| Landrieu Slanders New Orleans Workers |
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September 12, 2005 |
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RUSH: All right, Mary Landrieu. I have teased you long enough. And, by the way, I'm getting a lot of I wouldn't say grief, but people say, "Rush, are you okay?" Because last week I said, you know, I like Mary Landrieu. She's a swing vote in the Senate, she's not one of these pedal-to-the-metal libs that doesn't move off of it now and then, and I said some days she actually looks cute to me, nice looking woman, still has some of her baby fat in fact. And people have been questioning my judgment ever since. Even Cookie here on the cue sheet roster, "Mary cute baby fat Landrieu," you know, with a little smirk here towards me. Anyway, here's what happened. I just want you to imagine if a Republican governor, if there were a Republican governor, or Senator, white, talking about black employees in a city and saying what Mary Landrieu says here in this bite, I want to know if he'd have gotten away with it. Here's the question from Chris Wallace. "Senator Landrieu, I want to ask you, and I'm going to ask you both--" some other senator was on there, too "--about the local response. Was it incompetent and insulting for Mayor Ray Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation, but then to leave buses--" and we got a picture of these buses "--hundreds of buses idle so that they could be flooded instead of using them to get people out?"
LANDRIEU: I was there, as you know, through the whole ordeal with state and local officials and was right there with Louisiana Democrats and Republicans, city council members, police chiefs, mayors, the governors, and could watch what Haley Barbour was doing and Governor Riley in Alabama. I am not going to level criticism at the local level. These people --
REPORTER: But I'd like you to answer if you could this one specific question --
 LANDRIEU: I will. I will answer it. I am not going to level criticism at local and state officials. Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane.
RUSH: All right, folks. (Laughing.) It's flat out amazing. Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane? What? We simply can't expect certain big cities to work well because their employees won't show up? And it's unfair to hold them accountable because most mayors can't get their employees to work anyway? Isn't that what's called the soft bigotry of low expectations? Could it be said, ladies and gentlemen, that Mary Landrieu is making this argument because New Orleans has a high percentage of African-Americans in it who might make up quite a number of these employees that Mayor Nagin can't get to show up? I hope not, folks, I certainly hope not but I mean it certainly sounds that way. This is the way the left has conditioned me to think. The left has conditioned me to think in terms of skin color and skin gender -- well, not skin gender -- well, could be skin gender in San Francisco. I'm simply referring to the addadictomy procedure here that's paid for my taxpayers out there. But she won't go where the criticism needs to be, she won't go local. Here's the question I have. |
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The question I have for both Mary Landrieu and Governor Blanco, who are their controllers, who's running them? Is it Howard Dean? Is it Harry Reid? Which member of the Democratic Party apparatus is coordinating all this so there is not a deviation from the plan to keep all the focus on Bush and FEMA and other places? As I say, we're going to nuke this whole notion today. I'm sure you've heard about this great piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by a guy named Jack Kelly: The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed. And, folks, I have to tell you this, too, there was an absolutely fabulous story in the Palm Beach Post yesterday, it was by Dara Kam and Alan Gomez: Lack of plan hurt Katrina-hit states' response, is the headline. You know what this story does? This story talks to Florida state and local officials on how they have dealt with hurricanes. Mentions not a word about the feds. Talks about the plans that they have here in Florida, how often they meet to take tests and temperatures of the plans and then to do dry runs. It even mentions that some of these Florida executives and planners called Louisiana and Mississippi when they learned Katrina was going to miss the Florida panhandle and offered their services and both states turned them down, but it's a fascinating story. It appeared yesterday in the Palm Beach Post, and it really explains how all of this preparedness is a local and state responsibility, that it is not a federal responsibility. Mr. Snerdley wants to know what am I doing reading the Palm Beach Post. All right, I mess fess up, I wasn't. It was recommended to me. Snerdley is in there wiping his brow. "Whew." No, I wasn't. It was recommended to me by someone who read it, so I remembered late yesterday afternoon between football games to go check the website and there it was. Trish in Alberta, Canada, I'm glad you called. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I was listening to this whole thing on Fox News yesterday as well, and what struck me, it was incredible to hear Mary Landrieu blame the Bush administration for not spending their surplus to help refurbish these levees. Clinton could not do it, he had to cut back on the funds because he was dealing with the deficit left over by the Reagan administration, and then she added the first Bush administration. And I'm sitting there thinking, my God, a year ago all we were hearing from these Democrats was that it was the worst economy since Herbert Hoover. Now, where did Bush's surplus come from, where did it magically appear from?
RUSH: I know, there isn't one.
CALLER: Exactly, and there wasn't one with Clinton.
