Video link to Keith Olberman's absolutely scathing editorial comment on Katrina and politicians.

Snagged from DailyKos.

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[T]he government reaction the last time an American city was destroyed - San Francisco, April 18, 1906.

The earthquake struck at 5:13 AM.

By 7 AM federal troops had reported to the mayor.

By 8 AM they were patrolling the entire downtown area and searching for survivors.

The second quake struck at 8:14 AM.

By 10:05 AM the USS Chicago was on its way from San Diego to San Francisco; by 10:30 the USS Preble had landed a medical team and set up an emergency hospital.

By 11 AM large parts of the city were on fire; troops continued to arrive throughout the day, evacuating people from the areas threatened by fire to emergency shelters and Golden Gate Park.

St. Mary's hospital was destroyed by the fire at 1 PM, with no loss of life, the staff and patients having already been evacuated across the bay to Oakland.

By 3 PM troops had shot several looters, and dynamited buildings to make a firebreak; by five they had buried dozens of corpses, the morgue and the police pistol range being unable to hold any more.

At 8:40 PM General Funston requested emergency housing - tents and shelters - from the War Department in Washington; all of the tents in the U.S. Army were on their way to San Francisco by 4:55 AM the next morning.

Prisoners were evacuated to Alcatraz, and by April 20 (two days after the earthquake) the USS Chicago had reached San Francisco, where it evacuated 20,000 refugees.

Video link to Keith Olberman's absolutely scathing editorial comment on Katrina and politicians.

Damn.

I wonder if in a few weeks things will go back to normal in the MSM, or does the government's failures really represent a sea-change in the way the media treats our government....

By 10:05 AM the USS Chicago was on its way from San Diego to San Francisco; by 10:30 the USS Preble had landed a medical team and set up an emergency hospital.

Why don't we have a navy or a naval shipyard in the Gulf at all? Why is the East Coast navy concentrated so heavily in Norfolk when the West Coast has four bases carrier groups run out of?

If we hadn't been so overzealous to close military installations over the last 15 or so years, maybe we could have had some support ships within a 24 hour sail of NOLA. I'm talking to you, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.

BBC editorial: Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.

But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.

Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

There's more... interesting stuff....

I hope the article is right....

I just found this on a list I follow but am way behind on. I don't think it has already been posted here. It's on the significance of New Orleans as a port to the economy of the US and the world: [link]

A state governor, the mayor of one of the nation's largest cities, and the previous President have now called out those in charge for their incompetence and apathy, and multiple news sources are picking the tone up and running with it as it becomes clearer that this is the way the public is leaning. I don't think the press is going to back down from this one.

We'll never take aid from Cuba. It would be admitting the failure of our government to take care of its own.

It's become rather a source of embarrassment, in fact. We're all having to face people who are like, "You're the richest country in the world and you can't handle this? Tiny economies are giving your aid money back to you?" This is usually followed up with a few points about how if we weren't spending all this money in Iraq.

On the other hand, we've backed off our original stance, directed from DC, of accepting no foreign aid whatsoever.

The Cuba thing, though...we can't verify that they are in fact doctors, and the Castro administration has tried in the past to send us people from their jails. So there's a possibility that "1100 doctors" means "1100 folks we want out of our prisons."

Yeah. The Cuba situation is messy enough that I wouldn't blame Bush for turning down this one. One of the very few things I don't blame him for this last week.

So there's a possibility that "1100 doctors" means "1100 folks we want out of our prisons."

I suppose we could test them first: "Here - perform an appendectomy on this guy. Points will be deducted for infection, failing to close the incision, uglier than usual scars, removing the wrong organ, or death."