"Listen up, meatheads."
Uh, check out this story from August 28th.

In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

Wait a minute. Are you kidding me? These ostensible chief executives couldn't seriously have been so clueless that the only reason they finally bothered to evacuate was because the President called them up on the telephone and told them how to do their jobs? I'd like to find an exact quote.

Update: I guess the hundreds of buses Mayor Nagin didn't use to take the poor out of the city would be a lot more upsetting if there'd been time to organize them. On the other hand, that wouldn't have been a problem if they'd ordered it 72 hours beforehand, like their evacuation plan appears to have told them to.

Update: Threshold State has a handy list to help you keep track of who is at fault. Personally, I think he should put together an easy-to-understand flowchart. IMAO provides a list of lessons learned:

The job of the Mayor is to take care of the people in his city. When he fails at that - his secondary job becomes blaming the federal government.

Apparently, he and Blanco imagined their duties to be more, shall we say, "advisory", or perhaps that their offices were honorary, like being King and Queen of Mardi Gras. I've been about as kind as I can to Nagin, but alongside Blanco's obliviousness it's looking like the locals really phoned this one in, big time. Maybe they should've hired Mayor Giualiani as a consultant.

Update: Meet the man, speaking Thursday:

An angry Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans' emergency operations, watched the slow exodus from the Superdome and said the Federal Emergency Management Agency response was inadequate...."FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Ebbert said. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

Ebbert is the New Orleans head of Homeland Security, appointed by Mayor Nagin. He's supposed to be command and control, yet there he was complaining that no one was doing his job for him. As Jason at CounterColumn said:

Yeah, you got the hardest job in the world right now. Harder than the governor's. It's even harder if you're not doing it.

Was anybody down there switched on for this? This is why local elections matter, folks.

Update: President Bush, noting Governor Blanco's screwups, has asked Blanco to let the grownups take over, and Governor Blanco says "no, if I do that, people might realize I've screwed up":

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration had sought control over National Guard units, normally under control of the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request, noting that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law...."Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who is an adviser and does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Was this guy high? "We're in charge of it, and we aren't letting anybody else take charge of it, but we are not to be held responsible for it"?

The incredible Washington Post headline? "White House Shifts Blame".

Update: One of Arthur Chrenkoff's readers notes that people weren't running around in circles over in Mississippi. Apparently, their officials aren't cartoonish parodies of real leaders.

Free tip - contrast the Louisiana situation with the one next door in Mississippi - Gov. Barbour (R-MS). What's been lost in all the blather over New Orleans is that it was really Mississippi that took the big hit. The buildings in New Orleans are still standing; the Gulf Coast of Mississippi basically has been scrubbed, like God took out a pencil eraser and just erased it...I really don't like to find fault at times like this, but one thing that was missing was a quick recognition that in such a situation the potential for civil collapse is nearly 100%. Once the weather settles, you need to immediately declare marshal law and send in the MPs. That's basically what Haley Barbour did in Mississippi - there were a few early problems but very quickly the MPs were patrolling what was left of Biloxi and Gulfport and keeping a lid on things. Back on Tuesday when I put on the news and we all saw Kathleen Blanco bursting into tears, I knew that was the wrong message and would bring trouble. Louisiana and New Orleans basically have those touchy-feely, "I'm okay, you're okay" soft-leftie types in charge. Their education took a few days and has been expensive.

Amidst all the hyperventilating that's going on, it's actually a good time for a civics lesson, particularly watching the competence of the people in Mississippi and the gross incompetence of almost all concerned in Louisiana....Mississippi got hammered much worse than Louisiana but is barely in the news because the leadership has been much more competent. Ms. Blanco is clearly way out of her league in this situation.

This was a good reminder that LA has for decades been our worst managed and most corrupt state.

I just hope we don't have a disaster here in Illinois that forces us to have an "incompetent bureaucracy drag race" to the bottom. It's bad enough that he runs the highway system, the last thing I need is my life in Governor Blagojevich's hands.