Now is not the time to grandstand.  I doubt they can do much other than get in the way and waste the time of people who need to be helping with the evacuation and preparing for a disaster.  I would say the same thing to Obama and Biden.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. Franklin D. Roosevelt

New Orleans a ghost town due to Gustav
Hurricane likely to make landfall earlier, and as major Category 4 storm

NBC News and news services
updated 2:05 p.m. CT, Sun., Aug. 31, 2008
(more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26451955/)

NEW ORLEANS - The Big Easy and other Louisiana coastal areas increasingly took on the eeriness of ghost towns Sunday as most residents heeded a mandatory evacuation order, and police and National Guard troops clamped down to prevent the kind of lawlessness and chaos that followed Katrina three years ago.
Col. Mike Edmondson, chief of the Louisiana State Police, said he believed over 90 percent of the coastal Louisiana population had fled -- the largest evacuation in state history.
Large areas of southeast Louisiana, including sections in the greater New Orleans area, that are protected by levees face being flooding by several feet of water, according to Gustav surge models. Gustav appears likely to overwhelm the system of levees west of the city that have for decades been under-funded and neglected even as the population has grown.
The Army Corps of Engineers has stockpiled steel pilings, sandbags and metal baskets filled with sand in the event that emergency repairs are needed to fill in breaches. Heavy duty helicopters capable of dropping sandbags are on standby.
The exodus took place as Gustav sped up to a pace that could see it make landfall somewhere along the northern Gulf Coast by Monday morning.
Clouds were already rolling in along the Gulf Coast, and the skies were beginning to darken. Rain could begin falling as early as Sunday night on New Orleans.
Mayor Ray Nagin imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew that was to begin Sunday at sunset, while the last bus carrying residents to safety was to leave at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Nagin also warned that looting -- one of the chronic problems after Hurricane Katrina -- would not be tolerated. "Looters will go directly to jail. You will not get a pass this time," he said. "You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You will go directly to the Big House."
Most were taking him seriously. Stores and restaurants shut down, hotels closed and windows were boarded up. Some who planned to stay changed their mind at the last second, not willing to risk the worst.
"I got scared at the last minute," said Ollie Hilson, 54, of Marrero, a town on the west bank of the Mississippi River. She was waiting for a bus in a gymnasium where the New Orleans Hornets practice. She had a single plastic grocery bag with a change of clothes and a few personal belongings, and waited with her two nieces and their four children, all under the age of 3. "I was worried about the kids. We just couldn't stay."
Gustav had weakened to a Category 3 hurricane while crossing western Cuba on Saturday, but was expected to strengthen later in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
It had also picked up speed on leaving Cuba and was moving northwest at 17 mph with winds of 115 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center's 2 p.m. ET advisory. The center also warned that Gustav could spawn tornadoes along the coast.
Some hospitals changed plans once Gustav sped up and decided to evacuate patients they had planned to shelter there, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters Sunday before leaving for a command post in Louisiana.

An untypical Negro

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