Tv Fundraiser

[91L3xus]

I don't know if any of you saw the fundraiser on TV a few nights ago for all the victims of the floods in LA and MI, but there was one segment where Mike Myers and Kanye West were speaking about the difficulty of rebuilding after such a horrible tragedy. It was all going well, until Kanye had to add his unscripted and uncalled-for input at the end: "...And George Bush doesn't like Black people!" (cut directly to Chris Tucker)

Now I am not a racist, but I would love to see Kanye contribute "as much" as he can towards the issue. He comments that when there's Black people on TV in the city, they're looting, but when there's whites, they're looking for food. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that most of the affected area is the "ghetto" of New Orleans, where there is a predominent Black population. This is not me being stereotypical, this is me stating the facts. And Kanye expressing his belief that Blacks are still being victimized is just not acceptable.

Direct Kanye West Video Link

[SW03ES]

Uncalled for sure, but the frustration is very real...

[Lexusfreak]

Totally unacceptable & way out of line! :chairshot: :chairshot: the frustration part I understand, but those comments were (no pun intended) "bush league" :whistles:

I felt really bad for Mike Myers actually standing right beside the guy. Can you say A$$ hat? :chairshot:

[indiasfinest]

hmm...i dont know what to say since they never show white ppl looting only blacks but then again black popilation is so hi in that area

[cruznroadking]

People should just get past the race issue & just try to help. I just made my donation to the Red Cross.

[indiasfinest]

may parents rote a check but wont tell me how much...i HATE racism bieng indian myself and i ge tso mad when ppl start bieng racist with me its not even funny

[molocka12]

People should just get past the race issue & just try to help. I just made my donation to the Red Cross.

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GOD BLESS ALL THE VICTIMS

If I was trapped there with my family I would do whatever it takes to protect my family & people who I can help including looting for food & much needed life sustaining supplies !

I cannot believe it took 4-5 days Just to get food & water there.

The director of FEMA out & out lied when he stated on TV he had no knowledge of the situation at the dome. Also the army engineer who stated on TV that it just was not cost effective to build the levy to withstand a class 5 hurricane. How cost effective would it have been now?

I heard that the Red Cross take a big percent of donations for administration salaries & expensives is this true if so what percent ?

[civi]

Article about the improv...

Kanye West's Comments

[Lexusfreak]

People should just get past the race issue & just try to help. I just made my donation to the Red Cross.

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GOD BLESS ALL THE VICTIMS

If I was trapped there with my family I would do whatever it takes to protect my family & people who I can help including looting for food & much needed life sustaining supplies !

I cannot believe it took 4-5 days Just to get food & water there.

The director of FEMA out & out lied when he stated on TV he had no knowledge of the situation at the dome. Also the army engineer who stated on TV that it just was not cost effective to build the levy to withstand a class 5 hurricane. How cost effective would it have been now?

I heard that the Red Cross take a big percent of donations for administration salaries & expensives is this true if so what percent ?

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mol, I beleive the director of FEMA said he had no knowledge of the folks that were held up in the convention center, not the Superdome. But either way, the whole thing has been very heart wrenching & this is not the time to point fingers & play the blame game. Keep the race card out of it too. There were all sorts of different races that were in serious trouble.

[dcfish]

People should just get past the race issue & just try to help. I just made my donation to the Red Cross.

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GOD BLESS ALL THE VICTIMS

If I was trapped there with my family I would do whatever it takes to protect my family & people who I can help including looting for food & much needed life sustaining supplies !

I cannot believe it took 4-5 days Just to get food & water there.

The director of FEMA out & out lied when he stated on TV he had no knowledge of the situation at the dome. Also the army engineer who stated on TV that it just was not cost effective to build the levy to withstand a class 5 hurricane. How cost effective would it have been now?

I heard that the Red Cross take a big percent of donations for administration salaries & expensives is this true if so what percent ?

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mol, I beleive the director of FEMA said he had no knowledge of the folks that were held up in the convention center, not the Superdome. But either way, the whole thing has been very heart wrenching & this is not the time to point fingers & play the blame game. Keep the race card out of it too. There were all sorts of different races that were in serious trouble.

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It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

[bartkat]

*BLEEP* that mother *BLEEP*ing Kayne West *BLEEP*er.

[SW03ES]

Well the Red Cross takes a portion of the donations to pay its overhead, they don't give everyone raises if thats what you mean.

[SKperformance]

Very well written DC.

