One more thing

This just in President Bush is launching an investigation on himself. Now correct me if I am wrong but the guy has lost it. Fess up Mr. President and save the tax payers money for a bullshit investigation.


A special thank you to Oprah for showing everything on her show today. Ms. Winfrey. I meet you back in 1997 when my son was in your movie. I shook you hand you spoke, hug and walk with me. I knew then what I know now. You are a powerful woman with the heart of a saint. Maybe you Ms. Winfrey can take Bush’s place for the Presidency.

God had a hand on them

By Ellen Barry Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times Tue Sep 6, 9:40 AM ET In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.  They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love. Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding. Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans. "It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?" Children reported missing So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which will help reunite families. "When my kids were little I used to lose them in Target, so it's not hard for me to believe," said Nanette White, press secretary for the Louisiana Department of Social Services. "Sometimes little kids just wander off. They're there one second and you blink and they're gone." At the rescue headquarters, Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school. He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building. The children were clean and healthy--downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." All evening Thursday, volunteer Ron Haynes carried one of the 2-year-old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm enough to eat dinner. "This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble." Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodaux, about 45 miles west of New Orleans, was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health. "What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me." The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, with rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days, the staff did detective work. One of the 2-year-olds steadfastly refused to say her name until a worker took her picture with a digital camera and showed it to her. The little girl pointed at it and cried out, "Gabby!" One of the boys had a G printed on his T-shirt when he arrived; when volunteers started calling him G, they noticed that he responded. Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he would take care of his little brother. Late Saturday, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a Web site set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight waited to take the children to Texas. In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened, she said, was that her family, trapped in a New Orleans apartment building, began to feel desperate. Wrenching moment The water wasn't going down, and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived, they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead. "I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48. The helicopter didn't come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas. Days passed without contact. On Sunday, Williams was elated. "All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else will just fall into place." At 3 p.m. Sunday, social workers said goodbye to the children who now had names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother Tyreek. The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The girl they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they called G was actually Lee--Leewood Moore Jr. The children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport for the flight to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. Deamonte was hanging on to Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the last minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette. Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the evacuation, or the smell of the flooded city. "I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."

History about the flood

Could the federal government slow response be considered ethnic cleansing? A little history about floods on New Orleans: The Great Mississippi Flood in 1927 was the most destructive flood in United States history. In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 the Mississippi River broke out of its levee system in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles or about 16,570,627 acres (70,000 km²). The area was inundated up to a depth of 30 feet (10 m). The flood caused over $400 million in damages and killed 246 people in seven states. The flood affected Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee with Arkansas being hardest hit with 13% of its territory covered by floodwaters. The flood began when heavy rains pounded the central basin of the Mississippi in the summer of 1926. By September the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to capacity. On New Year's day of 1927 the Cumberland River at Nashville topped levees at 56.2 feet (17 m). By May of 1927 the Mississippi River below Memphis, Tennessee was a watery oval up to 60 miles wide (100 km). The flood propelled Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, in charge of flood relief operations, into the national spotlight and set the stage for his election to the Presidency. It also helped Huey Long be elected Louisiana Governor in 1928. As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana and sent 250,000 ft³/s (7,000 m³/s) of water pouring through. This prevented New Orleans from experiencing serious damage but destroyed much of the marsh below the city. As it turned out, the destruction of the Caernarvon levee was unnecessary; several major levee breaks well upstream of New Orleans, including one the day after the dynamiting, made it impossible for flood waters to seriously threaten the city. By August 1927 the flood subsided. During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 refugees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts. Several reports on the poor situation in the refugee camps, including one by the Colored Advisory Commission by Robert Russa Moton, were kept out of the media at the request of Herbert Hoover, with the promise of further reforms for blacks after the presidential election. When he failed to keep the promise, Moton and other influential African-Americans helped to shift the allegiance of black Americans from the Republican party to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats. The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities. The flood resulted in a great cultural output as well, inspiring a great deal of folklore and folk music. Charlie Patton, Bessie Smith and many other Delta blues musicians wrote numerous songs about the flood; Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" was also based on the events of the flood. So what do you think? This is no laughing matter!

God blessed.