Irma Thomas

Government Sucks

I've always been a believer in the power for good that is a government's reason for existence. We need roads, schools, a really good single payer health care system, clean water, clean air, etc. etc. But sometimes I have to agree with the ReThugs, government doesn't use you money wisely, as in the case of the salary of one Mr. Paulinson, who, by reason of an advanced educmacation of some kind, has determined that FEMA will no longer provide ice to the victims of hurricanes. I have never experienced a hurricane, but once a tornado was reported to have touched down over in Sec. 14, but, seriously, WTF? A NOLA blog, Suspect Device, has answers. Here's the best one, IMHO.

Ice, Mr. Paulinson, is what we put the bodies on.

My emphasis.

Up here in Northern Wisco, like other places north of the 45th parallel, we used to get our summer ice this way. The ice, thick cork insulation, & lots of sawdust.

Red Beans

Snooks Eaglin. Along with George Porter, Jr. & at the piano, Jon Cleary. I sure do miss New Orleans. I've got to win the lottery.

Yikes!

I'm sure the headline writer didn't mean it to sound this bad.

School bus drivers to be trained

Thanks

John Edwards left the campaign for the Democratic nomination today. He did it in New Orleans, Louisiana, the city where he announced his campaign. I supported him, & will still write his name in at Wisco's primary. He was the only candidate that addressed what is truly right about America & what is truly wrong about America. He understood the unimaginable cruelty of the Bu$hCo administration's attitude towards New Orleans. & while a backward thinking commenter below somehow thinks that C-Ray had/has a lot more money & power than the federal government, Bu$hCo effectively abandoned New Orleans. The local pols aren't even important, frankly, since this was a national disaster, not some tragic local tornado destruction. It's easy to rebuild the local Log Cabin Pizza Place or Let's Kill Us Some Deer Sporting Goods & Liquor Emporium. It's harder to rebuild a distinct American culture of the kind that New Orleans developed over the centuries. & this is not to say that the culture existing in NOLA pre-Katrina didn't need some deep fixing, it certainly did, but it's hard to fix the schools, for example, when the whole community is not behind that fixing. It's easy to have good schools in Whitefish Bay, WI, where the median income for a family is $95,744. Yes, that's pretty close to a hundred thousand a year. In NOLA, by contrast, the median family income, pre-Katrina, from the 2000 census, was $27,133. The poverty stats are interesting as well. Whitefish Bay had 3.2% of its citizens living below the poverty line. NOLA had 36.38% of its citizens below the poverty line. & in that range of folks below the poverty line the highest percentage was 61.4% among families with a female as the head of the household & with children under five. Now I know that I am comparing rutabagas to eggplant here, a small, upper Midwestern suburban city with a large, multi-ethnic southern port city. But my point is that Bu$hCo deliberately ignored NOLA because it is predominately black, poor, & Democratic. It is a bright blue spot in an otherwise dismally red state. Bu$hCo's response was the response of a racist, of someone who just doesn't give a shit about poor people. Parse it anyway you want, but don't blame a ReThug turned Democrat, that would be C-Ray, for the disaster. He was a ReThug, you know, the responsible cable television exec. Anyway, back to Mr. Edwards. He went to New Orleans today & gave this speech. I hope Clinton or Obama listens not only to this speech, but to much of what Edwards had to say. He, alone among all the initial Democratic candidates, had the mettle to smack the Rethugs down, he does understand just how awful the present administration is. I can only hope that whoever wins the nomination & then the presidency would have the ovaries or balls to appoint him as Attorney General. Then we will finally make the criminals in the Bu$hCo mafia pay all their debts to society, a society they are/were hell-bent on destroying.

Oh Yeah, Down There

The son-of-a-bitch Bu$hCo continues to fuck the people of the Gulf Coast, New Orleans to be specific. This is the ReThug (Republican) response to all things that have to do with the poor: open your trailer windows & ketchup is a vegetable. Depraved indifference indeed. & Pelosi won't impeach, but will stand & applaud.

Man Crush Time

A quote from Anthony Bourdain. Mr. Bourdain, whose Travel Channel teevee show, No Reservations, is great to watch.

The whole thing is about the restaurant and hospitality industry in New Orleans. What happened, how it is now, is it recovering. Man, I tell you, every single person we talked to for the show, every single person, at some point started crying on camera. Anyone who is telling you that New Orleans is back and that New Orleans is better and everything is fine is lying. That town was abominably fucked over. It's like everybody had a simultaneous nervous breakdown, and the sense of betrayal, everything you believe was proven to be utterly false.

Via Norwegianity. You know, we've had many people comment on New Orleans, like Peter King.

