your dwelling place, as it is written in the Torah of Moshe Your servant, “Even if you are dispersed in the farthest parts of the world, from there the Lord, your God, will gather you, from there He will take you. And the Lord, your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed and you shall posses it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.” Unite our hearts to love and respect Your Name and obey the words of Your Torah. Send us the descendant of David your righteous messiah to redeem those awaiting salvation. Enlighten with Your glory all the inhabitants of the world and let all who breathe proclaim: The Lord, God of Israel, is King, and He rules over all. Amen.

I know, I haven't posted much. First because I've been super-busy at work. Second because I've been too depressed about what's going on in New Orleans and I think everyone's said what needs to be said (and especially what doesn't need to be said).

I wish there was something more concrete I can do without either spending more time away from my family than I already do, but I guess I'll have to settle for donating money and maybe some food or clothes over the weekend. I imagine my local Jewish Family Serivces can use some help. My donations have gone to the American Red Cross generously matched by my employer, and United Jewish Communities.

Actually my wife is upset because we got a mailer through my kids' school on behalf of JFS saying that any donations of clothes must be NEW. I understand clean, but NEW?!?

I can't wait for my trip to Argentina next month so that I can spend my time explaining why I don't think President Bush is to blame for everything. All I'm going to tell them is to think about 9/11 and the recovery of New York. Who do they think of? Rudy Giuliani, the firefighters, the policemen, maybe even Governor Pataki if they were paying close attention. Bush got the credit for Iraq but not for New York. Now he's getting the blame for New Orleans and 95% of the country can't name the mayor of New Orleans and no one's seen the local police or fire chief on the air.
Hell, I've been paying attention and I can't remember the mayor's name..I just know he's the "pissed off" guy.

Probably the best picture of how local authorities screwed up is the parking lot full of city-owned school buses about a mile or two away from the Superdome that weren't used to evacuate people from the city. Oops!



If you think that much of the mayhem is due to the fact that much of the local National Guard is in Iraq, here is a response.

If you think that the fault is the federal government's failure to provide additional funds for the levees, here is a response from the Army Corps of Engineers.

I also detest anyone, especially leaders in the black community, playing the race card. You would think that every white person in the government was a secret Klansman. As I heard one person say, "blacks are angry and whites are embarrassed". Bullshit. Everyone should be angry and embarrassed.

I equally detest any right-wing loonies who say this was an act of God brought down against abortionists and gays.

As I also read somewhere, it's not that God acted AGAINST us, it's that we haven't been working WITH Him.

Finally, as ex-President Bill Clinton said the other day - "...You and I are not in a position to make any judgment because we weren't there."