There is apparently a real chance that Hurricane Gustav could hit New Orleans next Monday — which happens to be the day that President Bush, Laura Bush, and Vice President Cheney are scheduled to speak....

We hope Gustav fades harmlessly away. And if it does hit land, we hope the people in its path are properly taken care of.

We must say, though, that we like the idea that as the Bush administration comes to an end, nature is forcing the President and the Republican National Committee to think back to the horrifically bungled response to Katrina — one of the worst part-natural, part-man-made disasters in American History.

Got the word from one of the project's partner organizations.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Trouble the Water is directed and produced by Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The film tells the story of an aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning. It’s a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes that takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen.

Feds collect files from nonprofit
by Andrew Vanacore, The Times-Picayune
Monday August 11, 2008, 10:02 PM

Federal investigators collected documents Monday from the shuttered New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., the city-chartered and city-financed nonprofit that ran a home-remediation program in 2006 and 2007....

The city nonprofit has been under intense scrutiny for the past several weeks, as news reports raised questions about whether its contractors billed taxpayers for work they didn't perform on blighted New Orleans homes. The remediation program, aimed at the poor and elderly, was touted as a salve to sagging neighborhoods by Mayor Ray Nagin in his 2007 budget address.

But some of the homes listed on NOAH work sheets were in fact gutted by volunteer groups, records show. Meanwhile, more than 100 of the 870 properties that the agency's contractors claim to have remediated have since been torn down. Neighbors have said that some of the demolished homes were not cleaned up at all before they were razed, though taxpayers were billed for the service.

Katrina’s Most Vulnerable

Louisiana is set to receive $73 million in desperately needed federal aid to help house some of the region’s lowest-income families, including ill and disabled people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

Landing the money is only the first challenge. Now begins the delicate and difficult work of setting up permanent housing arrangements for homeless people, many of whom have psychiatric or medical problems that require ongoing counseling and other services.

Homeless-services agencies that work in New Orleans are rightly worried. In a city where rents have skyrocketed and housing is in short supply, they fear that developers who were required to set aside units for the most vulnerable citizens may shy away from tenants with histories of mental illness or homelessness.

Political leaders and policy makers will also have to muster courage and persistence in the face of pessimists, who will inevitably question whether people who were once homeless can be good neighbors and citizens.

With apologies to Michael Myers.

Rush Limbaugh Attacks Black Katrina victims and praises Whites as the Floods hit.

Limbaugh: I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

He didn't see any of that in New Orleans either. He SAID all that but saw none of it. If I could, I'd challenge him to find reports documenting his claims on Lexis/Nexis. Now just rants from the likes of WorldNetDaily but arrest reports and such.

Since the places he's lauding are also gun nut country, he may well have seen all that if help was a week in coming.

The $600 million now going to the port was originally allocated for the state's housing assistance program, which provided money to families who lost property to Katrina's storm surge.

Katrina Housing Aid to Be Used for Port

JACKSON, Miss. -- The federal government has approved Mississippi's plan to divert $600 million in hurricane housing funds to a port improvement project, angering critics who say tens of thousands of people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina still need help.

In a letter to Gov. Haley Barbour (R), Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said on Friday that he is concerned about using the housing money for the port project, but that congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds "allows me little discretion."

Mississippi plans to restore public infrastructure and publicly owned facilities at the State Port at Gulfport that were destroyed by Katrina, and to improve the port's operating capacity.

“I told them, ‘I love turtle soup.’ People here go, ‘What’s that?’ ” said Pauline Hurst, a former therapy technician at a New Orleans hospital who settled here after her home was destroyed in the post-hurricane flood.

Dreadlocks, accepted in New Orleans, might mean a reservation at a fancy restaurant is suddenly “lost,” as in the telling of one exile here. A burst of gunfire might mean an instant police response rather than none at all, as in New Orleans, in the amazed recounting of another. Late-night cravings mean the IHOP rather than the famous Camellia Grill; going to work means hourlong trips on country roads, rather than, say, a 10-minute hop across the Industrial Canal from the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. 

With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind
By ADAM NOSSITER

LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.

They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.

This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.

The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson criticized the protesters in an interview aired Friday, saying many of them have never lived in public housing.

"It's amazing how people have little respect for low-income people in the sense that they want them to go back into that drug, crime-infested environment where they don't live," Jackson told WWL-TV in New Orleans.

