Mayor Orders Mandatory Evacuation of New Orleans

Pickens writes "City officials ordered everyone to leave New Orleans beginning Sunday morning — the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city three years ago — as Hurricane Gustav grew into what the city's mayor called 'the storm of the century' and moved toward the Louisiana coast. 'This is the real deal. This is not a test. For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life,' said New Orleans mayor, C. Ray Nagin. Already, hundreds of thousands of residents had begun streaming north from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas stretching from the Florida Panhandle to Houston. Bush administration officials took pains not to be caught as flatfooted as they were in Hurricane Katrina, announcing that President Bush had called governors in the region to assure them of assistance and that top federal emergency officials were in the region to guide the response. 'We could see flooding that is worse than what we saw with Katrina,' said Louisiana Governor Jindal." The US Geological Survey will be running a real-time "Map of Hydrologic Impacts" to monitor flood levels, and the National Weather Service has charted direction and wind-speed probabilities. Reader technix4beos points out the need for IRC transcription of FEMA and NOAA feeds.

Comments

Ellen

[kanweg]

Is Ellen Degeneris still living in New Orleans, then?

Bert

Re:Fuck it

[darkpixel2k]

Don't try to pretend I said something I didn't. I said "the KKK crowd" rather than just "the KKK" quite deliberately; there aren't really any links between any political party and the KKK itself any more, because except for a few die-hards the KKK as an organization has been pretty much defunct for decades

You said "For decades now, the KKK crowd has been the property of the Republican Party." To me, that sounds like you are saying that the KKK and the ilk that surrounds them either belong to or are controlled by the Republican party. So I asked you to show me links. If I misunderstood what you were saying, then please clarify what you meant by "For decades now, the KKK crowd has been the property of the Republican Party.".

-- thanks in large part to the efforts of Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Democratic Attorneys General Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Clark.

Ahh that would be President Johnson who (as a senator) said:
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
And also:
President Truman's civil rights program "is a farce and a sham--an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I have voted against the so-called poll tax repeal bill. . .. I have voted against the so-called anti-lynching bill."

And Attourney General Robert F. Kennedy who said the following before illegally wiretapping Martin Luther King's phones:
"I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes."

By "the KKK crowd" I mean, of course, the sorts of people who would be Klansmen if it were still socially acceptable ...

I see what you're saying. You're saying that IF the KKK were still around, you know who would be in it, and that it would be most Republicans. That's some great evidence there.

Meanwhile, Thurmond's and Helms' spiritual heirs go Republican in overwhelming numbers.

This sentence has me completely lost. I'm not sure what you are saying. People who once voted republican and voted for Thurmond and Helms continue to vote republican?

I'll agree with you that Thurmond was a douche. His campaigns about 'states rights' were bullshit when you look at the Declaration of Independence. Thurmond can say all he wants that it's up to the states to make decisions about slavery--except one of our founding documents says "...that all men are created equal". Which totally shoots down his argument in my opinion.

Look--I'm not arguing that the republican party is totally perfect and the democrat party is totally racist. My statement was simply that the MAJORITY of the democratic party is racist compared with a small MINORITY of republican party which is racist.

except Byrd, who nearly alone among his contemporaries had the guts not only to admit that he was wrong, but also work to do something about it.

Good for him for standing up and admitting he was wrong and apologising.