Free Republic

Scott and Kimberly Roberts clung to each other in the attic of their clapboard home, praying the gale-force winds and rising flood water would not carry them away. With shaking hands, they captured the moment they were hit by Hurricane Katrina – one of the fiercest storms in living memory – on a $20 camera they had bought just days before. “I decided to film because I realised we weren’t going to be able to leave,” Mrs Roberts, 34, said. “And just in case it happened how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to capture it. “The...

While debating proposed cuts to Amtrak’s budget, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) argued that the government subsidized train system is necessary, especially during disasters. “What is it - that we don’t support transportation infrastructure?” Brown said on the House floor Thursday. “When we had 9/11 – Amtrak was the only entity that was moving people. When we had Katrina – Amtrak. We had over 3,000 people to die because they couldn’t move around the area.” According to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 1,833 people died in relation to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Amtrak...

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed. That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise. But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped....

An Air Force veteran is asking the Internet's help to reconnect him with a girl he rescued 10 years ago during Hurricane Katrina. The hashtag #FindKatrinaGirl has now taken off on social media. A 2005 photograph of the two shows the girl in pigtails and a pink shirt squeezing Michael Maroney, now a master sergeant at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The iconic New Orleans image has served as a symbol of hope after the devastation. "When she wrapped me up with that hug, I just melted, and the weight of the world was lifted off my...

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney had a Galadriel moment. He appeared to be briefly seized by a vision of himself as an all-powerful, world-striding President Romney, before turning away from temptation and settling for the plain old Mitt Romney he has always been. It was political theater at its most bizarre, a flack-driven frenzy that doubled as a flashback to the self-delusion that blinded the Romney 2012 campaign in its final days. With Romney now out of the way, Jeb Bush has consolidated the support of the GOP's moneyed class with surprising alacrity. As Politico noted last week, the contest...

New Englanders are no stranger to hurricanes, enduring the likes of Bob in 1991 and Donna in 1954, which packed winds over 100 miles per hour and caused hundred of millions of dollars in damage. But that was kids' play compared to the storms that hit the region centuries ago. Using sediment deposits from a Cape Cod pond, scientists said Wednesday that hurricanes more powerful than any on record in modern times swamped New England between the years 250 to 1150 A.D. And they were pretty frequent, with 23 hurricanes recorded - one for every 40 years - from what...

The former general manager of the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, where embattled "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams reportedly roomed during Hurricane Katrina, said Sunday (Feb. 8) that neither mass flooding nor floating human remains were near the hotel after the levees broke. Her statement raises questions about Williams' stated Katrina experiences and could add to a pool of public skepticism regarding his tale. Williams recounted his time reporting on Katrina in a 2006 interview with Disney CEO Michael Eisner. "When you look out of your hotel room window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down,...

NBC News anchor Brian Williams' 2006 claim that he saw a dead body float past his hotel window during Hurricane Katrina is drawing fresh skepticism in the wake of his own admission on Wednesday that he lied about being aboard a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire during the Iraq war. Despite a swift apology on his Nightly News program, Williams is at the center of a media firestorm after it emerged that his old war story that he has retold numerous times over the past 12 years has become increasingly exaggerated. Williams was forced to apologize this week...

Ava DuVernay, the director of the Martin Luther King historical movie "Selma", is set to again team up with the film's star David Oyelowo for a new project about Hurricane Katrina. DuVernay and Oyelowo, who were both finalists at this year's Golden Globes, will "develop a new narrative feature film chronicling a sweeping love story and complex murder mystery during the time of Hurricane Katrina," Participant Media said Monday. The project will mark the pair's third collaboration after "Middle of Nowhere" and "Selma", which has been nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

Chris Kyle, the now-deceased Navy SEAL who is celebrated in Clint Eastwood's movie "American Sniper" was a proved liar. Jesse Ventura, the former military man, wrestler and governor of Minnesota, sued Kyle before he died, claiming that he defamed Ventura in his memoir, "American Sniper." Kyle claims to have punched out Ventura in a bar after Ventura bad-mouthed the troops who'd been sent to Iraq. Kyle was killed before the trial, but a jury determined that none of what he had written about Ventura was true and awarded Ventura $1.8 million. Because he's a proved liar, we should be awfully...

glaringly missing from the summary was mention of $15 million in fees paid by Burkle's Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund since 2002

On Sunday's broadcast of ABC's This Week, there was a consensus moment between former President Bush's chief re-election strategist Matthew Dowd and Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of the liberal magazine The Nation: Dr. Ben Carson should run for president.