Razing of New Orleans housing halted
By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
Fri Dec 14, 5:26 PM ET

Demolition of three public housing complexes, slated to start this weekend, was halted Friday amid complaints about the scarcity of housing for the poor after Hurricane Katrina.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans, which is run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, agreed to postpone the start of demolition pending a hearing Thursday before City Council. Opponents of the tear-down plan had filed a lawsuit contending that the council's consent was required by the city charter.

"We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who was then heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation. "We're pursuing evidence of those stories."

"Conscious human error"? What the fuck kind of Economic Correctness is that?

Ex-Army Corps official pleads guilty to rigging New Orleans bid
By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Times Staff Writer
8:43 PM PDT, August 23, 2007 

A former employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pleaded guilty Thursday to rigging a bid on repairs to levees in the New Orleans area, part of a broader Justice Department investigation into procurement fraud in levee reconstruction.

The highlighted quote comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center

Even though it has largely left "respectability" behind, the Council still wields a big political stick in Mississippi, where it claims some 5,000 members. The Council helped organize opposition to a 2001 referendum to change Mississippi's state flag to a less Dixie-fied design (the flag included a miniature representation of the Confederate battle flag). The referendum's thumping defeat in a racially polarized vote — 64% to 36% — was a major victory for the CCC.

Haley Barbour (center), later elected governor of Mississippi, appeared at a 2003 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) fund-raising event with CCC supporters and officials, including CCC Field Director Bill Lord (far right).

The Council also flexed some muscle in last year's gubernatorial election, which pitted incumbent Democrat Ronnie Musgrove — who led the fight to change the Mississippi state flag — against Republican Haley Barbour. During the campaign, the CCC Web site ran a photograph of Barbour posing with Council luminaries at the Black Hawk Barbecue, a CCC fundraising event for "private academy" school buses.

When the photo caused a stir, Barbour was quick to call the CCC's segregationist views "indefensible." But he refused to ask that his picture be taken down from the Web site. It was a matter of principle, Barbour explained. "Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?" he asked. "Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan?"

Mississippi Governor's Associates Profit From Katrina Recovery
By Timothy J. Burger

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour's efforts to rebuild the state's devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina. The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped residents move to new or repaired homes.

Judge acquits New Orleans cop in videotaped beating

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- A former police officer accused in the videotaped beating of a man in the French Quarter after Hurricane Katrina was acquitted Tuesday by a judge who heard the case without a jury.

"I didn't even find this a close call," said District Judge Frank Marullo.

Robert Evangelist, 37, had been charged with beating Robert Davis, 66, during an arrest videotaped by an Associated Press Television News crew the night of October 8, 2005, about six weeks after Katrina.

Evangelist, who elected to have his case heard by Marullo without a jury, pleaded not guilty to second-degree battery and false imprisonment. Marullo acquitted him of both counts.

Marullo watched videotapes of the beating and its aftermath and he noted that Davis could be seen struggling on the tape for several minutes.

"This event could have ended at any time if the man had put his hands behind his back," the judge said.

FEMA suppressed health warnings
Katrina victims tell a House committee that formaldehyde in their trailers made them sick. Documents show testing was discouraged.
By Claudia Lauer
Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — Top officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency knew about reports of possible health problems from formaldehyde in trailers provided to Hurricane Katrina victims, according to documents released Thursday by a House committee.

The warnings from Gulf Coast field workers were brushed aside because "senior FEMA officials in Washington … didn't want the moral and legal responsibility to do what they knew had to be done," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as he opened a hearing into the agency's response.

Michele Martin went all United Nations on them, asking if they would support a right to return. Senator Clinton is kinda working around it the way she works around apologizing for voting for the invasion of Iraq. Biden ducked the same way.

Edwards talks such a good game. And Sen Obama oes the embrace and extend thing.

The report clearly shows that some areas are less vulnerable than they were in 2005. But it could also potentially lead insurers and investors to think twice about supporting the rebuilding efforts in vulnerable areas or in the city as a whole....

As part of the report, the corps established a Web site, nolarisk.usace.army.mil, that allows New Orleans residents to study the city on a block-by-block basis and learn what kind of damage they might expect with more than 150 kinds of storms.

New Orleans Still at Risk, Army Data Show
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

After nearly two years of work, the Army Corps of Engineers revealed yesterday which New Orleans neighborhoods and blocks were the most vulnerable to flooding, and which were the best protected. The report shows that despite considerable improvement, large swaths of the city are still likely to be flooded in a major storm.

Generating benefits to the nation is what created the problem, and the nation needs to solve it. Put simply: Why should a cab driver in Pittsburgh or Tulsa pay to fix Louisiana's coast? Because he gets a stronger economy and lower energy costs from it, and because his benefits created the problem. The failure of Congress and the president to act aggressively to repair the coastline at the mouth of the Mississippi River could threaten the economic vitality of the nation. Louisiana, one of the poorest states, can no longer afford to underwrite benefits for the rest of the nation.

