Evacuees being turned away from Houston's Astrodome

[ligastar]

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Who should be leading this effort? Probably the governor, right? But we have the FEMA people, director of homeland security, the mayor, the president, etc. making statements. Presumably they are all making decisions. Or not making decisions, which actually seems to be the case. Who do you think should take over?

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The state and the feds should be working in conjuction. State and local authorities supposedly gameplan for things like this. They pay universities millions to do studies, crunch numbers, do analysis, gameplan. Even my simple idea of placing National Guardsmen in NO before Katrina hit would solve many issues. I'm just Joe Six Pack and I was paid nothing but it just seems logical to me. We are talking about a city of hundreds of thousands that could become paralyzed should the levee system break. Let's show some leadership and have boots on the ground should the worst case scenario happen.

I've seen no leadership from the Mayor, the Governor, FEMA or Bush. Also, Bush is a fool for visiting the destruction zone tomorrow. That's just going to piss people off more. We don't need images of that clown hugging a black child tomorrow (btw, I'm black, FWIW). Stay in Washington and work on the problem and the solutions that are needed for the months ahead. In fact, if I was a NO citizen and I ran into Bush I'd ask him one question: Why did you slash the NO Corp of Engineers budget by 20% to $71M when we've been asking Washington for assistance for years to shore up our levee system? We spend $1B a day in Iraq but can't appropriate funds to protect American citizens and infrastructure.

Sorry to rant, and I know this is the wrong forum, but some of you need to take a step back because much of this could have been avoided with proper leadership from top to bottom.

Greg H.