RUSH: I've got some more Mary Landrieu sound bites coming up, but the reason why I asked the question about who is controlling her and who is running Kathleen Blanco, it is clear that left on their own, folks, they're going to step in it. You put a bag of cow manure out there and most of these people are going to step in it, and somebody's going to be guiding them away from the cow manure. And yesterday somebody was unable to keep Mary Landrieu out of the cow manure.
CALLER: Yes, sir. |
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RUSH: I mean, she literally just stepped right in it here. "Well, most mayors can't get their people to work on an sunny day." Yeah, like everybody, this is understood. Is that the way we look at bureaucrats and their employees? "Come on, everybody knows that the people aren't going to go to work." What is that, the soft bigotry of low expectations? What, are local civil service jobs simply patronage jobs just to give them a paycheck and whether they show up to work or not is no big deal? It's amazing. You know, I used to call it shiftless and lazy, but now, see, we can't call it shiftless and lazy because that would be simplistic. We have to understand why they are shiftless and lazy and who wouldn't be when they see all these people making so much money at Enron and Halliburton, what is the point of going to work if you can't get anywhere near a decent wage when there Enrons and WorldComs and Halliburtons and Cheneys and Bushes out there. "They have no hope, Rush, why should they go to work? It's not going to lead them anywhere." The anthem of the self-loathers. You always have to understand root causes. You can never blame victims. You can never blame the poor. Nobody is ever responsible for what happens to them. Even those who didn't get out of New Orleans, it's not their fault. Even those that could and didn't, it's not their fault, it's not their fault. You have to understand the root causes, and it all boils down to what the hate-America crowd sees: a basic unfairness and inequality in the way the country is designed, in the way the country is put together.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
 RUSH: Here's the sound bite from the woman that called from Alberta, Canada, Trish. We have the sound bite she was referring to from Mary Landrieu yesterday on Fox News Sunday. The host Chris Wallace with Mary Landrieu says basically, "Is it just the president who gambled and lost, or, frankly, did a lot of Louisiana politicians, including you?"
LANDRIEU: The president gambled and lost, and I'll tell you why, if you'll let me answer this question. Number one, it is true that the president gave slightly more than Bill Clinton. But what is also true is Bill Clinton was running the largest deficit created by the Reagan administration before him, and the Bush administration before him. President Bush was running a surplus. Yet when he had a surplus, he didn't invest it in levees and flood protection for people from Miami to Orlando to New Orleans to Biloxi or to Mobile.
RUSH: This is sad. This is what Trish was talking about. It's just patently sad that somebody with this limited amount of understanding and knowledge is actually in the US Senate. The nineties were the greatest decade for economic activity in recent years, I thought. When was the peace dividend and all the surplus? Well, that came after the Soviet Union and the wall fell, and the Clinton administration got rid of all those big deficits. This surplus that she's talking about, there never was a surplus. It was ten-year economic forecasts. But anybody with half a brain can tell you, folks, that two things are going to happen when a government report says there's a huge surplus in the out years. A, government is going to suggest raising taxes, not cutting them, and, B, they're going to spend it. And this is precisely what happened. There never was a surplus. This is a Democrat mantra talking point about how the Bush administration squandered this giant surplus left by the Clinton administration. But deficits only stop Democrats from spending when they are Republican deficits. But the point is she didn't answer the question. Hey, Wallace tried, you've got to give him credit. But it was clear, more money was spent on the levees, more money was given to the Corps of Engineers during the five years of the Bush administration to date than were sent during equivalent period of time during the Clinton presidency. And, you know, she's out there fudging the numbers on the levee project. She cooked the books (Money Flowed to Questionable Projects).
Remember, they had a report that said the cost-benefit analysis to fixing the levees would not make it sensible to do, and she went back and she told the Corps to basically to cook the books, to do some recalculations to show that it would, in order to get the money. The question is where did the money go? It went to the Corps but it didn't go to these levee projects which everybody has been warning about for five or ten years. And the idea that it can now fashionably be blamed on Bush -- folks, it's as specious -- and that's why I say this is a modern media scandal from the death toll to the hysteria to the willing attempt to join forces with the left to blame this on Bush. It's just the new Cindy Sheehan. It's all it's ever been. And it was camouflaged and disguised with all the pictures of sadness and horror that we saw. So when you couple the projections of thousands and thousands and thousands of dead with the pictures and Republicans unwilling to stand up to it, it gave this whole scandal a legitimacy that it apparently doesn't -- well, "scandal" -- gave it a legitimacy it doesn't deserve.
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Read the Articles... |
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Money Flowed to Questionable Projects
State Leads in Army Corps Spending, but Millions Had Nothing to Do With Floods
By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 8, 2005; A01
Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.
Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.
In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.
For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast.
