Redstate

I was just listening to the good Senator on WWL TV's live feed. After listening to her berate FEMA and praise the state and local officals who did absolutely everything exactly right from beginning to end I had the feeling of listening to a report of an entirely different disaster.

The "old" FEMA (the one that responded to Katrina) was underfunded (the administration having slashed their funding), incompetently managed, completely disorganized, etc. But now that the President has met with the Governor and the Mayor the "new" FEMA is going to do everything right. Of course it's the same cast of characters, the same old plan, the same old funding, etc. But, thanks to the intercession of the Governor and the Mayor telling the President how it should work somehow it's been magically transformed.

Funny how the mismanaged, disorganized, underfunded, etc., FEMA managed to respond to four hurricanes in Florida in 6 weeks along with others that struck the east and gulf coasts. And living in South Florida somehow we all managed to survive while FEMA got up and running. Strange.

According to the Senator on of the major problems was/is communications. She commented on a complaint from the NOPD that they could not communicate with their officers because their radios were down along with the cellular system. And they can't communicate with the other releif workers. I certainly understand how the local NOPD radio system failure is the fault of FEMA.

She did say that at one point this weekend someone from FEMA (Director Brown I think) handed her a satphone. She said something to the effect that she thought "oh wonderful, now I can communicate. But the satphone didn't work --- That's how disorganized FEMA is.'

As I said, I thought I was hearing about a different disaster.

(It would be nice if there was, but I'd be surprised if there is ever a transcript from this interview, WWL-TV is understandably not set up to provide that kind of thing right now.)

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Someone perhaps needed to show her how to push the little button you need to "talk" and perhaps charge it.

What ticks me off is that the lefty-libs went off before the rain stopped last week.

Priorities ... what's more important? Bashing Bush or saving lives ... ohwait. My bad.

Will see if WWL has a site, tho ... and nose around. Thanks for the info.

It's actually quite good. They are streaming from the Louisiana Public Broadcasting studio in Baton Rouge I think.

I had no trouble getting the stream in the hours after the flooding but then lost if for several days. Their reporting was better in many ways as they were giving some local context to their video --- what part of town, where it is relative to the city, etc. The national media coverage seems to be all "run together" so you never really know much about where the video is from, east or west, what parish or the city, etc.