I like the different take on things with answers rather than band-aid solutions.

As for Kanye he is a rapper not a politician or buisness man.I don't think he tried to be one either as his mentor Jay-Z is. Kanye has been know to fly off his handle as he did in Toronto on a radio show because here we do not like to sensationalize "guns,rascim and its other bedfellows.

He spoke how he felt but choose a bad venue to do it in.

I laughed after i saw it as there is no way he could look back at what he just said and think he could have not done a much better heartfelt plea to people rather than that erruption.

[98es]

Right on DC. The situation is terrible, and your heart can't help but go out to the victims. But at some point you have to look at how social conditions deteriorated in the way they did, and you hit the nail on the head. On Fox News the other night, I saw a woman screaming to the camera, "I HAVEN'T HAD A HOT MEAL IN 3 DAYS! I CAN'T EAT THIS CRAP THAT THEY ARE GIVING US, I DON'T LIKE NO CRACKERS!" It was at that point I came to the realization you did. The government has enabled these people to the point of destruction. They've gotten a handout from the government their whole lives in just about every aspect, so can you blame them for not being able to rise to the occasion? Sure, personal responsibility has to come in somewhere.

Yes, the federal government was slow to respond, but obviously this isn't something they have experience dealing with. If the mayor of N.O. really cared about his poor, he would have bussed them out of the city, don't you think? Everyone knew that this disaster would happen someday. When you have a catagory 4/5 hurricane headed right for you, and your below sea level... DUH.

As for Kanye West, Sean Hannity brought up a good question whether you like him or not. What was the decline in $$$ coming in immediately after he said that? My guess would be thousands of dollars, because he wanted to score some political points during one of the worst national disasters at the expense of a president with the most minority (including blacks) appointments in his administration EVER?! Just my two cents.....

[Lexusfreak]

Nicely done dc! B)

One guy I do really like that is getting things done & is also a native of LA. is 3 Star Lt. General Russel Honore & he takes no BS from anyone & that includes the media! Even the Mayor of N.O. called the man a "John Wayne Dude". B)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/honore.profile/index.html

[SW03ES]

Woah DC, I missed that post. Very well written and well thought out...

[dcfish]

Woah DC, I missed that post. Very well written and well thought out...

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I also have my views on that so called rapper, But I would be booted off for sure. :whistles:

[SW03ES]

Just bleep out the bad parts and we be cool lol

[SKperformance]

Agreed , any opinion expressed is fine as long as it is tastfully done.

[bartkat]

Just bleep out the bad parts and we be cool lol

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After I bleeped mine, there wasn't much left. :D

[dcfish]

Agreed , any opinion expressed is fine as long as it is tastfully done.

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I believe that Kanye was simply expressing his true [drug running, thieving, ignorant,] feelings towards the race relationship in this country which he just took two steps back doing so. Can you blame him? I think not I would be upset also. However, I believe the way that he did was uncalled for and shows how negative he really is [ just try and listen to that crap he calls music ]. America was just beginning the long road of rescuing the disaster survivals and comments like he made was uncalled and unnecessary. He should have done something to help the cause like get his big mouth a#& down there to help and donate his $ to the cause, not hamper it with his negative innuedos. He needs to mature and get his priorities in order, He did more damage than good, As he probably knew, N.O.'s population is made up of over 70% African Americans. It only make sense that most activities, good or bad, will most likely involved this race of people. There is a difference between people (black or white) looting for foods, diapers, etc. and hand full of clothing, tvs, etc. If he really wants to keep it real, he should learn to deal with the issues at hand like saving the people from their homes and accept the facts that looting for necessities are far more forgivable than looting for the sake of looting. <_<

I kept it clean against my better judgement in this case.

[Lexusfreak]

Agreed , any opinion expressed is fine as long as it is tastfully done.

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I believe that Kanye was simply expressing his true [drug running, thieving, ignorant,] feelings towards the race relationship in this country which he just took two steps back doing so. Can you blame him? I think not I would be upset also. However, I believe the way that he did was uncalled for and shows how negative he really is [ just try and listen to that crap he calls music ]. America was just beginning the long road of rescuing the disaster survivals and comments like he made was uncalled and unnecessary. He should have done something to help the cause like get his big mouth a#& down there to help and donate his $ to the cause, not hamper it with his negative innuedos. He needs to mature and get his priorities in order, He did more damage than good, As he probably knew, N.O.'s population is made up of over 70% African Americans. It only make sense that most activities, good or bad, will most likely involved this race of people. There is a difference between people (black or white) looting for foods, diapers, etc. and hand full of clothing, tvs, etc. If he really wants to keep it real, he should learn to deal with the issues at hand like saving the people from their homes and accept the facts that looting for necessities are far more forgivable than looting for the sake of looting. <_<

I kept it clean against my better judgement in this case.

