Tag: Hurricane Katrina

Why Obama Should Be in NOLA on Katrina Anniversary

The deathers are all worried about how old folks will be treated under Democratic health care legislation.

Perhaps they have forgotten how old folks were treated under Republican rule:

Photobucket

How many old folks died because our federal government saw no role to play in protecting and caring for its citizens?

See, the trouble with not looking back is that we don’t remember what we ought to remember.

Katrina is something to remember.  Always.  The federal flood, they call it on the NOLA blogs.  The federal flood because the Army Corps of Engineers cut corners and didn’t make the levees right.  The federal flood because heckuva job Brownie and Bush’s happy cronies didn’t give a shit about the folks suffering but only cared about going to the cash register to hear the “ca-ching” that meant their usual profit off of human suffering.  Blackwater profited.  Halliburton profited.  A whole lot of Republicans profited.

Friday Night at 8: Cool Shades

The only way to view the political circus nowadays is to put your shades on first.

Photobucket

Seriously!

Don’t want anyone to recognize me!

My mama told me to stay out of places like that.

And it’s worse than she said!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All I can say is it’s a damned good thing we didn’t get health care legislation passed before the August break!  Look what we would have missed!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

How can something so utterly serious be impossible to take seriously?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The circus has come to town ………………………… hall.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My political commentary for the week.  It’s fucking Friday and I’m gonna put on my cool shades and go prowling down some particularly fine back alleys.  Hope all is well with Dharmaniacs everywhere and Happy Weekend!

Some music to prowl by …

… it’s coming up to that time of year again.

From YouTuber maedgen’s notes on this tune:

Filmed in mid-2005, this is a glimpse into life on the French Quarter’s lower Decatur Street before Hurricane Katrina.

Originally written by Ray Davies of the Kinks, this track is performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band featuring Clint Maedgen on vocals with a guest appearance by the New Orleans Bingo! Show in the video.

According to Rumors, Mississippi’s Boss Hog Aspires to Become President

Can you imagine this crook in the White House? No way this is in the cards for America’s future! No way this white supremacist will be allowed in the White House!

Barbour Ignores Budget-balancing Stimulus in Fox News Criticisms

By Bill Minor, 7-19-09

Jackson, Miss – Call it chutzpah, biting the hand that feeds you, or whatever else you might call it when the beneficiary of largesse disdains the one who made the goodies possible.

Gov. Haley Barbour goes on Fox News Channel’s (where else?) Sean Hannity show four days after Mississippi’s Legislature has handed him a balanced state budget without draconian agency cuts or big tax increases, thanks largely to money from President Obama’s $785 billion stimulus package, officially known as American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Does Haley tell Sean anything about how the Obama stimulus money plugged gaping holes in the Mississippi budget? He does not.

No, he tears into the stimulus package with all the pat phrases from the Republican Party playbook.

“Too much spending on social policy and not enough on infrastructure,” Barbour repeats, followed by the old GOP standby: “not enough tax cuts.”

Adding, of course, “It would make a lot more sense if they’d given states more discretion over how to spend the money.”

Translation: Give me say-so on where to put the money (we all remember how Barbour shifted $600 million in Katrina money intended to rebuild housing on the devastated Gulf Coast to the Port of Gulfport’s 10-year old expansion plan that includes creating casino-hotel sites.)

What were the “social policy” programs Barbour told Fox viewers were wrongly included in Obama’s recovery package?

Did that apply to the $160 million stimulus money that made it possible to fully fund Mississippi’s K-12 education program, saving 4,500 teachers’ jobs?

Or $133 million ARRA money for Title 1 to aid poverty students or another $122.3 million for school children with disabilities?

Or the $164 million ARRA money that saved the fiscally troubled Medicaid program and its 600,000 vulnerable clients?

Or the $177 million to the Department of Transportation for shovel-ready projects that will put hundreds of Mississippians to work?

At home, a different tune

Strangely, back home in Mississippi, Barbour whistled a different tune about the Obama recovery package in his Web site. It was saying “spending on all three levels of education will be the highest ever” and acknowledged that federal stimulus money made it possible.

On the Hannity show, Barbour sounded more like a hopeful to be on the GOP’s 2012 ticket, veering off into water over his head on foreign policy and military preparedness.

He roundly criticized President Obama’s recent meetings with Russia’s two top leaders, and his agreement that both U.S. and Russia would reduce to 1,600 their nuclear warheads.

The Mississippi governor charged “it is no time to dismantle our nuclear arsenal to have a charm offensive with the Russians.”

Barbour said that his hero, Ronald Reagan, would never have done such a thing, insisting that Ronnie “showed the world the Russians couldn’t compete with us” in nuclear weaponry.

Barbour forgets Reagan

Obviously Barbour didn’t know or conveniently forgot that Reagan, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, stunned NATO allies and his aides by proposing both the U. S. and the Soviet Union scrap all of their nuclear weapons.

Reagan aides quickly went into damage control, attributing Reagan’s off-handed nuclear giveaway to a brief lapse of memory, and told the Russian team just to forget what he said.

Makes Obama’s nuclear agreement with the Russian leaders small potatoes by comparison.

Barbour’s Fox News sortie into the foreign policy minefield brings to mind his unmemorable 1982 Senate race against aging Sen. John Stennis when he tried to portray Stennis, then one of the hawkish of war hawks in Congress, as soft on standing up to the Soviets in the Cold War.

Mississippians then saw that Barbour was talking pure hogwash and soundly defeated him.

Bill Minor is a syndicated columnist who has covered Mississippi politics since 1947.  