What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.

If you can't believe a cook & a sport's writer, who are you going to believe?

Guru of the groove

Billy Delle remembers owning his first rhythm-and-blues records about age 12. With a combination of birthday and Christmas money, he bought an adapter that allowed him to play 45s through radio speakers, and three singles to play on it:

"Night Owl" by Tony Allen and the Champs, "At My Front Door" by the El Dorados and "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard.

Read the rest here.

Tom Tancredo Is A Complete Asshole

This racist son-of-a-bitch ought to made to live in the 9th Ward.

Tancredo Calls For End To Katrina Aid

Wow. Tom Tancredo took the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to blast federal aid to the Gulf Coast today. The presidential candidate said it is "time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station" and also, "The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end."

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Just More

New Orleans Music

From today's Washington Post we get this slideshow. More here.

This complete contempt for New Orleans will be Bu$hCo's most grievous legacy. As my loyal four readers know, I fell hard for New Orleans when The Kid lived there. It was its cosmopolitan nature, the food, the people, the music, the architecture. There were a lot of problems, to be sure, the public schools sucked, the political corruption of the city & state, the crushing poverty, but the almost constant celebration mitigates some of that.

UPDATE:
More from Douglas Brinkley.

Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.

They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.

After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.

Just Don't Forget

Or forgive.

WWOZ

WWOZ is a great radio station from New Orleans. It is a public station that has always kept the great music of New Orleans streaming to those of us either in exile or wanna-be exile. I'm in the latter camp, having my daughter & son-in-law living there for a couple of years. As I've said before, I haven't fallen for a place that hard before. Go click on the station's link & make a pledge. It really won't hurt you one bit & you'll feel cool, particularly if your donation is big enough to get a little of the lagniappe that NOLA offers.

Friends In High Places

Kill people on the streets. The NOLA pumps memo, via fixthepumps via Humid City v2.3. Now, anyone with a speck of gray cellular matter in the uppermost area of their body knows that there is more Bu$hCo involved than the complete failure to help the people of the New Orleans. & yes, here it is - his fucking brother Jeb!

MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El* that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved.

Taxpayer-backed loans, sounds like Hank Martinsen & Gary LaPean of Ashland, WI.

More on the faulty pumps here & here.

Let it not be said that Hurricane Katrina's lessons didn't sink in. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers learned that it's good to look prepared, even if you aren't -- so it (apparently knowingly) installed 34 defective pumps in New Orleans before the 2006 hurricane season. The season was mild, so the Corps now has time to fix the gadgets' overheating engines, broken hoses, and blown gaskets for the 2007 season. (The pumps were made by a company run by a former business partner of Jeb Bush. We're just saying.) The Corps also learned that developing wetlands is bad, bad, bad. That's why it just issued controversial regulations allowing development on some flood plains to proceed without environmental reviews. Curiously, Corps officials say the rule -- which guides projects that fill less than half an acre of wetlands or less than 300 feet of a stream -- will deter building on bigger wetlands parcels by allowing it on small ones. It's a wonder their brains don't burst from all that logic.

Emphasis added. *Nice ring to the company name, eh? I bet the Bu$hCo handholding buddies in Saudi Arabia love it as well, probably helped with the name.

Day Three

From The Times-Picayune, we get the third installment of the series on the loss, destruction, & ignoring of the wetlands of south Louisiana.

Right smack in the center of Louisiana's fragile, sinking coastline, a river gives birth to new wetlands every day.

The Atchafalaya River flows freely through the middle of Cajun country to the Gulf, depositing life-sustaining sediment into the interior wetlands along its path and the shallow bays at its mouth, creating a rich new delta.

The river's natural land-building ability contrasts sharply with the Mississippi River, which politicians and engineers long ago confined inside levees and jetties. That prevented the inundation of the cities, towns and industrial infrastructure along the river, but it also stifled the annual floods that had nourished the wetlands with fresh sediment.
....
"We can't go on for many years before we cross a threshold" beyond which the coast can't be saved, Groat said. "The scale of catastrophe and impact on the state and on the people -- on the entire country -- are all affected by the delta."

Emphais added.

The lesson of the the Atchafalaya River was/is lost on most of the commercial, i.e., business, interests. Their bottom line is not the resurrection of the delta, but maximizing shareholder value. & that's why we have this huge problem to begin with. Along with, of course, this whole notion of having dominion over the earth.

Losing Ground 2

It can, sadly, be summed up with Talking loud, doing nothing.

