It’s that time of year again.  Time for everyone to trot out their preferred narrative about Hurricane Katrina.  Bush hates black people!  Democrats screwed everything up!  It was the most powerful storm evar!  People were too stupid to evacuate!  Racist cops refused to let black people cross the bridge to evacuate!  Those jackasses re-elected Chocolateville Ray Nagin!  We’ve given zillions of dollars to rebuild a city in a bowl!  Mississippi pulled itself up by its bootstraps, why can’t you people?  A recent favorite of mine from Daily Kos is “We Let the Republicans Kill a Major U.S. City.” [Read more...]

There’s a pseudo-scandal right now about Bobby Jindal’s supposed lies about his activities around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It all depends on the meaning of “during Katrina,” and that varies by the person. We tend to refer to “Katrina” as the overall situation, and “the storm” to refer to the bad weather we experienced on 8/29/05. [Read more...]

Well, some of the truth, anyway, but it’s a good primer to get you started, as a follow up to this post. I’m still getting my Gustav plans finalized.  [Read more...]

The entirely preventable 17th St. Canal levee failure

Three years ago, I sat stunned and nauseated in Dallas and watched my city flood. There are a lot of myths about Katrina, largely created by the media which hypes everything beyond recognition, and aided and abetted by politicians on both sides of the aisle and at all levels of government for their own benefit. Here are a few facts that most people don’t understand:

• Katrina was not a Category 5 hurricane when it made landfall either in the New Orleans area or the Mississippi coast.  [Read more...]