Looking to help? Here’s a couple of links:
The American Red Cross
The Episcopal Relief and Development Fund
Initial reports were that Katrina had been less lethal than expected. Now it looks awfully bad.
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Helping Katrina Victims
Looking to help? Here’s a couple of links: The American Red Cross The Episcopal Relief and Development Fund Initial reports were that Katrina had been less lethal than expected. Now…
Posted those two links to my site as well. Thanks for putting them up.
My heart and some of my money go out to your country.
Did you know that there are about 7,000 National Guardsmen from Mississippi and Louisiana currently serving in Iraq? I have to wonder, as I watch this tragedy unfold, just what sort of difference having these people on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi would have made in the coming days.
A year ago governors warned the current administration that the large Guard deployments to Iraq would hurt their ability to deal with natural disasters and crime.
We’re all about to see what the “back door draft” means to your country.
Money to fix the levees was diverted from the Army Corps of Engineers to homeland security and the war in Iraq.
Yikes.
It’s not clear that the Bush administration would have spent the money, regardless (the tax cuts are also cited as a cause for the shortfall — and, honestly, $250 million in an annual budget of $2.5 trillion, or in the face of a national debt of $8 trillion, is trivial, if someone wants to find the money somewhere).
The Corps is often chronically short of money for projects it wants to do, which is either a horrible thing or a good thing, depending on who you talk to and which projects you’re referring to. For every person who wants the Corps to dam a river to prevent flooding, another person points out the massive ecological impact of that. And as this PBS special notes, the levee system — by reducing flooding and silt deposit and thus diminishing the Delta itself — has made the impact of hurricaines all the greater.
All that said, yes, the impact of using the National Guard and diversion of money from other projects also needs to be calcuated into the cost of war.
Amazon has put up a link from its front page that goes to its own donation page for the Red Cross (allowing One-Click donations). They’d faced some early criticism over not having something put up there — which is their prerogative, of course, but also a sign that they, like most other folks, didn’t recognize the severity of Katrina’s damage until hours, if not days, after it came ashore …
“Did you know that there are about 7,000 National Guardsmen from Mississippi and Louisiana currently serving in Iraq.”
And did you know that another 30,000 are being mobilized to help out in Mississippi and Louisiana? The Guard and Reserve is ready to do both.
(Heck, if they’d have me, I’d help out even though I retired from the NG several years ago.)