Ray Nagin in New York

This weekend, the mayor of New Orleans C. Ray Nagin is in New York raising money just a week after describing the World Trade Center site as a "hole in the ground".

My money will stay in my pocket.

While New York City first responders risked their lives by rushing into danger, the Chocolate City's first responders ran the opposite way leaving the blame to President Bush and FEMA.
Police were unable to account for 240 officers on the 1,450-member force following Katrina. Fifty-one members of the New Orleans Police Department were fired for abandoning their posts before or after Hurricane Katrina and more cases are pending.

Ray Nagin was quick to blame the Federal Government even though he failed to evacuate the city after President Bush had declared a state of emergency.

In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of buses were sitting in bus yards, some less than a mile from the Superdome. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco(a Democrat) commented, "The buses could have saved an estimated 20,000 people if they had been used for emergency evacuations which President Bush had declared two days before Katrina hit.", however the evacuation was ordered by Mayor Nagin, President Bush having no direct authority to order evacuations.

The failure to issue a timely evacuation order in effect made it physically impossible to evacuate the nursing homes, hospitals, and those without buses.

The FBI has also investigated and prosecuted numerous fraud cases in which millions of disaster relief funds have been mismanaged. Not to mention the millions that are still unaccounted for.

Nagin tries to drum up New Orleans business

September 2, 2006

New York

NEW YORK -- Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans opened a visit to New York yesterday by expressing regret for describing the World Trade Center site as ``a hole in the ground." He said residents of New York and New Orleans both ``understand what tragedy is all about." Nagin was in town for a two-day pitch to the New York investment community to get business in New Orleans, which still has an enormous rebuilding job ahead of it a year after Hurricane Katrina. During a recently broadcast ``60 Minutes" interview, a CBS correspondent pointed out flood-damaged cars still on the streets of the city's devastated Ninth Ward. Nagin replied: ``You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later. So let's be fair." Nagin apologized soon afterward . (AP)