I’ve been reading some foreign media accounts of the stories coming out of New Orleans, and in short – after days of watching this stuff on TV, I hadn’t heard most of these accounts. Reuters News for instance describes accounts of a National Guardsman shooting a man seeking help to aid a woman being raped, a 16 year old run over by the guard and left for dead in front of his family, 22 bodies in the Convention center, wanton raping and throat slitting in the bathrooms there and at the dome (one guardsman suggested over a 100 dead there)… The scariest part is also from that Reuter’s UK article: “One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the centre, “They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here.” The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, “We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq.”

I was wondering when it might become apparent to somebody that the reason there was ‘too little, too late’ responses for a whole week had more to do with the fact that most of our reserves are already in the Middle East. The army reserve guys I know have been gone for two years now. I honestly believe that Bush’s opinion of the poor has not changed since he was in Harvard Law.

“At harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that “people are poor because they are lazy.” He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to “free market competition.” To him, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was “socialism.”

— see my original story here