Friday, September 02, 2005


Department of Domeland Security

As Molly Ivins points out:

. . . the war in Iraq is directly related to the devastation left by the hurricane. About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short-handed.

The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators have also been sent abroad. (I hate to be picky, but why do they need high-water vehicles in Iraq?)

The levees of New Orleans, two of which are now broken and flooding the city, were also victims of Iraq war spending. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said on June 8, 2004, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

Meanwhile, according to a report from CNNthe Astrodome is no longer a haven for the evacuees from the New Orleans Superdome:

The Houston Astrodome in Texas, where thousands of refugees had been bused over the past couple of days, stopped accepting refugees late Thursday. However, authorities later decided to process evacuees at the Astrodome and house them in the nearby Reliant Arena, said Patrick Trahan, a city spokesman. Other New Orleans refugees are being taken to the Texas cities of Huntsville, San Antonio and Dallas.

Let's hope Reliant Arena lives up to its name; it used to carry the Enron logo.  Huntsville, of course, is the end of the line, where more executions are performed than anyplace else in the nation.  And the person who signed off on many of those executions was -- you guessed it, Gov. G. Dubya Bush.

If all else fails, maybe they could build a Fallujahdome large enough to house not only the refugees from that city, which the US military had to destroy in order to save, but also the ones from New Orleans.   Then they could construct some levees on the Euphrates to protect against a Category 5 sandstorm.  At least it would be a more approriate use of funds than the war.


4:06:30 PM    comment []