Their Republican questioners stuck more closely to the committee’s actual purpose, which is to study the development, coordination, and execution by local, state, and federal authorities of emergency response plans and other activities in preparation for Hurricane Katrina; and the local, state, and federal government response to Hurricane Katrina.
Predictably, local (NO) and State (LA) were totally to blame in ALL phases, while the Fed did what it could under the circumstances.
The Committee will no doubt conclude Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were grossly negligent and derelict in their duty, response, and preparation of the entire Katrina fiasco.
I HOPE the Committee does so conclude about Nagin and Blanco, among other aspects about LA.
If the Committee does NOT, and does not include a public reprimand of the highest degree about these two, then I conclude the Committee is, also, to blame, just as are Blanco and Nagin.
I'd hardly heard a more disgusting delivery as I did hearing Blanco before that Committee. I could barely believe her total absence of manners, her presumptions so thick they reeked.
She could at least be humble in ASKING for taxpayers to fork over billion/s of dollars -- I doubt this is her intended one and only such plea, either -- but her entire delivery was so offensive in blaming everyone else, particularly the federal government...she omits entirely from her frame of references any focus on herself, on her own state and government.
Meaning, she's incompetent. She's not governing, she's using.
And if the Feds HAD come in and taken over operations, as actually was necessary (though not desired or constitutionally allowed), who would have been the first to yell about a police state because a federal officer ordered buses under Nagin's "control" to be used for evacuation?