The State of Louisiana Blooper Reel

2:26 pm, 9/13/05

The State of Louisiana Blooper Reel
It's endless.

"We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

Then there's this gem, from Governor Blanco:

Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.

Apparently not, because despite there being 21,000 of them in the state and Governor Blanco having the power to put them to work, it took days after the disaster for anybody to get them moving. (The New York Times hilariously says it took two days to "find" enough buses, as though they were hidden.) Senator Mary Landrieu, however, is just sure that Bush is to blame:

On Sunday, Landrieu said it was President Bush's fault that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin didn't use city school buses to evacuate those trapped by flooding.

Whatever you say, sweetie. There's video of Landrieu freaking out here, claiming that she won't blame Nagin because all cities are incompetently run (...maybe all those run by Louisiana Democrats...), and the problem is just that Bush hates mass transit. (Seriously.) As a reader emailed me the other day, of course, if Ms. Landrieu had put the same infrastructure into play that she uses to bus poor blacks to the polls on election day, she probably could've saved a lot of lives all by herself.

(BANG! From way downtown!) Then there's these guys...

"I'm a part of the militia," Boza said. "We were taking the law into our own hands, but I didn't kill anyone."

The several dozen people who did not evacuate from Algiers Point said that for days after the storm, they did not see any police officers or soldiers but did see gangs of intruders.

So they set up what might be the ultimate neighborhood watch.

At night, the balcony of a beautifully restored Victorian house built in 1871 served as a lookout point.

Another afternoon, a gunfight broke out on the streets as armed neighbors and armed intruders exchanged fire.

"About 25 rounds were fired," Harris said.

Blood was later found on the street from a wounded intruder.

There are gas lamps on the columned porch that stayed on during the storm and its aftermath. The militia rigged car headlights and a car battery on porches of nearby houses. Then they put empty cans beneath trees that had fallen across both ends of the block.

When someone approached in the darkness, "you could hear the cans rattle.

Then we would hit the switch at the battery and light up the street," Pervel said. "We would yell, 'We're going to count three, and if you don't identify yourself, we're going to start shooting.' "

They could hear people fleeing and never fired a shot.

During the days, the hurricane holdouts patrolled the streets protecting their houses and the ones of evacuees.

...who didn't need to be crippled by these guys...

Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

...who deserve to be imprisoned.

I'll have an article on the New Orleans gun confiscation on Reason.com. But there's one part of the story that's too important to wait: the confiscation is plainly illegal. . . .

The particular Louisiana statute which allows emergency controls on firearms also clearly disallows the complete prohibition being imposed by the New Orleans chief of police.

Don't miss the video of New Orleans' finest body-slamming a little old lady to take her revolver. It's rumored that the Louisiana National Guard has refused to participate in the roundup, which may or may not be true. If it isn't, the officers involved should be court-martialed.

Update: Remember Parish President Broussard taking to the cameras in CNN to cry and tell us about an employee's mother who drowned in a nursing home because FEMA abandoned her or something? It's starting to look more like she was essentially murdered by the nursing home's administrators, since they refused to evacuate, even turning down offered assistance, in apparent violation of the law.