We should have our new server online today. Can’t wait.
What’s on your mind today? Football? Baseball? HBO programming? Remembering 9/11? The Hurricane Victims? What?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
It is official they will not rebuild for the poor:
Indeed, state Sen. Ann Duplessis (D-New Orleans) reported at a state legislative hearing Friday that she’d been told by several officials that water damage and toxic contamination meant her east-side district, which contains some of the city’s poorest and hardest-hit neighborhoods, “will never be rebuilt. They’ll just clean it, level it and — I don’t know — maybe build an airport there. My district is gone. It has turned into a wetland, a marsh.”
“The city,” she told her colleagues in Baton Rouge, “is probably going to be a smaller city and go vertical.”
Dan Packer would agree. The head of New Orleans’ power company, Entergy New Orleans, was at the mayor’s side last week, troubleshooting problems that arose as crews began trying to relight portions of the city.
“I think we will end up with a smaller population,” said Packer, 58, who has lived in New Orleans since he was a boy. “I think the city will be viable as a tourist attraction, and who knows? We may find ourselves with other businesses,” lessening the city’s economic reliance on port trade and tourism.
I can’t believe that people are actually saying those things in public. However, the Katrina response has finally shaken the scales from the eyes of the Des Moines Register editorial board. Here is what they wrote today:
After a searing critique of FEMA, they concluded with this:
This kind of writing is not exactly common in the Des Moines Register. I hope that it really is a turning point in their thinking.
I’m betting on a cross between Disneyworld and Las Vegas.
What about a WPA project to get the residents back on their feet along with their city?
I sent an e-mail to Habitat for Humanity asking them to please create some box ads for blogs.
If Habitat for Humanity can get aggressive and muster a lot of clout — Harry Connick Jr. as honorary chair for the NOLA project is a good start — we might get somewhere.
I HOPE I hear from them. If not I will call them directly.
I have a hunch that a lot of you would put up Habitat signs on your Web/blog sites and help spread the word, right?
Rebuilding Together is another Habitat-like group, with a 4-star (top) rating from CharityNavigator.org. You may want to consider them, too.
best regards,
Unfortunately, it is actually better to contemplate not building in an area known to be contaminated with pathogenic organisms – some of which can survive for decades in spore form – and potentially contaminated by God-Only-Knows-What carcinogenic petro- and other chemicals. And, may be even, bio-toxins. Given time and effort (and money) these sorts of contaminates can be cleaned-up but until, unless, that is done it is a continuing private and Public Health risk for humans, and anything else, to live there.
maybe they’ll have a chance to rebuild and get it right this time. San Francisco has been tearing down many of their old “projects” and rebuilding them into beautiful communities that the former residents are proud to return to…
… and this ONLY happened in the poor areas… 80% of NOLA was under water.
Help! I just quit my job, left my family, and moved 300 miles to take another job. The new job hasn’t started yet, so here I sit in Starbucks — the only way I have of getting on the internet at the moment. It was a risky move, but one that I hope will lead me out of a financial dead end.
It’s nothing like losing everything I own under 20 feet of toxic water with nothing between me and skid row but an AWOL Republican administration, but I can relate to feeling displaced, disoriented, and lonely. I miss my family, my home, and the liberal blogosphere!
Keep up the good work, all you progressive activists. We need you more than ever.
–such as family, friends, knowledge of neighborhoods and local opportunities–all the connections that help many people succeed in life.
We two relocated from the midwest to the PacNW in late middle age. Now even 5 years later we regularly pay the costs of lack of local knowledge and long connections.
A million or so Americans suddenly have that condition forced on them, above and beyond all the economic loss and disruption.
Here’s to your future, mymother!
Thanks, Gooserock! Truer words were never spoken! I feel like I just landed on Mars, even though this is an area where I used to live.
Can we find you some local BooTribbers to at least have you over for a home-cooked meal and a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11?
What a great offer, Cali Scribe! I really appreciate all the support, you guys, even though this is the first time I’ve been able to get back on line and see it. I’m on the scenic Monterey Peninsula in California, hoping to calm down soon so that I can begin to enjoy the scenery! I think I may have found a missing niece last night, left her a phone message, so that would be cool! 🙂 My email is mythmother (a) yahoo (dot) com.
Stumping for Tim Kaine at the Sunday farmer’s market.
Lakers: 12
Red Sox: 84
That’s so funny.
I’m crabby because I can’t find any info on MSNBC TV’s site about what time Keith O’s special is today.
I think he said, Thurs. night, that he’d be on for three hours today.