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Very well said & I couldn't agree more! B)

[dcfish]

Agreed , any opinion expressed is fine as long as it is tastfully done.

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I believe that Kanye was simply expressing his true [drug running, thieving, ignorant,] feelings towards the race relationship in this country which he just took two steps back doing so. Can you blame him? I think not I would be upset also. However, I believe the way that he did was uncalled for and shows how negative he really is [ just try and listen to that crap he calls music ]. America was just beginning the long road of rescuing the disaster survivals and comments like he made was uncalled and unnecessary. He should have done something to help the cause like get his big mouth a#& down there to help and donate his $ to the cause, not hamper it with his negative innuedos. He needs to mature and get his priorities in order, He did more damage than good, As he probably knew, N.O.'s population is made up of over 70% African Americans. It only make sense that most activities, good or bad, will most likely involved this race of people. There is a difference between people (black or white) looting for foods, diapers, etc. and hand full of clothing, tvs, etc. If he really wants to keep it real, he should learn to deal with the issues at hand like saving the people from their homes and accept the facts that looting for necessities are far more forgivable than looting for the sake of looting. <_<

I kept it clean against my better judgement in this case.

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Very well said & I couldn't agree more! B)

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In his first public appearance since verbally lashing President Bush, rapper Kanye West said he would stick to entertainment at this week's NFL opening kickoff concert.

"I don't want to detract from the show at all, because it's entertainment, and a lot of times, in a time of need, we need entertainment to lift people's spirits," West said Tuesday at a news conference to promote Thursday's free concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

That Can't make up his mind, Now he doesn't want to talk about it, It's OK at a fundraiser to spout off but he wouldn't want to mar his LOUSY ENTERTAINMENT. What a piece of trash = Two faced punk I'm done with this.

[blake918]

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

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Wow, DC! You nailed all of the issues!! I can't stand it when I go to WalMart, and the able-bodied people in front of me have two buggies overflowing with items. Then, they whip out the good ole food stamp card, and their troubles are over. Now, here's where the interesting part comes, the car in which they unload $200-$300 of items. I would think it would be some jalopy that barely made it in to the parking lot. Wrong! It's a brand new, high end car like an Escalade, Navigator, 300C, etc. all have expensive 20+" rims. I guess when your housing and food is taken care of, you can buy things like that.

I think the media got a little carried away with the comment on the prisions releasing the inmates. It's just too hard to believe. I also saw a story on the news that said there was a hostage situation involving firefighters and their families. As it turns out, the building in which this was supposed to be taking place was under water. Gotta love the media!!

Kayne is missing the facts. In Orleans parish, white people are the minority, and in that minority, the vast majority are middle class and up, so they can afford to evacuate. So, statistically, the majority of the looters you'll see on tv will be black.

*BLEEP* that mother *BLEEP*ing Kayne West *BLEEP*er.

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My sentiments exactly!!!!!

[dcfish]

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

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Wow, DC! You nailed all of the issues!! I can't stand it when I go to WalMart, and the able-bodied people in front of me have two buggies overflowing with items. Then, they whip out the good ole food stamp card, and their troubles are over. Now, here's where the interesting part comes, the car in which they unload $200-$300 of items. I would think it would be some jalopy that barely made it in to the parking lot. Wrong! It's a brand new, high end car like an Escalade, Navigator, 300C, etc. all have expensive 20+" rims. I guess when your housing and food is taken care of, you can buy things like that.

I think the media got a little carried away with the comment on the prisions releasing the inmates. It's just too hard to believe. I also saw a story on the news that said there was a hostage situation involving firefighters and their families. As it turns out, the building in which this was supposed to be taking place was under water. Gotta love the media!!

Kayne is missing the facts. In Orleans parish, white people are the minority, and in that minority, the vast majority are middle class and up, so they can afford to evacuate. So, statistically, the majority of the looters you'll see on tv will be black.

*BLEEP* that mother *BLEEP*ing Kayne West *BLEEP*er.

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My sentiments exactly!!!!!

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The reality of this is that there are many like him out there, But to keep under the radar they have learned to keep there mouth shut.