Gary Drescher wrote:
The folks in N.O. are not treating the National Guard as an enemy--in part
because of the leadership of Gen. Honore (I'm thinking of the footage of him
running around ordering his combat-stance troops to "Point those goddamn
weapons down" so they wouldn't appear unnecessarily hostile and provoke
violence instead of preventing it).

Smart guy! I don't watch TV, though, so I must have missed that
footage. Keeping the mission peaceful seems like the only way to make
the relief effort work.


It's hard to avoid hearing the Bushisms, though. The Bushism about
shooting-looters-to-kill combined with stories about people being shot
makes it seem like someone at the top ain't though things through.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Police_s...2C _five_dead
- Police shoot eight gunmen on New Orleans bridge, five dead. Bearing
arms isn't illegal in this country -- what really happened? What about
the due-process rights of those "gunmen"?

http://cryptome.org/kat05/pict58.jpg -- Leonard Thomas, 23, cries after
a SWAT team burst into the flooded home he and his family were living in
on Monday, Sept. 5, 2005. Neighbors had reported that they were
squatting in the house in the wake of Hurricane Katrina but the
authorities left after his family proved they owned the house. Some
rescuers are not taking any more food and water to those who have
decided to stay in an effort to force them out. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Scary... Let's just hope that when I walk down a street in Virginia
that my belt-clip cell-phone holder doesn't look like a gun-holster,
that I'm not mistaken for a looter, that I'm not mistaken a squatter, or
(as happened to a friend recently when he was staying as his brother's
house) that I'm not on the receiving end of false-alarm for a "robbery
in progress". Let's furthermore hope that no TFR's pop up while I'm in
the air, so that I don't get mistaken for a terrorist.



But, they are making some progress:
http://cryptome.org/kat05/pict57.jpg - A military helicopter drops a
sandbag as work continues to repair the 17th Street canal levee Monday,
Sept. 5, 2005, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

And, just for balance: http://cryptome.org/kat05/pict39.jpg (the AP
caption is useless)

-Luke