Update, 9/10/05: The following e-mail was proved to be false. See the comments below.

Below is an email forwarded to me by a friend that contains many purported facts about Bush's noble efforts to prepare New Orleans for the impending Katrina. I would be interested to hear any verification or refutation of any of the facts asserted in this email. It is, in my opinion, highly suspect. And, of course, the inevitable Congressional hearings on Katrina and her aftermath should clarify the facts of what did and did not happen.

Snopes.com does not have any info on the facts asserted below. . . but I did send this to Snopes.

Saturday, August 27, before the Hurricane hit, the President again
called Blanco and Nagin requesting they please sign the papers
requesting federal assistance, that they declare the state an emergency
area, and begin mandatory evacuation.

Didn't I read somewhere that the governor declared a state of emergency (and announced it on CNN) BEFORE the weekend even came around? I think if everyone here took one piece of this email at a time, we could debunk much of this email.

Here is a link that purports to be a declaration of a state of emergency in Louisiana by Bush on Saturday 27 August. The ensuing comments from AMERICAblog users speculate that this is a doctored copy, posted after the fact, of a declaration of a state of emergency in the wake of tropical storm Cindy, which occurred several weeks before. I mean, hell, even here in Sweden I knew on Saturday that Katrina was predicted to strike New Orleans, and there are three very interesting parishes missing from the list shown there: Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard.

This link shows a copy of the letter by which the governor of Louisiana requested federal assistance on Sunday 28 August, the day before the hurricane even hit.

Plus the salient point in all of this is that if Bush was so all-fired het up about making sure Louisiana got the aid it needed in spite of the supposed dilatation of the mayor and the governor, then why in the goddamned hell are so many people dead today for preventable reasons?

Pardon the language, but this whole thing makes me so angry I can hardly see straight.

There are no facts stated here, Prof, at least attributed ones. Somehow, an e-mail from "a friend" isn't very convincing. This kind of looks like the GOP talking points that are going around. If that is the case, I can see why you would redact the sender's name and address.

Yes, the Washington Postl had to run a correction on the GOP-stated "fact" that Blanco hadn't declared the state of emergency.

All this blaming the victims is making me sick to my stomach. Those people have no shame.

This link pulls together sources that prove what happened, who declared what, etc., in what order.

Best,
Tim

I, too, have received another version of this sickening email. I hit my "reply to all" button and stated this:

Everyone:

Please refrain from sending emails that are part truth and part lies unless you have definite proof that they are accurate. These types of emails only serve to further divide our country, and at this critical time in our history, we need to pull together and not point fingers. Taking the high road is the Christian thing to do.

Salon has this:

The most recent tack by conservatives defending President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina has been to pin the blame for the fiasco on state and local officials. As part of that effort, some commentators are saying that in the run-up to the storm, President Bush was so upset with New Orleans officials' preparations that he personally called Ray Nagin, the city's mayor, to urge an evacuation of the city.

The problem with that assertion? It's dead wrong. Media Matters for America has reverse-engineered the rumor -- which was repeated by Bob Williams in the Wall Street Journal and Brit Hume on Fox News, among others -- and traced it back to its source. According to Media Matters, an Associated Press story on the evacuation neglected to mention when Bush's call took place or whom he called. From there the story made its way onto conservative blogs like Power Line, and it was off and running. But it turns out that the president called Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, not Mayor Nagin, and that the conversation occurred just prior to a joint press conference at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, called by the governor and mayor to announce the evacuation. So Bush didn't prompt the evacuation order so much as second it.

But don't take our word for it. Here's how White House spokesman Scott McClellan described the call in his briefing today: "And the president, if you'll recall, on Sunday morning, was in touch with Governor Blanco ... he spoke to Governor Blanco around 9 a.m., had a good conversation with her about some of the things that needed to be done ahead of the hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast."

This is the second time the right-wing spin corps has been caught in the act since Hurricane Katrina. Over the weekend, the Washington Post and Newsweek were snookered by the White House into writing, falsely, that Gov. Blanco was delinquent in declaring a state of emergency for Louisiana. (The Post issued a correction; Newsweek has not.)

