Katrina Again

by hilzoy

Washington Post"

"With much of central New Orleans finally cleared of hurricane refugees, search teams widened operations Sunday to outlying streets, moving house to house with orders to evacuate all remaining residents from the city.

Determined to reestablish order, police shot several people and killed at least two after gunmen opened fire at or near a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make repairs, authorities said.

Mortuary teams also began the gruesome task of collecting corpses still floating in floodwaters, trapped inside buildings or abandoned on highways after the devastating storm that deluged the city a week ago. Officials warned that the death count -- which Louisiana officials put at 59 on Sunday -- is sure to rise exponentially.

"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Sunday on CNN before he headed to the area, echoing predictions made last week by city and state officials."

This will be horrible. My heart goes out to anyone who's still alive in New Orleans, to the friends and family of the dead, and to the rescue and recovery workers who have the awful job of finding them.

Comments

[Dianne]

"Determined to reestablish order, police shot several people"

Did anyone else's mind suddenly stutter to a stop when they read this phrase? The shootings may have been justified, ie police shooting at people who shot at them, but the juxtaposition in the sentence makes it sound like shooting people is just a normal and necessary part of reestablishing order. Which just seems...bizarre.

[Tad Brennan]

After eight days of neglect and incompetence, things are still so bad in New Orleans that having the police shoot people may well improve them.

And two and a half years later in Baghdad, things are so bad that the insurgents can execute a raid, in daylight, on the Interior Ministry.

But don't worry--the Rove/Bush/DeLay gang is sparing no effort to turn around the war on control of the US media. They aren't interested in controlling anything else, but they will try their best to control their pet journalists and control the public's perceptions.

[Ugh]

Stolen from DeLong who got it from Avedon Carol on the Bush administration:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

[Gary Farber]

"...who got it from Avedon Carol...."

Who credited Rob Hansen.

[Anarch]

Who credited Rob Hansen.

Who was not in any way the originator of the phrase (though I don't feel like tracking down its ultimate genesis).

[Anarch]

OT: From the previous post in that thread, hilzoy, this one's for you:

And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"

They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed."

And Jesus replied, "What?"

[Donald Johnson]

Whoever coined it, it should be called the Bush Corollary to Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".) The person who exemplifies it deserves the honor more than the person who said it first.

[ral]

Donald, I thought someone else here might beat me to that one but I expected it to be Gary!

[Tim]

Bush's Law: "Anything that can't possibly go wrong, will."

[bob mcmanus]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"."

Clarke got that from "Tropic of Cancer"

[Slartibartfast]

I read about the shootings this morning in the paper, and the article I read explicitly stated that the NO police were fired upon and returned fire, killing 5 or 6 of the eight people who were shooting at them. Assuming the account is accurate, then, I'd say that yes, this is part of keeping the peace: shooting people who are attempting to shoot those who are attempting to bring aid.

And on that same page, tucked into a little box on the lower left-hand corner, there was a paragraph that said (paraphrasing, here) that Mayor Nagin was relinquishing all authority over NO (I can't recall to whom he was relinquishing authority to) and was withdrawing the entire NOPD. I thought that ought to have had been reported in print several font sizes larger, and possibly with exclamation points.

[Anarch]

I read about the shootings this morning in the paper, and the article I read explicitly stated that the NO police were fired upon and returned fire, killing 5 or 6 of the eight people who were shooting at them. Assuming the account is accurate, then, I'd say that yes, this is part of keeping the peace: shooting people who are attempting to shoot those who are attempting to bring aid.

The current and quasi-stable iteration of this story has (or at least, had a few hours ago) two people shot and killed and a further three injured. Hard to say but yes, if this iteration holds, that sadly does count as keeping the peace.