[Thanos]

It was the Bush Admin's responsibility to have aid on hand and, more importantly, to have law and order ensured both before and after the hurricane hit. They had more than enough warning beforehand and should have had all the key elements in place, but didn't. That's why the Katrina debacle is their fault. Look into the role especially of Donald Rumsfeld in deliberately delaying the deployment of Army and National Guard units after the hurricane passed. One absolutely terrible decision alone, by the author most responsible for the Iraq mistake, is explanation enough as to why the situation in New Orleans went so quickly from being a disaster into a full-blown nightmare. And it also gives more than adequate explanation as to why, in 1994, the FEMA response to Hurricane Andrew was regarded as a success and why the 2005 response to Katrina was such a joke. Ultimately the answer always lies in the nature of conservative politics in the Untied States and their approach to governing, which can accurately be re-interpreted as they completly hate any sort of government, even when they're in power. This depraved lust for governmental power combined with the sheer hatred of the parts of the job that don't accrue any political power ultimately leads them to completely fucking up everything in government that they touch.

Blaming Obama for the oil spill is merely another pathetically misguided attempt, by Limbaugh and the rest of the psychopathic taling heads, at more political revenge for the disgraced and throroughly loathesome conservative movement. The US Coast Guard was on hand almost immediately to assist in fighting the rig fire and to search for the missing workers who were unfortunately declared dead later on. To suggest that there was no US government presence in place is an absolute cheap-shot political lie. It there's any fault ot be attached to the US federal government it once again goes back to the Bush administration, Dick Cheney and those paid-off assholes in the Republican-dominated Congress specifically, who deliberately watered-down as much safety and environmental regulation as possible at the direct request of companies like BP. Less regulation gets boiled down to BP using it as an excuse not to cough up less than another $1 million (in a project that wold have netted them billions over the life of the oil field) into a proper wellhead blow-out protection valving system that would have bypassed any hydrate eruption out of the main riser pipe and kept any major damage from occurring to the riser or to the rig that it was attached to.

Simple explanations actually. All one has to do is to make a small effort in understanding the true nature of the souless corporate slime who control companies like BP. And of who in the governments, when American conservatives are in power, allow the corporations to get away with literally anything they want. I'd like to someday see Americans rise up and get rid of the unchecked corporatism that is, indisputably on any basic logical level, literally destroying their nation. But it won't happen, ever. All some reckless and irresponsble conservative, who is usually just a former corporate or Wall Street propagandist anyway, has to do is start screaming "SOCIALISM!!" at the the top of their lungs and Americans collectively go into retard mode as reliably as a Pavlovian dog. And this is why nothing is ever really going to change in the United States, except maybe to just get worse and worse as time goes by. The banal ignorance that most people live their daily lives by in the United States literally ensures that the bad guys, (and make no mistake about this whatsoever, they genuinely are the baddest of the bad guys, with their almost Communist-like contempt for the value of life and any sort of recognizable human decency) are always going to win.

All we can do in Canada is to keep on permanent guard and not let this uniquely American brand of poison infect our own thought process to the point that it begins to undermine our own systems and procedures. If we don't we'll end up too on the same path to pure Hell that the unfortunate Americans now find themselves stuck on.

[Marcus_Ozius]

For one thing, I don't think anybody is saying that Katrina was handled well, or that the Bush administration should not have done things very differently and much better. However, as has been pointed out, the nature of American laws prevents the use of federal forces until called for by the state in question. If you look at the situation with Andrew, I'm sure that you'll find that Florida made itself, early on, available to the Federal government.
You seem to be characterizing the conservative movement. The conservative movement is made up of several different factions, all of which have a different philosophy. Less government does not mean inept government, or a government that does not interfere in people's lives when needed. Moreover, I think that it is a disservice and a furtherance of partisan senselessness when you refer to the conservatives as having a depraved lust for governmental power. I think that, if that's accurate to use on conservatives, it's accurate to use on anybody else. I think that the movements need to be separated from the parties that are allegedly supposed to represent them.
I don't think anyone on this forum, anyone, anyone at all, blamed Obama for this. There is a general consensus regarding the ultimate responsibility of the office of president for events in, if nothing else, a symbolic sense, but nobody here has seriously accused Obama of any failings regarding the spill.
Your tirade on corporations seems to be lacking in much of a focus, but we're all guilty of that. I'll try to deal with your points as they come up.
I don't think that there is much basis in fact supporting the notion that the Democrats do much more than Republicans in terms of corporate regulation or management. I think that we get more gestures from the Democrats, but the net result tends to be vaguely similar. If we talk about the respective conservative and liberal movements (devoid of party) there is much more of a tendency among liberals towards regulation, much of which would be more symbolic than useful, and a tendency among conservatives for less regulation, though all but the most plutocratic or inbred of the arch conservatives would argue that some regulation is needed, and even beneficial for society.
There's all this talk about corporations as a bad thing and there's all this sense that we can't trust them and they're out to get us. Yes, there is much more true than false in this statement. It's the second part that bothers me. There is a notion that government is able, or at the very least, interested in doing anything about it. As long as money runs elections, then politicians run to the money. How many people honestly feel as if their party represents them or anything that they support? I have only once found a candidate who I could support with few reservations, and my trust was quickly thereafter betrayed. It rather refreshed me that he lost in some ways. Subjugation is subjugation and a yoke is a yoke. The notion that Canada is somehow free from corporate power is a joke borne out of anti American sentiments. Firstly, when the government takes over as much as a person's life as it does in most countries, it becomes a corporate entity, for all intents and purposes, in and of itself. Change the politicians and the cronies live in in their appointed positions, fighting just as hard, and just as unethically, to hold on to their sphere of influence as any robber baron of the corporate world. If anything, the notion that a government is to be trusted implicitly to watch out for us prevents people from being able to as effectively think critically about government. Sometimes it is the problem. Sometimes it isn't. The failings that are around us are more a result of society and its ills than any outside force, but we all need an outsider to claim is at fault. The left picks corporations, who take money, do not represent people, lie, cheat, steal, and destroy the lives of those who compete. The right picks government, who takes money, does not represent people, lies, cheats, steals, and destroys the lives of those who compete. They serve the same overall function for the same overall rhetoric used by both parties to hold onto what they have.