Gov. Blanco still wants 1question answered: Where were the 500 FEMA buses?

Blanco says feds pledged buses

By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
mmillhollon@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, Gov. Kathleen Blanco still wants one question answered.
Where were the buses?

Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes.

On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.

Even after levees broke and residents were crowding the Louisiana Superdome, then-FEMA Director Mike Brown was bent on using his own buses to evacuate New Orleans, Blanco said.

Continued @ http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/091805/new_blanco001.shtml

The Founding Fathers had hoped the media would be watchdogs upon government, but during Bush’s first term, the establishment mass media were more like lapdogs. Most of the media, perhaps sensitive to comments that they were biased against Bush during the campaign, charges that ran throughout conservative radio talk shows and right-wing blogs, gave the new president a “honeymoon.” And then came 9/11. The mass media, like most Americans, stood beside their president. Soon, they were afraid to question his policies and his decisions, even the USA PATRIOT Act that the Bush Administration rammed down a fearful nation; the people seemed to willingly give up their civil liberties in order to get what they believed was protection. Those who protested the Bush Administration actions were often branded un-American or unpatriotic. As Bush began to shove the United States into an invasion of Iraq, the media focused primarily upon what the Administration was saying, and gave little airtime or print coverage -- or credence -- to the growing anti-war movement. As the United States went into Iraq, the media made a few noises but accepted the Administration’s rules that embedded journalists with specific units. To most, it seemed as if there was greater coverage; the reality was that there was greater manipulation, with reporters so focused upon the actions of the specific unit which they were assigned, and aware of the bundle of rules of what and how to report, they didn’t question the greater issues. Well after the March 2003 invasion, as evidence mounted about the lack of evidence to justify the war, and as the Administration’s statements and plans for the post-war planning were being proven wrong almost every day, the New York Times and Washington Post printed apologies for failing to question the President and his senior staff more closely about the war and its consequences. But, still, the media primarily fell within the web spun by Karl Rove and senior Bush Administration officials who were far better at controlling and manipulating the media and public opinion than the media were at aggressively challenging authority. For the most part, the media practiced stenographic journalism, recording and transmitting what was fed to them. This failure to aggressively challenge policies and practices allowed the deterioration in FEMA to go unnoticed by most of the country.

Emboldened by a nation that had begun questioning Bush’s policies, the media rose to the level the Founding Fathers demanded. With the federal government slow to react, the media moved into the Gulf Coast and began giving the nation unparalleled coverage of the disaster, free from manipulation, not forced to accept the role of being “embeds”. On the cable news channels, on TV network news, and on the radio, the people were getting almost unfiltered live coverage of Katrina’s destruction of property and lives, of hundreds of thousands of people helping each other, sacrificing for each other, of slivers of hope, of desperate people sometimes being forced to do desperate things, and of criminals who remained in the city to prey upon the victims and to shoot at rescue helicopters and patrolling soldiers. In their newspapers and news magazines, for one of the few times during the past four years, the people were getting far greater in-depth coverage about issues that mattered to them than earlier in the year when the trial of Michael Jackson, the divorce of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston, and the marriage of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner seemed to dominate the headlines. It didn’t take long for the nation and the media to realize that the federal government was displaying not courage in the face of disaster, but ineptness.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Brasch0912.htm

On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.