Click to watch:

On August 26, 2005, President Bush declared a “State of Emergency” in Louisiana. A day later he did the same for Mississippi. The hurricane hit on August 29, 2005, three days later.

continued below the fold
His declarations made Hurricane Katrina an “Incident of National Significance.” The National Response Plan (NRP) defines an Incident of National Significance as:

an actual or potential high-impact event that requires a coordinated and effective response by and appropriate combination of Federal, State, local, tribal, nongovernmental, and/or private-sector entities in order to save lives and minimize damage, and provide the basis for long-term community recovery and mitigation activities.

The critical point is here:

“ALL PRESIDENTIALLY DECLARED DISASTERS AND EMERGENCIES UNDER THE STAFFORD ACT ARE CONSIDERED INCIDENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE.” (NRP, 7)

Furthermore the NRP states:

When an incident or potential incident is of such severity, magnitude, and/or complexity that it is considered an Incident of National Significance, the Secretary of Homeland Security initiates actions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the incident.” (NHP, 15)

And so from August 26th onward the President already had declared he was lead via the NRP mandate. Because in the plan, which is a security assurance given to every state in this Nation, it says the President will lead in Incidents of National Significance. It says the President will order the Secretary of Defense to deploy troops, without a request from the local officials. It says the President directs the Secretary of Homeland Security and leads him in responding “effectively” to disasters.

So if they really want to hang their collective hat on the notion that 2 days after Bush already declared the NRP into effect, where he was now responsible to lead the proactive response to do what needed to be done, that somehow he was begging the local and state authorities to declare an evacuation… well they are welcome to it, because we already know that for three full days prior to the storm hitting, Bush was in charge via the NRP, and he could have forced the evac two days prior if he wanted to since he was so “Johnny on the spot” and in control, and because of the NRP already being in effect, he already had every legal authority and was already the one responsible.

This is the real face of modern Republicanism and their starve the beast, shrink the government to a size you can drown it in a bathtub world-view.

A dog consumes the remains of a man near a breach in a levee in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Image: © Allen Fredrickson/Reuters/Corbis

Photographer:    Allen Fredrickson

Date Photographed:    September 6, 2005

Location Information: NEW ORLEANS, LA, United States

I don’t know what I can say… what can we do to make people realize what the cost of Republicanism really is?

Download the flash movie at the top of this diary and pass it along (or pass along the URL, www.wiseass.org/katrina.html)