With the facts getting this mixed up, what we need is a timeline that lays out step by step how the crisis developed. Luckily, there are several, as Think Progress, AlterNet and Talking Points Memo have all posted lists that detail how the calamity unfolded. Call it the Rove Patrol.

LADD: "There are no facts stated here, Prof, at least attributed ones. Somehow, an e-mail from 'a friend' isn't very convincing. This kind of looks like the GOP talking points that are going around. If that is the case, I can see why you would redact the sender's name and address."

The reason I posted this email is because it states facts with no attribution. As stated in my original post: "I would be interested to hear any verification or refutation of any of the facts asserted in this email."

A friend sent this to me: I do not know the individual whose address block was listed at the bottom of the email, nor do I know whether that individual was the author of this email.

Which is all beside the point: the point being the verification or refutation of the (suspicious) facts asserted in the email.

I am interested to read the Salon article referenced above, but the link is farked.

sorry for the farked link. Try this one:

Salon War Room. If you're not a subscriber, you may have to click through lots of ads to get to the article.

Doesn't the Associated Press also a timeline? No need to even turn to the alternative media this time around.

It's important to bear in mind that there are multiple questions to be asked at once. And the truth is that one can find fault with the way states and locals handled their end without abdicating one iota of responsibility for the federal government getting "off their a$$es" (or vacations, as it were) as Nagin put it, and sending help and doing everything they can.

The really tragic thing that is happening is that the White House is trying to put all blame for their own problems off on Louisiana. And make no mistake: people are mad on the Mississippi Gult Coast at them, too. I can't wait to see if our state gets blasted as well (although Barbour is a buffer for that, at least for now).

We need leaders who don't pass the buck all the time. Starting at the top.

Also, Prof, your header for this thread and your previous posts seem to indicate that your intentions are more about promoting the talking points, rather than proving or disproving them. I apologize if I assumed incorrectly.

Still, what I said above still holds. These are unattributed talking points that should not be passed along as fact, or as anything, until they have some context and factchecking. We should do a factcheck project on them. Anyone game for leading that effort out there? I'm swamped with other issues today.

In fact, I can move this thread to Truth Watch, and make its header a bit less misleading.

think about this. in 2004 he went to hurricane spots in Florida SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK for more than one hurricane, none of which were this bad. this time? he's doing fundraisers and photo ops.

the idea that bush had

"pleaded with her to sign the request papers so the federal
government and the military could legally begin mobilization and call
up. He was told that they didn't think it necessary for the federal
government to be involved yet."

is laughable since she'd already, days before, declared a disaster area and asked for aid. moreover, are we to believe this president couldn't help in new orleans bc some papers weren't signed? is he THAT weak that he was scared to act to save people bc some papers weren't signed?

oh REALLY? if this is true, its like saying bush COULDN'T act because he was such a big chicken? ...and that's not much of a defense now is it?

haw!

i have a timeline. or at least i found one:

http://pollan.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-timeline.html

click on the title of the post.

oops. already posted above.

The answer (bless snopes.com):

http://www.snopes.com/politics/katrina/nagin.asp

Thanks, Prof. That's cool of you to post Snopes' response to this. Their analysis (see the page for links to their sources):

Origins: Sorting out who should have done what, and when, to head off the disaster in New Orleans produced by Hurricane Katrina will undoubtedly take a very long time (and the issue may never ultimately be resolved). A preliminary timeline doesn't seem to support the sequence of events claimed in the article quoted above, however:

According to the St. Petersberg Times, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center contacted government officials in Louisiana and Mississippi on Saturday night (27 August), not Friday night.

According to the New Orleans Time-Picayune, President Bush's first communication with Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco occurred on Sunday morning (August 28), just before a 9:30 AM press conference called by Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to announce the latter's mandatory evacuation order for New Orleans.

On Friday (26 August), Governor Blanco did indeed declare a state of emergency for the state of Louisiana in advance of Katrina's making landfall in the Gulf Coast.