The Industrial Canal lock is one of the agency's most controversial projects, sued by residents of a New Orleans low-income black neighborhood and cited by an alliance of environmentalists and taxpayer advocates as the fifth-worst current Corps boondoggle. In 1998, the Corps justified its plan to build a new lock -- rather than fix the old lock for a tiny fraction of the cost -- by predicting huge increases in use by barges traveling between the Port of New Orleans and the Mississippi River.
In fact, barge traffic on the canal had been plummeting since 1994, but the Corps left that data out of its study. And barges have continued to avoid the canal since the study was finished, even though they are visiting the port in increased numbers.
Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, remembers holding a protest against the lock four years ago -- right where the levee broke Aug. 30. Now she's holed up with her family in a St. Louis hotel, and her neighborhood is underwater. "Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork," Dashiell said.
Yesterday, congressional defenders of the Corps said they hoped the fallout from Hurricane Katrina would pave the way for billions of dollars of additional spending on water projects. Steve Ellis, a Corps critic with Taxpayers for Common Sense, called their push "the legislative equivalent of looting."
Louisiana's politicians have requested much more money for New Orleans hurricane protection than the Bush administration has proposed or Congress has provided. In the last budget bill, Louisiana's delegation requested $27.1 million for shoring up levees around Lake Pontchartrain, the full amount the Corps had declared as its "project capability." Bush suggested $3.9 million, and Congress agreed to spend $5.7 million.
Administration officials also dramatically scaled back a long-term project to restore Louisiana's disappearing coastal marshes, which once provided a measure of natural hurricane protection for New Orleans. They ordered the Corps to stop work on a $14 billion plan, and devise a $2 billion plan instead.
But overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects. Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina's storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands.
"The project manager for the Great Pyramids probably put in a request for 100 million shekels and only got 50 million," said John Paul Woodley Jr., the Bush administration official overseeing the Corps. "Flood protection is always a work in progress; on any given day, if you ask whether any community has all the protection it needs, the answer is almost always: Maybe, but maybe not."
The Corps had been studying the possibility of upgrading the New Orleans levees for a higher level of protection before Katrina hit, but Woodley said that study would not have been finished for years. Still, liberal bloggers, Democratic politicians and some GOP defenders of the Corps have linked the catastrophe to the underfunding of the agency.
"We've been hollering about funding for years, but everyone would say: There goes Louisiana again, asking for more money," said former Democratic senator John Breaux. "We've had some powerful people in powerful places, but we never got what we needed."
That may be true. But those powerful people -- including former senators Breaux, Johnston and Russell Long, as well as former House committee chairmen Robert Livingston and W.J. "Billy" Tauzin -- did get quite a bit of what they wanted. And the current delegation -- led by Landrieu and GOP Sen. David Vitter -- has continued that tradition.
The Senate's latest budget bill for the Corps included 107 Louisiana projects worth $596 million, including $15 million for the Industrial Canal lock, for which the Bush administration had proposed no funding. Landrieu said the bill would "accelerate our flood control, navigation and coastal protection programs." Vitter said he was "grateful that my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee were persuaded of the importance of these projects."
Louisiana not only leads the nation in overall Corps funding, it places second in new construction -- just behind Florida, home of an $8 billion project to restore the Everglades. Several controversial projects were improvements for the Port of New Orleans, an economic linchpin at the mouth of the Mississippi. There were also several efforts to deepen channel for oil and gas tankers, a priority for petroleum companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We thought all the projects were important -- not just levees," Breaux said. "Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but navigation projects were critical to our economic survival."
Overall, Army Corps funding has remained relatively constant for decades, despite the "Program Growth Initiative" launched by agency generals in 1999 without telling their civilian bosses in the Clinton administration. The Bush administration has proposed cuts in the Corps budget, and has tried to shift the agency's emphasis from new construction to overdue maintenance. But most of those proposals have died quietly on Capitol Hill, and the administration has not fought too hard to revive them.
In fact, more than any other federal agency, the Corps is controlled by Congress; its $4.7 billion civil works budget consists almost entirely of "earmarks" inserted by individual legislators. The Corps must determine that the economic benefits of its projects exceed the costs, but marginal projects such as the Port of Iberia deepening -- which squeaked by with a 1.03 benefit-cost ratio -- are as eligible for funding as the New Orleans levees.
"It has been explicit national policy not to set priorities, but instead to build any flood control or barge project if the Corps decides the benefits exceed the costs by 1 cent," said Tim Searchinger, a senior attorney at Environmental Defense. "Saving New Orleans gets no more emphasis than draining wetlands to grow corn and soybeans."
Jack Kelly: No shame
The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio
It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.
"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.
But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.
Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.
So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.
I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:
More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.
The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.
Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.
Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:
"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.
"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.
"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."
"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.
Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.
Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.
And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.
Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.
The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.
A better question -- which few journalists ask -- is why weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?
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