(no subject)

Having mostly just spent two days flat in bed, writhing in pain from one end of my GI system to the other, I've missed commenting on all the juicy stories of the week (Harlan Ellison, Keith Olbermann, and everybody's favorite photo-op Preznit).

But having just read this by Greg Palast, I find that outrage works almost as well as my long-abandoned caffeine:

DON’T blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east.

It wasn’t the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.

Here’s the story you haven’t been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.

Van Heerden isn’t the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This is no minor player. He’s the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He’s the top banana in the field — no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane’s devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.

I'm shocked, truly shocked, I tell you, to hear that the consulting company whose job it was to create an evacuation plan for New Orleans can't produce a copy of said plan. Or that the plan didn't include provisions for carless residents. Or that their prior experience in planning evacuations apparently included precisely zero major cities. Or that they apparently lied about having a major expert in the field on their staff.

Or that the company's founder had no experience in disaster planning, but was a major Republican contributor.

Or that the company FEMA has hired exactly the same company to fix the failed evacuation plan.

Heckovajob, Georgie.