"At the same time we were asking for help in protecting our wetlands, (the Louisiana delegation) was pushing for reducing regulations and protections," Davis said. "It was all to help the oil industry. People on the national level just couldn't take us seriously."
....
Another huge hurdle for planners lay in the sanctity of private property rights, which the state's congressional delegation vociferously supported. More than 80 percent of the state's coastal wetlands are privately held, so landowners had to agree to the changes caused by the restoration projects, or accept financial compensation.

The landowners also included the petrochemical industry, which sought to protect thousands of miles of pipelines and service canals running through the wetlands. Dumping new sediment into that network could close off canals, restricting access.

Real estate developers, with a stake in providing land for industries as well as residential and recreational owners, also had a vested interest in saving the coast -- but they wanted the coast-saving diversions to be installed where it wouldn't hurt their bottom line.

Wake Up!

In today's The Times-Picayune, there is the first of a three part series on the destruction of the wetlands that nourish & protect, not only New Orleans, but much of what matters to America. Or ought to matter to America.

"People think we still have 20, 30, 40 years left to get this done. They're not even close," said St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which seeks to save one of the coast's most threatened and strategically vital zones.

"Ten years is how much time we have left -- if that."
....
"I think that shocked us as much as any other group," said Robert Twilley, director of Louisiana State University's Gulf restoration initiative who has worked on the issue for years. "I think our concern now is that we may have contributed to false optimism."
(No shit, Dick Tracy. & my emphasis.)
....
Studies show destruction of the wetlands protecting the infrastructure serving those industries would put $103 billion in assets at risk.

Despite such dire threats, the most disturbing concern may be this: Coastal restoration efforts have been under way for two decades, but not a single project capable of reversing the trend currently awaits approval.

The modest restoration efforts already under way have no chance of making a serious impact, experts say.

"It's like putting makeup on a corpse," said Mark Schexnayder, a regional coastal adviser with LSU's Sea Grant College Program who has spent 20 years involved in coastal restoration.
(Very New Orleans, ed. My emphasis.)
....
That has forced researchers at the Louisiana University Marine Consortium in Cocodrie to take boats to work, and the erosion has made life ever more precarious in communities once separated from the Gulf by miles of marsh.
(Emphasis added. Gratuitous mention of The Kid's dog, Cocodrie.)

& this has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not New Orleans ought to be rebuilt. It is not about people living in a flood/hurricane/below-sea-level area. It is about the destruction of a massive wetland. & this destruction lies at the feet of human beings through their neglect, ill-advised levee construction, refusal to recognize global warming, & we don't care about poor people attitude.

Rebuke!

People's Rebuke for Bush's Photo Op in NOLA today

Bush will be in New Orleans today. A Rebuke of Bush is planned at 2pm. Via Humid City is the statement of rebuke from Katrina Survivors....

JOIN THE KATRINA SURVIVORS’ REBUKE OF PRESIDENT BUSH

2:00 PM THURSDAY MARCH 1

SAMUEL GREEN SCHOOL

2319 VALENCE ST.

(Near Freret and Napoleon)

NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans Needs Federal Aid, Not Presidential Photo-Ops.

Mr. President: Katrina Survivors Do Not Welcome You, We Rebuke You!

We live in a devastated city and you are a big part of the reason why it sill sits in ruins. Your administration has abandoned our children by savaging their public schools. Your administration has tortured our working class people by refusing to reopen the city’s public housing developments. And your administration is fully complicit in placing our uninsured in harms way by ruthlessly pursuing the privatization of local public healthcare in the aftermath of Katrina. And, finally your administration is guilty of sending our sons and daughters of to war for oil and empire just when we need them most to help us rebuild our community.

Mr. President, we, Katrina Survivors all, do not welcome you to our city, we rebuke you!

Sponsored by Survivors Village, United Front For Affordable Housing.

If you have a blog please consider posting this today.

This is is via First Draft.

I, too, rebuke you.

I kind of like using that rebuke word. It's right up there with fornicators & adulterers.

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Another Example Of Compassionate Conservatism

This ought to help the recovery effort, or should I say, lack of effort on the part of the Bu$hCo morons. &, really, there is no other word for this distatesful crew. Feeling safer yet?

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plans to cut 18 workers at its Louisiana refuges over the next five years, which will likely result in a scaling back of educational programs and maintenance.

A Little NOLA Humor

I'm just glad they have a little left.

At one point, I was nudged by a woman in the group who announced: "The penises are coming out."

No, there weren't any flashers present but there was a large papier-mâché member being worked on by the sub-krewe next to us. They call it George. Why, I have no idea but it's their penis so they can call it whatever they want. I asked the guy who was working with the member if he was the penis handler. "Nope," he replied, "I'm the penis wrangler."