The Bush Horror: An Elegy; A Letter

The following is a letter to my (infant) sons that I wrote in longhand in August, 2005 over a period of several days. It ends in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I am typewriting it here for archival purposes.   My intent in writing this was to preserve for them some sense of what occurred in this country as I don’t expect that the history books can or will do it justice.  My other intent was to capture my own emotions at the time, which were not good.

Cross-posted on the Great Orange Satan.

The Trust:

My dear _ and __:

   If you had told me five years ago that this country would have witnessed a contested Presidential election result, resolved only by a Supreme Court which effectively ordered a state to stop counting its votes (arguably in disregard of its own state laws), and exposing, as almost an afterthought, massive voter suppression, a near institutional campaign of racial intimidation, wanton disregard of legitimate ballots, and a manipulative smear campaign waged by the prevailing party culminating in political staffers flown to Florida to physically harass and threaten public officials, I would have thought–“that’s terrible enough, but somehow the nation will get past it, somehow common sense and reason will prevail.”

Give it up for the Gulf Coast, take 5

The gross incompetents and criminally negligent may be leaving DC soon, but there are still tens of thousands of people on the gulf coast who haven’t been able to rebuild… so we’re going back over Christmas, some for the fifth time since the storm.

What started as a group of 7 is now over 70 strong.

Show us some love… and if you’re near Westchester County, NY… come listen to some music:



Riverbuild'08

The MSM’s Silence on Post-Gustav Louisiana

I wish I could say that Hurricane Gustav refocused more national attention on Louisiana’s issues including vanishing barrier reefs and wetlands as well as the following, which I learned about this morning from a fellow Kossack living in the NOLA area who had evacuated when Gustav was on the way. Maybe it did–for only a few minutes.

For to put it bluntly, even in the New Orleans area even though the MSM gave out of state observers the impression that the area had escaped unscathed or was only lightly damaged, residents still have a major mess to contend with–and FEMA still doesn’t seem to have learned from Katrina and the flood. More below the fold…..

Sarah Palin Should Have Mentioned Gustav…..

and its survivors across the wide swath of Louisiana which has been tortured by the devastation he left behind. Saying in last night’s speech that she stands behind our fellow citizens in the area would only have been right–especially were she to have called upon other Americans to donate to the Red Cross as has Obama. (Link below the fold).

Now for the “meat”–following is a poem I’ve written to commemorate the third anniversary of Katrina and the federal flood. It is in the voice of the mother of 8-year-old and 9-year-old boys who have a disabled grandmother. While it is fiction, it’s based on things people actually went through during Katrina and flood and in the aftermath.

Why The Obsession With Palin When Louisiana’s Hurting? (With Donation Info)

As duplicative, repetitive diaries keep being posted about Sarah Palin on other blogs, the agonizing aftermath of Gustav in Louisiana is being ignored, if it hasn’t been forgotten already.

Don’t get me wrong–but there’s plenty of time to go into Palin’s issues between now and the election (though as Obama has said, we shouldn’t go into Bristol’s pregnancy because that’s a family problem of the Palins.) And those having to do with her work as a leader are important. But we should not lose sight of what’s going on in Louisiana as we focus on them. Because the disaster and anguish continue in Gustav’s aftermath.

Show this picture everywhere

Tomorrow, the whole world will watch as John McCain introduces and appears with his running mate as the Republican ticket in public for the first time. The timing of the announcement is meant to achieve four key goals for the McCain campaign:

1) Keep Obama/Biden from getting the kajillion point bounce they need for the Democratic National Convention to be considered a success.

2) Dominate the weekend news cycle.

3) Generate a little excitement for the moribund Republican Party heading into their dirgefest national convention.

4) Distract us all from an important anniversary.

Heckuva Job, Brownie, Part Deux? (Updated x 3)

Cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Its name is Gustav.  And nobody is entirely sure where it’s going.  But the 5 day forecast map from Weatherunderground.com makes an alarming prediction:

Photobucket

And that prediction is that this storm could grow in intensity and travel to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Join me in the City that Care Forgot.

Louisiana’s Relationship From Hell: The Sequel

For anybody who thought Louisiana would get a far better deal from BushCo under GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal than she did under Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, they’d better think again. For Bush’s pattern of abuse against Louisiana seems to transcend her politics. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate,

Bobby Jindal,  angered over the increased costs that storm-wounded Louisiana must shoulder for construction of hurricane protection levees, asked Washington for more time – and a little fairness.

Under the latest war spending bill, Louisiana must kick in $1.8 billion by 2011 in order to activate $5.8 billion in federal funding needed to strengthen the New Orleans-area levee system.

Jindal said Louisiana’s share for repairs to the 360-mile, federally maintained levee system, is higher post-Katrina, than before the storm. “It seems ridiculous,” Jindal said, tersely.

9/11 and 8/29–What’s Different?

This diary is intended as something of a rant. Because this saddens me and makes my blood boil every time I think about it.

But before I vent, here’s a caveat: as I said in yesterday’s diary, 9/11 tore me apart. So this is by no means intended as a put-down of the trauma 9/11 survivors went through or a complaint about the well-deserved sympathy and support they’ve gotten.

Rather, what pisses me off is is the fact that survivors of 8/29–whether of Katrina, the federal flood, or of Rita–have not been receiving the equal aid, synpathy, or other treatment to that received by 9/11 survivors, that they deserve. What blueintheface brings up–the fact that Daily Kos hasn’t been paying enough attention to New Orleans and Katrina, is the tip of a very big iceberg involving the MSM and many politicians that has been keeping storm and flood survivors from getting the attention they have a right to receive.

Load more