asking Al Gore to run in 2008!
Katrina Continued
Posted August 28th, 2007 by pcmedia
Dear visitors, please read the following Katrina account from one compassionate woman.
We must not allow the travesty of Katrina to be drowned out by the war and the election. I want to hear from our so called "candidates" what they did after Katrina and Rita and what they are doing now or will do later as "President". I don't remember any of them running down to help out. Do you?
We had an obligation to divert war money to assist there. There is so damn much money being funneled into Iraq through private contractors. That money could have gone to NOLA and if Iraq was better managed that money would not have been missed.
We need to make this particular byproduct of the Climate CRISIS put to the front burner again. We will need the practice once the climate party really gets started.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/29/01012/9014
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Be part of the Draft Gore '08 campaign!
A little known story
Friday, September 9, 2005
Al Gore airlifts Katrina victims out of New Orleans
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.
Gore criticized the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina in a speech Friday in San Francisco, but refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew on Sept. 3 and 4.
However, Dr. Anderson Spickard, who is Gore's personal physician and accompanied him on the flights, said: "Gore told me he wanted to do this because like all of us he wanted to seize the opportunity to do what one guy can do, given the assets that he has."
An account of the flights was posted this week on a Democratic Party Web page. It was written by Greg Simon, president of the Washington-based activist group FasterCures. Simon, who helped put together the mission, also declined an interview.
On Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slamed into the Gulf Coast, Simon learned that Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.
"The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute -- food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and ... corpses outside," Simon wrote.
Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights, although Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, later pledged to pay for one of them.
"None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews," Simon wrote of the American Airlines flights. "One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them."
He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore's cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.
Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.
About 140 people, many of them sick, landed in Knoxville on Sept. 3. The second flight, with 130 evacuees, landed the next day in Chattanooga.