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Three times since the Federal Flood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina devastated the greater New Orleans metropolitan area, Fat Tuesday has come and gone. Every year, the powers that be claim the parades and celebrations are a step nearer  Read more 

WaPo’s headline:

Staying Cool Amid Flames

As opposed to keeping cool because you’re drowning, or trapped in your attic by the rising waves, I suppose.

As a troll prophylactic, I should perhaps remark that I don’t minimize any of the terrible things that California—or my friends in LA—are going through.

I’m only pointing out—as our famously free press seems absolutely unwilling to do—that every citizen should be treated equally when disaster strikes.

And the disparity between the treatment of a poor, mostly black, Democratic city, in a state with a Democratic governor, and the treatment of a more middle-class, mostly not black, more Republican area, in a state with a Republican governor, couldn’t be more clear.

There really is no other explanation for this than racism.

Let’s ask ourselves:  Read more 

Many of you recall, no doubt, that two years and two months ago, a hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. The devastation remains largely unrepaired (well, except for casinos and maybe Trent Lott’s porch). One family in NOLa’s 9th ward lost all progress on restoring their home when it burned to the ground after car thieves’ arson-fire spread to the structure, taking with it their Road Home grant money.

Miracle, the girl pictured above, is one of the children in this twice-devastated family. A group of medical students at Tulane  Read more 

Historical antecedents:

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it—and profit from it. As we shall see.

We’re all niggers now, eh?

* * *
For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I’ve read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifique Avedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein’s thesis.* I’m going to fair-use a lot of it here:  Read more 

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Picture of JFK Campaigning in a Factory.

Yes, last night’s debate/forum was a huge improvement on previous outings, and Tavis Smiley and the panel of journalists he had gathered put Brian Williams and the rest of the beltway star interlocutors to shame.

And yet, for those of us who, without hesitation, call ourselves liberals, progressives or otherwise acknowledge our left leanings, something has been missing from this too early campaign for who will be the Democratic nominee for President in the 2008 election.

Well, look no further for someone to define what that missing something is. And irony of ironies, you have the Washington Monthly to thank for this, a publication that has sometimes been less than comfortable embracing the liberalism inherited from the 1960s and 70s, not that Charlie Peters, its editor for many years, wasn’t a genuine liberal. But if you were reading the magazine in the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll know what I mean.

Well, someone at the Washington Monthly had the brilliant idea of asking Theodore Sorenson, John Kennedy’s chief speech writer, whom, as the Monthly points out, Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank,” to write an acceptance speech for whomever addresses the Democratic convention next year as its presidential nominee.

Sorenson is now retired. Over the years, every appearance of his, every published word of his, has reminded me of what it was like living in an America where “liberal” wasn’t a dirty word. Perhaps that’s why Ted Sorenson has been far less visible as a media presence than we had a right to expect, given his historic role with both John and Bobby Kennedy, his intelligence and knowledge of policy, and the power of his writing.

You will see by the speech he has written that Ted Sorenson has been paying attention.

Here’s his opening paragraph, how he would like the Democratic nominee to frame the kind of campaign that is worthy of the demands of the time we’re living in, and worthy of American voters, and which he or she intends to wage with or without the cooperation of the Republican nominee, whomever that may be.  Read more 

And I thought I’d remind y’all, courtesy of Greg Palast’s column, how much “security” the “homeland” can count on in the face of the next hurricane. Here I thought maybe it would be prudent to point out, too, that Houston, in 2001, had its own inundation and a scant four summers later was ’good as new’, despite scenes like this:

and these, and this:

… so, in June 2001, before “9-11 changed everything!!”, we still knew how to fix things like this:

.

What changed in the interval between George W Bush’s first Imperial summer and his fourth  Read more 

And then explains how,even under Saddam’s iron fist, the Iraqi people were able to retake a  Read more 

There is literally nothing that the Republicans won’t sell, corrupt or destroy, so long as it means some of them will make a little extra money from it. I feel as if I’ve posted on something like this at least once a week for the last six years. If there is any argument which will make me enthusiastically support Hillary, it is that at least she will have some semblence of deceny in appointments, and won’t pick guys like these:

His nomination Thursday of an executive from the National Association of Manufacturers to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission points this out.
Michael Baroody is executive vice president of the manufacturers association and this organization seeks to relax some regulations imposed by the commission. Consumer advocates fear he will follow through.

His past record of service in government shows he sought to thwart regulations designed to protect workers. And he also has been vocal against some standards for cleaning the environment.  Read more 

OK, OK, I promised not to blog on Hilbama. But what Steve Gilliard said:

These Democrats didn’t just enable Bush’s war, they sat by and let the Right Wing smear machine attack those of us who waged our lonely battles to end this thing.

And it’s still happening: Amanda is Exhibit A.

And while most have come around, Hillary remains the notable exception.

Those who have admitted their mistakes are now free to train their sights on the GOP. It doesn’t absolve them from their terrible judgment, but it mitigates it. While it’s best to not make a mistake in the first place, it’s even worse to compound that mistake by refusing to come to terms with it.

