Setting an example (Al Gore & other private citizens respond to Katrina)

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/3350932

While government failed the Katrina test, many individuals stood tall.

Much of the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has rightly focused on the inability of government at all levels to adequately protect citizens against an oft-anticipated disaster and its consequences. Removed from heading the federal relief effort following an unacceptably slow response, Michael Brown resigned Monday as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

While private efforts cannot approach the magnitude of resources that state, local and federal agencies can bring to bear in an emergency such as Hurricane Katrina, they serve as an example of what individual determination can accomplish.

Two private charter flights organized and paid for by former Vice President Al Gore ferried 270 ill New Orleans residents to safety during a period when the federal relief effort had hardly begun. Gore responded to an appeal from Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who had previously operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a 1989 auto accident. Kline was at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, surrounded by rising floodwaters and without power to care for desperately ill patients.

(more... )

Al Gore wanted absolutely no publicity. He only wanted to help people.

Read this heart-warming account of his trials and tribulations of fighting FEMA idiots and Chimpy administration bureaucracy in order to be allowed to save dozens of critical patients who might have otherwise died.

This article will put a smile on your face and will also piss you off about Chimpy's new world.

Gore at NOLA: The Fastercures Airlift From New Orleans

Also available as a pdf:
Warning: PDF file of above link

for president in 2008. That is, if he wants it. I get the idea that there is some energy behind that idea (your moniker is a hint).

Sadly, this country has to go through some very rough times, with the poor getting most of the shafting as usual, before it wakes up and sees the Bush Administration in all of its horror.

Al Gore has never looked better. Let's hope that by 08 we still have a country to save!