The Black Voice, out of San Bernardino, California, is part of a coalition effort to send 10 volunteers to New Orleans to recover bodies. The effort is also being co-sponsored by entertainer Nancy Wilson and her husband,...
Read MoreOriginal posted at DailyKos. What’s happened to Louisiana Latinos and Asians post-Katrina? Almost the same length of the shaft as blacks. But many of you wouldn’t know that by looking at American cable news or...
Read MoreMike Davis and Anthony Fontenot pose these questions for many unknowing Americans:
Read MoreWe recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.
Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple “incompetence” or “failure of leadership,” locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect-the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.
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Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.
He was called ‘the poet laureate of comedy’: 
Often called “the poet laureate of comedy,” Mr. Russell may be best known today as one of the polyester-wearing guests on TV quiz show reruns, cracking wise and rhyming couplets in the company of such B-list celebrities as Paul Lynde, Fanny Flagg and Charles Nelson Reilly. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was a frequent guest on “To Tell the Truth,” “Match Game 73,” “Masquerade Party,” “What’s My Line?” and “Hollywood Squares.” He hosted a daytime game show called “Your Number’s Up.”
But children in past decades probably know him from a certain musical remake of The Wizard of Oz:
Read MoreIn addition to his numerous TV appearances, he was the Tin Man in “The Wiz,” the 1978 black-cast remake of “The Wizard of Oz.” It was a role that allowed him to showcase his versatility as a singer, dancer, actor and comedian.
Only thing is, they aren’t counting the bodies in the houses yet.
Read MoreThe search for Hurricane Katrina victims has ended in Louisiana with a death toll at 964, but more searches will be conducted if someone reports seeing a body, a state official said Monday.
State and federal agencies have finished their sweeps through the city, but Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company hired by the state to remove the bodies, is on call if any other body is found, said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman with the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
“There might still be bodies found — for instance, if a house was locked and nobody able to go into it,” Johannessen said.