Which is why the Edwards fiasco is so bad. Not only did the Edwards campaign stand by while one of us got smeared, they showed terrible judgment about the nature of the VRWC, and the role that the winger noise machine plays in polluting our political discourse. Can the consultants advising Edwards really have told him that any other solution than going on the attack would work? Could he have believed them? Why?

Clinton doesn’t have that. And what’s worse, she has pretty much lost the window of opportunity to do so. After resisting for so long, she finds herself in the thick of the presidential primary (yes, even a year out) with no room to maneuver. If she suddenly reverses course and decides that yes, she’ll take personal responsibility for her vote, it’ll feed into the strongest anti-Hillary narrative — that she’s a panderer and will say what is most politically expedient at the moment.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but Hillary has made her bed. And while her advisors may cringe that voters demand she account for Iraq at every campaign stop, I hope she continues to get grilled on it. She deserves nothing less.

As CD would say, I’m playing the world’s smallest violin.  Read more 

The Travelers, which recently suffered a setback in a Federal appeals court when its policies’ wordings denying flood insurance coverage to Louisiana customers were ruled “vague”, has announced it’s leaving the most vulnerable parishes of New Orleans.  Read more 

I give thanks that we won’t have to listen to this shithead after 2009:

In his Saturday radio address, Bush said Americans are grateful to those who rallied after hurricanes Katrina and Rita to bring food, water and hope to people who lost everything.

“We renew our commitment to help those who are still suffering and to rebuild our nation’s Gulf Coast,” Bush said.

Big words, Sahib, that I translate “Better luck next hurricane.”  Read more 

Always remember that the Republicans want to drown government in the bathtub, which is why they can’t govern.

And in New Orleans, we can see what happens when Republicans get their way, and drown a whole city.

Republicans didn’t protect NOLA before Katrina, they let NOLA drown during Katrina, and even now that they’ve turned NOLA red by leaving the Ninth Ward to rot, they’re still screwing it up. AP:

New Orleans infested with wildlife
In the year since Hurricane Katrina drove out many of the people of New Orleans, wild animals have been moving in. Some were blown in by the winds or redistributed by the floodwaters. Others were drawn by the piles of rotting garbage and by the shelter afforded by all the abandoned homes and tall weeds.

Of course, for the the Republicans who, erm, like animals—more than a few—it’s all good.

But not for people who want to live in the city:  Read more 

From vastleft.com:

The media tells us that the GOP’s strong suit is national security.  Read more 

Don’t you feel well-protected, knowing that…

1. Bush vacationed, ignoring warnings of a levee failing in New Orleans — and then he failed to mobilize a response when the breach occurred: over 1,800 Americans died
2. Bush vacationed, ignoring warnings of a hijacking threat from Al-Qaeda (the previous president held weekly anti-terrorism briefings; Dick Cheney’s anti-terrorism task force met zero times): over 2,600 Americans died

Bush, September 6, 2005 (Quote from Uggabugga’s excellent Katrina timeline.)

So, how’s that investigation coming? I haven’t heard a lot about it, lately. Hey, can I find it online?

Maybe somebody from the SCLM will ask him about it. Or somebody that “roundtable” photo-op Rove has set up. Snicker.

More Katrina updates below the fold:  Read more 

Bushh cuts loose with another one, this time to Katrina survivors:

“[BUSHH] Optimism is the only option.”

Yeah, that theory really worked out great in Iraq, didn’t it? And Iran—good luck with that.






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What Digby said:

It’s not neglect. It’s design. The Republicans took a hit for their incompetence in handling Katrina, but in the long run they stand to benefit greatly from the African American displacement outside the state. The reconstruction delays and “not so blind” neglect serve the goal of a much lower black population in New Orleans. Louisiana is likely to be a deep red state from now on.

Perhaps that sounds too cynical, just as the idea that Bush would do nothing significant to help the poor victims sounded cynical last year. But after Bush vs Gore and the Texas gerrymandering and the California recall and voter disenfranchisement and on and on, I think it’s incredibly naive to think they wouldn’t make lemonade out of the Katrina lemon. The modern Republican party is deadly serious about electoral politics and nothing is too cynical for them.

Naturally, the refusal to protect Blue State cities from loose nukes in shipping containers is part of the same plan.  Read more 

What a surprise!

Not a dry seat in the house!  Read more 

I made some slight corrections here to clear up a typo that pervaded this story:

Under pressure from the National Ramrod Association, police this week began returning genitals confiscated after Hurricane Katrina.  Read more 

Cheney profits;

judge sues and (more after the jump)

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Go read:
Katrina
survivors: Mom faces truancy charges

Bodies still being discovered amid Katrina’s rubble  Read more 

and the “habitable structures” FEMA says people can move back into are here.

Send beads to Bush, adorned with the message: Please Take Responsibility and Set Aside the Money for Levee Construction. Because a US Army Corps of Engineers romeo-charlie-foxtrot drowned NoLa.  Read more