re: Kathleen Blanco puts in her two cents about Houston - Great for a good laugh

Well, since Bush was bashed as being totally at fault, she thinks the revisionist history account makes her blameless. Both she, and Nagin deserved much more blame. Add the Core of Engineers.

The pic of all those school busses sitting in water still is burned in my brain.

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The only one to bash right now is the Houston mayor, but he is still better than Nagin

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My cable has been out for the past 4 days (I'm only getting local news channels through rabbit ears) so I don't know what y'all are hearing from the national news, but Sylvester Turner has done a fantastic job.

I'm as right wing as they come and didn't vote for Turner, but I've been very impressed with him during this storm, and pretty much everyone in Houston feels the same.

So I'm not sure what the national media is saying about him and what they are trying to portray, but he's been great, so this disconnect where outsiders are bashing him is strange to see.

Talking heads/politicians have such a short memory.

Hurricane Rita, which I think at one point was a strong 4 or maybe cat 5, was taking direct aim at Houston. This was just after Katrina, so when the evacuation order came for the COASTAL communities (COASTAL ONLY) it was a free for all. It was straight up herd mentality, with people well inland high tailing it out and the roads were just a parking lot. Contraflow was in effect, but it had no effect. A two hour drive to Austin would take 26. More people died in that traffic jam from the actual hurricane which did what hurricanes do and wobbled off projected course.

To evacuate and put those people on roads would have sent them to the certain deaths by drowning. The spectacular pictures of the flood are the ones of our highways, which would have been a watery graveyard for hundreds of thousands.

You simply cannot orderly depopulate a place that has roughly 7 million people.

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Well to be fair they have a playbook based on Katrina and Sandy...FEMA rewrote their regs based on what was learned from those storms. Lots of preparation was learned from those experiences.

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Dude people were dying, the weather had cleared and they couldnt figure out how to get people water. It was a cluster on monumental levels because there was no leadership. It was a week later and babies were starving while the govt had meeting after meeting instead of action. It was ridiculous. They also wouldnt allow things like the cajun navy. She has blood on her hands.

She wasn't a total loss. Her handling of Katrina exposed just how poor the average American's understanding of the separation of powers between the states and Federal government works.

That's not an excuse for Bush or the fact that he had an idiot in charge of FEMA. But I still come across people that don't understand what Declaration of Emergency means or why Bush didn't send troops into New Orleans while the wind was still blowing.

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Well, since Bush was bashed as being totally at fault, she thinks the revisionist history account makes her blameless. Both she, and Nagin deserved much more blame. Add the Core of Engineers.

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In terms of designing and building of the levees, I hold the Corps of Engineers 100% to blame.

In terms of actual response, 55% Blanco, 35% Nagin, and like 10% Bush.

Blanco's refusal to accept federal troops is criminal in my mind. She's also a complete failure at seizing control of a situation and just cries on national tv, so theres that too.

She and Landrieu deserve each other.