Ms. Blanco and her director of disaster emergency had all the tools they needed because those tools INCLUDED all of the resources of our federal government. Is that so hard to understand?

The National Guard is never fully deployed to one area. They must have a reasonable number of soldiers to cover additional emergencies. There is not one shred of evidence that having some Guardsmen in Iraq had any affect on the deployment in New Orleans. Troops from California or Maine can be in Louisiana in a matter of hours if that is what the state requests.

Ms. Blanco also made an idiotic statement that "National Guard should thke over the job of shooting looters so that our police can get on with the job of feeding and rescuing citizens". What crap! I was a member of the National Guard in the early 1970's and nobody joined to shoot American citizens! In this type of emergency, a few selected and specially trained soldiers may be issued bullets, and these people may be required to shoot people who shoot at their fellow Guardsmen, most of whom are not armed or are not issued bullets.