Racist!! They're just "finding" that stuff!!!

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but there is a livejournal blog running from a downdown NO office complex. It confirms the police officer lootings as well as a fairly current breakdown of events, and webcam.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

Consider how much more manageable this disaster would be if the destroyed city had had a competent administration in the first place.

They didn't "go bad." A considerable fraction of the NOPD has always been bad--murder and armed robbery bad. The chaos in New Orleans is due at least in part to the endemic culture of corruption that's been tolerated there for literally centuries.

Exactly. I love (loved?) New Orleans, but anybody who spent any time there, and had any powers of observation, could easily be aware of the rather open corruption of the place. It's a damned, damned shame, especially since it is the weak and helpless who are bearing the ruthless brunt of it right now. Mark my words; when this story is told in full, some aspects of what is occurring will be reminiscient of the Balkans or Darfur, in terms of what degradations the weak are being subjected to. Disgusting beyond words.

A few years ago I saw an ad trying to recruit people from other states to move to NO and become cops. The thinking was that people from other states wouldn't have criminal connections, and would dilute the criminal influence in the NOPD. I looked at it for a while but couldn't figure out how to make a living on what they paid their cops. I wasn't rich, but going from what I was making then to the amount the NOPD paid would have been really hard.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

I live in New Iberia, Louisiana and have spent a lot of times in New Orleans as my sister lived in the French Quarter near Dauphine and St. Phillip. I would have been surprised had some policemen _not_ taken part in the looting. Here in New Iberia, we have already seen robberies and at least one car-jacking by refugees.

let's pause here for an academic moment and try to draw threads together.

In NO, people are shooting each other and looting for food and other stuff. There's no telling when conditions will improve. But they live in a 1st world country, and clearly their lives will improve.

In Iraq, people live in a place where conditions are challenging. Most (not all) are trying to live in lawfulness and order. A few are not. People are not looting. They don't know when conditions will improve.

Okay, so which is the fault of the US govt?

It still surprises me that while most people used to go to New Orleans to experience the vicarious thrill of a walk on the wild side in an area that wore its morally casual attitude on its sleeve, they now somehow think that what has happened there when the Thin Blue Line evaporated is abnormal and completely beyond the realm of the imaginable.

Hey, I loved New Orleans, and I am profoundly disappointed by the aftermath of Katrina and the subsequent flooding on a lot of fronts, but am I suprised? In a word, no.

In Iraq, people live in a place where conditions are challenging. Most (not all) are trying to live in lawfulness and order. A few are not. People are not looting. They don't know when conditions will improve.

Jenny, do you remember the looting immediately after Baghdad fell?

It's not a matter of being a 1st world country or a 3rd world country- humans are humans pretty much everywhere. What matters is if the local authorities are able to impose order.

In Iraq, the locals know that the Iraqi Police will, and if something comes up that they can't handle, the US Army/USMC will deal with it.

In New Orleans, the locals know NOPD can't impose order, so they're running wild.

This isn't the fault of the US government, it's the fault of the New Orleans city government- although I hear the feds are moving in.

There are reports of US Marines entering New Orleans, and with the experience in urban warfare they've gotten in Iraq, I expect the people raising hell are going to be dealt with fairly quickly.

I wonder what the MSNBC reporter took after the cameras were turned off. ("ooo, there's still one bottle of KY left. Let's see what we have for reading material. Jet is sold out, XXL sold out, Essence, The Oprah Magazine...here we go, Time. Oh boy, I hope there's a picture of Condoleeza in there).

As I posted on another Blog, the reaction of the inhabitants of New Orleans compares very badly with those od Des Moines during the great flood of '93. Sure hurricanes are worse but at least they had warning. Des Moines had none and their levees also broke. Did those people weep and wail,blame Clinton, trash and loot the place? No, they pitched in and fixed the breaches and cleaned their town up.

I saw the clip of two female police officers pushing a shopping cart and helping themselves, along with the other looters.

My impression of those acting like animals are from the same "victim" society that Jesse Jackson,Al Sharpton and the NAACP have cultivated all these years. They don't know how to help themselves (except to someone else's property). They expect the government to provide everything because they have an entitlement for ast wrongs.

A black man who had made it from the hellhole of the No dome to Houston said he was so ashamed of his people and the way they conducted themselves in the shelter. Could be why Houston suddenly closed the Astrodome. They probably didn't want it trashed.

Why do French colonies always go to pot?

Maybe their rotten mayor pays them so little while living in a fancy penthouse