As Twitchy reported yesterday, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, facing a runoff election Dec. 6, has resumed campaigning on Twitter, although her #WhereWasBill tweet racked up only one favorite and zero retweets in its first four hours online. (Nearly 24 hours later, it’s up to three retweets and two favorites.) Landrieu’s resurrected Twitter campaign has finally caught someone’s attention, although that person is her opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy, who was happy to answer where he was during Hurricane Katrina. Check out the favorites and retweets on this one. Bill Cassidy        ✔ @BillCassidy Mary Landrieu wants to know where I was during Hurricane Katrina? Setting...

**SNIP** When this hospital needed a champion to build and rebuild, literally out of the rubble of Katrina and Rita, ... where was Bill? In the video found here, Landrieu trumpets her own record, referring to herself in the third person, while damning Cassidy as “wishy-washy, unreliable, undependable, not sure who he is, not sure who he was, and not sure who he wants to be.” It would have made for great optics and might have helped her in a runoff pundits are predicting she will lose if Cassidy hadn't tweeted back an answer to her question: “Mary Landrieu wants...

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu heads into a Dec. 6 runoff as a clear underdog, struggling for another six-year term against a wave of conservatism and Republicans looking to pad their new Senate majority. Fifty-eight percent of voters chose another candidate on Tuesday over the 18-year incumbent. She has the distinction of being the last Democratic statewide elected official in a state where President Barack Obama remains highly unpopular. And her main campaign theme of clout was undercut when her party was forced into minority status: Even if she’s re-elected, Landrieu will lose her vaunted chairmanship of the Senate’s energy committee...

In the fight of her political life, Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu took the gloves off on day 1 of the runoff election between her and Republican candidate Bill Cassidy. Fewer than 24 hours later, the attack Landrieu launched went horribly wrong. The day after neither candidate reached the 50 percent plus 1 vote threshold, Sen. Landrieu held a press conference where she slammed her opponent as absent during the devastation from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Standing in front of a VA Medical Center construction site, Landrieu called Cassidy “wishy-washy, unreliable, undependable, not sure who he is, not sure who...

Fighting for her political life and effectively abandoned by the Democratic Party, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu went on the attack against Rep. Bill Cassidy, the Republican congressman challenging her in next month’s runoff. At a Thursday press conference in front of a Veterans Affairs medical facility, Landrieu tried to contrast her efforts to secure federal money for her state after Hurricane Katrina hit the state in September 2005 with Cassidy’s supposed failure to lift a finger.

Incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) got off to a bad start in her desperate bid to hold onto her seat. In an attempt to characterize her Republican opponent Bill Cassidy as “unreliable” and “undependable,” Landrieu demanded to know what he had done to help the state recover from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Cassidy, an MD, responded that he had been working to provide medical aid to refugees of the storm. With help from friends and neighbors he and his physicians’ group set up an emergency treatment center in an abandoned K-Mart. Landrieu shruugged this off as “small potatoes. While my opponent...

On Tuesday night, Republicans won big: They picked up governorships in blue states like Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and they held House seats in competitive districts with embarrassing incumbents like Michael Grimm of New York, who physically threatened a reporter and is under indictment for tax evasion. But their biggest win by far was taking control of the U.S. Senate. As of this writing, Republicans had already secured 52 Senate seats, thanks to knocking off Democratic incumbents or replacing retiring Democrats in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Another GOP pick up is probable in...

Former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton said she learned all she needed to know about Sen. Mary Landrieu by watching her work to get funding for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Clinton recalled she and Landrieu's experience in the U.S. Senate together during a get-out-the-vote rally at the Sugar Mill in New Orleans on Saturday. She touted Landrieu's leadership and how she prioritized Louisiana's women and families while urging the crowd to vote Tuesday. Clinton and Landrieu served in the Senate together from 2001-2009. Clinton said her greatest memories of Landrieu came in the aftermath of Katrina. She remembered Landrieu...