Looks like 4-7 Left Coast time…but so far I’ve only heard his voice, haven’t seen him to see if he’s in gray suit or black… 😉
Dark suit night… 🙂
Go Bears!
This is a particularly good story about the ER response medical team that went into New Orleans.
They were horrified by what they saw. .. worse than Vietnam, etc., etc.
I just got back from a trip to Sedona last night (difficult time for a vacation, but we had planned it almost a year ago). I bought my first digital camera just before I left and have spent the last hour or so downloading the 60+ pictures I took. This is a sample. And just in time for the Froggy Bottom Photo Fair!
HSUS’s figures:
Confirmed Totals to Date: 2935
Dogs: 1392
Cats: 457
Horses: 121
Other Animals: 965
Updated: September 10, 9:00 a.m.
GO HERE to read the reports and see photos.
Somebody from FEMA is live on CSPAN now
I am about to talk with my dad on the phone — been looking forward to it!
Sorry about Michigan yesterday, Boo, but at least TX beat Ohio State! 😉 And what a win for LSU opver ASU — a great game!
I’m going to buy a backback for a pre-K girl at my son’s school (one of about 10 kids we’ve gotten from the hurricaine so far) who doesn’t have one….
It’s raining here.
I have the house to myself for a couple of hours…
Hope you all hav e a good Sunday!
Good job,Brinnaine!
Today- I talked to my buddy in Austin-who I poked HARD with a sharp stick on Fri-and lo and behold he carried his ass down to the convention center and spent the whole day entering names in a database for people who had lost their relatives!
Shycat points her finger…………
I should get back over to the KatrinaWiki project and do another batch of names…
Mrs. Gooserock has joined the company firm part time. Today we’ve been setting up shelving, lighting and some jigs & tooling for her part of the work.
Now it’s off to the beach to walk our two totos at high tide.
On 9/11/01, George Bush was hiding in his underground bunker in Nebraska and the Capitol Building in Washington had been evacuated. I’m sure I remember a Republican congressman being interviewed outside the Capitol who said something very close to “where the hell is the President of the United States and why isn’t he here?”
I’ve never seen the clip again since that day.
on the Iwo Jima, posing for photos wiht the flight crew and he actually had the unmittigated gall to pull the flight micophone out of the way of the full face shot of an african american man befoer the picture — did anyone else see that?
What a HUGELY ARROGANT MOVE!
What’s on my mind today?
susanhu made a comment in her diary about the book “Use of Weapons”. I know the book has less to do with what the title may imply. I dropped a comment in there about Alphageeks diary and how the comments were littered with “weapons suggestions”.
But this story has a lot to with the use of weapons:
Welcome to the modern wild west system of justice where weapons reign supreme.
It is almost like the government is encouraging anarchy…
Is this the kind of America you want your kids and grandkids to grow up in?
Tried reading my Sunday SF Chronicle — I should know better.
On Page 15 is this quote:
Of the 1.4 million men and women in uniform and another 600,000 in the reserves or National Guard, roughly 140,000 are serving in Iraq, and another 62,000 are in the Gulf Coast, according the Pentagon.
“We do not have a shortage of capacity,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel. “Whoever’s raising that question … doesn’t really understand the situation.”
On to page 17 (sorry, no link — it’s not online) for the following:
About 600 members of the Mississippi Guard’s 155th Brigade Combat Team, posted south of Baghdad in the region known as the “Triangle of Death,” live in the parts of southern Mississippi and southeast Louisiana hit hardest by Katrina, Maj. Neil Murphy, a spokesman with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, said by email Saturday.
Guard members and relatives said in e-mails or telephone interviews that almost all of the roughly 300 soldiers of 155th Brigade’s B and C companies had their homes destroyed or severely damaged in the hurricane.
Eighty Mississippi Guard members have been granted emergency leave, Murphy said.
The rest have been refused leave, told by their brigade command that all other forward operating bases “are tapped out and cannot send troops,” one soldier wrote in an e-mail that a family member showed to the Washington Post, with his permission, on condition of anonymity.
Enough to make MY head spin! I’ll just go sit down now.
Is anyone else here a fan of “House”? Its new season starts on Tuesday night, we think.
I thought it was pretty weak sometimes, but that Hugh Laurie carried the series! hard as it is for me to say this, I almost hope he wins best actor, drama, at the Emmy awards, over Ian McShane in Deadwood … mostly because Laurie made “House” a success, and McShane is a great part of a great cast on a show that’s much better written and hands him great lines.