On Saturday (27 August), Governor Blanco asked President Bush to declare a state of emergency at the federal level for the state of Louisiana.

The White House responded to Governor Blanco's request that same day (Saturday) by declaring the emergency and authorizing FEMA "to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency."

Last updated: 8 September 2005

All, please send this to anyone who sends you these fake e-mails. It's important to get the facts out there!

i recommend this video timeline to anyone of any political stripe:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Timeline-Katrina.mov

Story today in The New York Times takes on the feds-vs.-Louisiana debate:

<I>As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.

For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

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. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

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."

By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.[/i]

Full story.

There is no doubt about the truth displayed here (snicker):

http://www.snopes.com/photos/katrina/disaster.asp

We got another copy of this debunked e-mail today, this time sent to our letters account (as if we'd print something unattributed from the Internet or an anonymous e-mail!). This one was interesting because it seems to have originated from a woman who is listed all over the Internet as an "intercessor."

All I have to say is that even intercessors need to learn to check their sources before spamming other people with unattributed e-mail.

I have just contacted Snopes about the discrepancy between Governor Blanco's request (linked from the "Blame Nagin" page at Snopes discussed above), which included the following language:

Dear Mr. President:

Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. ßß 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR ß 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing. The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

(emphasis in bold mine)

and the resulting declaration (also linked from the "Blame Nagin" page), which included the following list of parishes:

The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.

Metropolitan New Orleans isn't even on that list.

Best,
Tim

Wow. Good eye, Tim. Keep up the good bloggin'.

Thanks, Donna, doin' what I can with my recently operated-upon eye ;-)!

Unfortunately my eye surgery means I can't go to Mississippi on 2 October as I was planning, but when I do get there, I'm looking forward to meeting you and many of the other bloggers here.

Best,
Tim

(Tim: Sounds like we need to schedule a lounge in October. :-)

Meanwhile, on the Truthwatch front, it seems that Newsweek "corrected" its mistake last week (where it quoted as fact a source in the WH saying that Blanco hadn't declared a state of emergency) with a timeline-focused story for this week.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could beóhow the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a centuryóis one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

And get a load of that title:

How Bush Blew It

Now, honestly, it puts some of the blame at the feet of the Mayor and Governor as well; but the way it's told here, I think they both get credit for yelling and pounded desks and trying to get Bush & Co. to pay some attention.

As for the Lounge, let's definitely schedule one in October, if not late September, and then another in October, to welcome all of Jackson's new residents ó whether from Sweden, the Coast or New Orleans. It's tragic that our Creative Class is growing due to such a tragedy, but it is, so let's do what we can to incorporate folks into the vibrant progressive community here as soon as possible. If you're new to town, be sure to sign up for our Lounge e-mail (just enter your e-mail address on the front page at the top) to get all our alerts about events and such. (We don't sell it to nobody!) I should also put this in the Lounge Blog as well.

As for the "blame game," I don't know a single soul who has said that the mayor and governor bear no responsibility in this. That's ludicrous (and more spin to say that people believe that). However, two things:

1. Local/state authorities were operating under extreme circumstances, lest we forget. The federal government was not. Many of them were vacationing.

2. The fact that a guy over there makes a mistake in no way makes this guy less accountable for his actions, non-actions and for making sure he has a team who knows what they're doing, and are doing it. This isn't some big either-or game. The most disgusting thing happening are the efforts to "blame" every aspect of the slow relief effect on the state and local governments so that the federal government can claim no responsibility -- plain old passing the buck. And to tell outright lies to get there ... well. It makes you wonder if Karl Rove wrote the above e-mail and then threw it into cyberspace.

I agree with both of y'all. It seems there are some things the city and state could have done better, but as Donna says, that doesn't lift the burden of responsibility off the shoulders of the federal authorities -- who, after all, claim primary responsibility for emergency response.

(Tim: Sounds like we need to schedule a lounge in October. :-)

I may be spending October in England. Y'all probably need a lounge in October, as Donna says, to welcome the influx of new people, but I hope there'll be another before too long after I get there. :-)

Best,
Tim