Closed minds drive me nuts, no matter what side they're on. People form a rock solid opinion based on what they see or hear, and they're no light getting in. In this case, people seem to be playing Monday Morning FEMA Directer and looking for someone to blame. Blame the damned hurricaine.

I think there were some major screwups. Harry Connick Jr reports yesterday morning there are people without their essential medication, without food and water, and that these people are dying. Last night there wasn't any change in the situation that I could notice, other than the talking heads acknowledged the fact those people in the Convention Center actually existed and something would be done. I don't know why helicopters couldn't have dropped food and water. I don't know why doctors and medicines couldn't have been sent in. That's the whole point though: I don't know why.

I've had some experience in training for mass disasters, and I've had some small involvement in the planning process. I'f you've ever heard "No plan survives first contact with the enemy" (the 'enemy' in this case being a natural disaster of epic proportions) - it's not a figurative statement. People like FEMA don't plan to have a plan. They plan so they know where to start, what questions to ask, and how to find the answers.

Authorities plan how to react to a likely disaster, not the storm of the century. They plan how to handle the small numbers of people who refuse to evacuate. There will be a lot of evaluating what went wrong when people are done dealing with the immediate problems.

There were screwups. There always are. It's not clear to me exactly what the screwups are. Is the problem that the authorities didn't provide busses to evacuate people from the Superdome? Or is the problem the fact that many of those people would have evacuated the city when told to if they'd had the means