Our Coast to Fix -- or Lose
By John M. Barry
Saturday, May 12, 2007; A15

There has been much debate in the past 20 months over protecting Louisiana from another lethal hurricane, but nearly all of it has been conducted without any real understanding of the geological context. Congress and the Bush administration need to recognize six facts that define the national interest.

I read this headline

Critic Says Levee Repairs Show Signs of Flaws

and thought, "It's kind of late in the day to do something about it." Which is bad because, as the article says, hurricane season begins next month.

Now, there was similar mental stress in the air this time last year and we go a break...but two years down the line, I really think we're pushing it. Look at this:

There are places where the levees are breached already.

And remember, Katrina was downgraded to a category 3 hurricane. Think of what will happen is a REAL Cat4 storm hits the area.

Plunking down traumatized people from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans on a farm in the middle of nowhere may sound like the premise for a reality television show or, as Mr. Carmichael said, “an African-American version of ‘Green Acres,’ ” the television series in which Eva Gabor resisted going rustic. The village residents, in fact, while grateful for the generosity, suggest that the situation is odd, and sometimes uncomfortable.

Describing his thoughts when he arrived, [Allen C. Wyman] said: “Man, we’re in the country. That’s not going to last long. The whole kind of plantation vibe was going through people’s heads.”

Urban to Core, Storm Evacuees Give Farm a Try
By LESLIE EATON

SIMMESPORT, La. — Faced with the televised devastation of New Orleans and the despair of Hurricane Katrina victims, many people have sent them charitable checks.

Frank Stronach bought them a $2.4 million farm.

In Louisiana, this bureaucratic nightmare has left the financing for roughly 20,000 projects in limbo, while generating 2.6 million documents and the attendant overhead costs.

Broken Promises to a Broken Gulf

President Bush has reneged on his promises to Katrina’s victims. Shamefully, the president has chosen the interests of bureaucracy over those of American towns on the brink of failure.

Jarvis said district officials agreed that "under normal circumstances" the temporary policy "would be a little lenient."

But "under the circumstances our children are living under," she said, "we feel for a one-year period we need to try to do this to encourage them and help them move forward in their education."

Brian Riedlinger, president of the Algiers Charters School Association, said students will see the low expectations embodied in the policy, and they will figure out how to beat the system.

"Students will figure out a way to not learn the material and pass the course," said Riedlinger, whose association operates eight schools on New Orleans' west bank.

THE NEW MATH: FAILURE=PASSING
Do lenient temporary rules to round up grade-point averages of .5 or higher amount to 'soical promotion' in the Recovery School District?
Sunday, April 01, 2007
By Darran Simon

Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) introduces useless legislation into the Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery Housing bill. Rep. Frank (D-MA) intercedes for the people Jindal should be representing.

And the next time you hear Republicans crying about civility, remember the background noise in this clip.

Nagin, who won reelection last May over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, referred obliquely to the "chocolate city" comment at the dinner and suggested that his assertion that New Orleans would once again be a majority-black city had made him a political target.

"Everybody in America started to wake up and say: 'Wait a minute. What is he doing? What is he saying? We have to make sure that this man doesn't go any further,' " Nagin told a room full of black newspaper publishers and editors at the Capital Hilton.

Son...it's fucked up but it's not personal.

Colonel Jeffrey Bedey, who is overseeing levee reconstruction, insisted the pumps would have worked last year and the city was never in danger. Bedey gave assurances that the pumps should be ready for the coming hurricane season, which begins June 1.

Corps allegedly knew pumps put in after Katrina were faulty
Warnings issued, documents say
By Cain Burdeau, Associated Press | March 14, 2007

NEW ORLEANS -- The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood control pumps last year despite warnings from its own specialist that the equipment would fail during a storm, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

A:

Details:

Gingrich at CPAC: New Orleans destroyed by lack of education, "citizenship"

Most of the controversy from last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference has centered around Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" (although many news accounts failed to mention it -- I guess gay-bashing isn't news?).

But just as shocking was the closing speech delivered by presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who a CPAC leader called "the intellectual cornerstone of our modern conservative movement." On the week of the 18-month anniversary of Katrina, as families across the Gulf remembered the tragedy and how it devastated their lives, Gingrich claimed that those killed or displaced from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans had it coming because they were, in short, bad citizens and stupid.

Here's what he said...

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.