"Nobody Told Me" The Dog Ate My Homework

UPDATE: Mayor Nagin's decisionmaking and Enviro lobbying below.

From today's NY Times:

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. . . To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.

"I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. "Nobody told me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then." . .

Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.

More:

MaxedOutMama's pondered the issue and poses an astute question:

If you do believe that the Executive should have the power to invade states and supercede local authority on the basis that they were not doing a good enough job, where would you draw the line? Simply saying that lives are at stake is not good enough. Lives, many lives, are lost from traffic accidents, for example. Last year it was something like 40 or 50 thousand. Over the space of a decade it is very possible that an individual state could lose more lives to traffic accidents than to a storm such as Katrina. Should the president have the authority to demand at gunpoint that the locals change their traffic laws, eliminate traffic circles and lower speed limits? . .

The President couldn't have stopped the flooding. The state was probably in the best situation to decide what additional law enforcement actions were needed and how to get them in the city before the storm. . .

People need to stop and think hard before babbling about these matters. There will be a review in Congress. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. After the 2000 election Congress rushed to mandate electronic voting, and as a result we got uncheckable machines and long voting lines. Hasty legislation is usually bad legislation. Instead, question your local authorities about their plans. They will pass your concerns on to your state authorities. Eventually I believe that Katrina will result in Congress mandating more federal feedback and rating of state and local disaster planning, but it is a huge task which will have to be accomplished by publicizing failures so that citizens can exert pressure on their local and state governments.

More and More:

Let them eat cake:

Turns out, Nagin turned his nose up at the yellow buses, demanding more comfortable Greyhound coaches instead.

"I need 500 buses, man," he told [radio station] WWL. "One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here."

Nagin described his response:

I'm like - you've got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.

While Nagin was waiting for his Greyhound fleet, Katrina's floodwaters swamped his school buses, rendering them unusable.

Environmental pressure groups share the blame, according to ORACULATIONS:

[D]on't forget the envirowhacks beginning but not ending with Save Our Wetlands (SOWL) who fought for years to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from building a lock device that would have stopped almost all flooding from the lake. SOWL as you will see if you link there are total nuts who believe everything bad about Bush and the GOP, allege that 9/11 was a U.S. plot, and other stuff. Professor Bainbridge has more including...get ready to crap...an LA Times piece that actually reveals the extent of the law suits stopping the improvements of levees and locks.

(via MaxedOutMama)