Katrina's POLITICAL aftermath (keep the political discussions HERE)

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to
be changed.

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either responsible for
changing the light bulb or for darkness.

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new
light bulb.

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a
stepladder under the banner: Lightbulb Change Accomplished.

7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in
detail how Bush was literally inthe dark.

8. One to viciously slime #7.

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had
a strong light bulb changing policy all along.

10. And finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between
screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

also, with the $51.8B emergency relief bill currently being batted about in Congress, guess which federal agency would get control of most of the money? (hint: they've been in the news a bit lately)

Also, the $10.5B approved on friday will probably run out by tonight.

Such fun times we live in.

Reform Bankruptcy "Reform"

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU SEPT 08, 2005 08:02:33 ET XXXXX

CNN PRESIDENT HOLIDAYS IN NANTUCKET DURING NETWORK HURRICANE COVERAGE

CNN President Jonathan Klein spent last week on a posh island off Massachusetts while his network was down in the muck, covering Hurricane Katrina, the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS reports.

Reporter Lloyd Grove quotes a CNN rep: "Coverage plans for the hurricane were set before he left, and Jon was in constant contact with his deputies and CNN the entire time."

Klein has held the title of CNN president since November 2004.

Klein's holiday in Nantucket did not apparently hurt CNN in the ratings; the all-news network saw audience levels reach the highest levels in years, with host Aaron Brown even topping FOXNEWS one night last week in the demo.

Despite the rare Brown demo win, FOXNEWS still commands a wide lead over its competition.

WRONG PRESIDENT, STUPID: http://drudgereport.com/flash3jk.htm

You're on your own, Britain's victims told

British families trapped in New Orleans last night claimed that US authorities had refused to evacuate them as Hurricane Katrina approached the city.

Although assistance was offered to US residents, British nationals were told they would have to fend for themselves. According to those who remain stranded in the stricken city, police had visited hotels and guest houses on the eve of the hurricane offering to evacuate Americans, but not Britons.

The order meant UK holidaymakers without cars were left helpless in the face of the hurricane. Some have been trapped in hotels and guest houses since the hurricane struck at 7am local time last Monday.

One family from Liverpool, trapped in a flooded section of the city, told relatives yesterday of their bewilderment when they realised US citizens would be offered preferential treatment.

Gerrard Scott, 35, spoke to his brother Peter from the Ramada Hotel in New Orleans where he has been stranded without assistance with wife, Sandra, 38, and seven-year-old son Ronan for the past six days. 'Those that didn't fit their criteria were told to help themselves. The police said they were evacuating Americans, and took away the majority.

'The British who were left all thought the police would come back, but nobody has. They have just been left,' said Peter Scott last night. Among the 30 or so people still inside the Ramada Hotel is a woman recovering from breast cancer who had been confined to a hotel room by herself because of fears over her immune system.

oh here it is. Remember, this is Bob "Karl Rove's best buddy/valeria plame non-friend" Novak:

Political deafness mixed with lawyerly evasion was shown on ''Meet the Press'' when Chertoff claimed the breaking of the New Orleans levees ''really caught everybody by surprise.'' Russert cited repeated forecasts of this disaster by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but Chertoff insisted he did not say what he had just said...

and so on from there. He'll probably spin this all later as just an "anti-lawyer"(goes along with the "tort reform" bullshit) later on, but still, he still said what he said.

"The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

"The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/WSJ_White_rich_escape_New_Orleans_chaos_dont_want_blacks_poor__0908.html

and now Texas Gov. Rick Perry is doing quite a bit of self-promotin' himself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/arts/music/08jazz.html?adxnnl=1&8hpib=&adxnnlx=1126188513-6UFLYdWU5r3G9GcAK79nkw

Thanks.

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By BEN RATLIFF
Published: September 8, 2005

New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.
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Gregory Davis of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band last year.

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Mardi Gras Indian tribes, upholders of an old tradition, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2003.

All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions with new money. Although the full extent of damage is still unknown, there is little doubt that it has been severe - to families, to instruments, to historical records, to clubs, to costumes. "Who knows if there exists a Mardi Gras Indian costume anymore in New Orleans?" wondered Don Marshall, director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation.

"A lot of the great musicians came right out of the Treme neighborhood and the Lower Ninth Ward," said the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, temporarily speaking in the past tense, by phone from Houston yesterday. Mr. Ruffins, one of the most popular jazz musicians in New Orleans, made his name there partly through his regular Thursday-night gig over the last 12 years at Vaughan's, a bar in the Bywater neighborhood, where red beans and rice were served at midnight. Now Vaughn's may be destroyed, and so may his new house, which is not too far from the bar.

On Saturday evening Mr. Ruffins flew back to New Orleans from a gig in San Diego, having heard the first of the dire storm warnings. He stopped at a lumberyard to buy wood planks, boarded up 25 windows on his house, then went bar-hopping and joked with his friends that where they were standing might be under water the next day.

The next morning he fled to Baton Rouge with his family, and now he is in Houston, about to settle into apartments, along with more than 30 relatives. He is being offered plenty of work in Houston, and is already thinking ahead to what he calls "the new New Orleans."

"I think the city is going to wind up being a smaller area," he said. "They'll have to build some super levees.

"I think this will never happen again once they get finished," Mr. Ruffins added. "We're going to get those musicians back, the brass bands, the jazz funerals, everything."

Brass bands function through the year - not only through the annual Jazzfest, where many outsiders see them, and jazz funerals, but at the approximately 55 social aid and pleasure clubs, each of which holds a parade once a year. It is an intensely local culture, and has been thriving in recent years. Brass-band music, funky and hard-hitting, can easily be transformed from the neighborhood social to a club gig; brass bands like Rebirth, Dirty Dozen and the Soul Rebels have done well by touring as commercial entities. Members of Stooges Brass Band have ended up in Atlanta, and of Li'l Rascals in Houston; there could be a significant brass-band diaspora before musicians find a way to get home to New Orleans. (Rebirth's Web site, www.rebirthbrassband.com, has been keeping a count of brass-band musicians who have been heard from.)

The Mardi Gras Indian tradition is more fragile. Monk Boudreaux is chief of the Golden Eagles, one of the 40 or so secretive Mardi Gras tribes, who are known not just for their flamboyant feathered costumes but for their competitive parades through neighborhoods at Mardi Gras time. (Mardi Gras Indians are not American Indians but New Orleanians from the city's working-class black neighborhoods.) Mr. Boudreaux, now safe with his daughter in Mesquite, Tex., stayed put through the storm at his house in the Uptown neighborhood; when he left last week, he said, the water was waist-high. He chuckled when asked if the Mardi Gras Indian tradition could survive in exile. "I don't know of any other Mardi Gras outside of New Orleans," he said.

These days a city is often considered a jazz town to the extent that its resident musicians have international careers. The bulk of New Orleans jazz musicians have shown a knack for staying local. (Twenty or so in the last two decades, including several Marsalises, are obvious exceptions.)

But as everyone knows, jazz is crucial to New Orleans, and New Orleans was crucial in combining jazz's constituent parts, its Spanish, French, Caribbean and West African influences. The fact that so many musicians are related to one or another of the city's great music families - Lastie, Brunious, Neville, Jordan, Marsalis - still gives much of the music scene a built-in sense of nobility. "Whereas New York has a jazz industry," said Quint Davis, director of Jazzfest, "New Orleans has a jazz culture." (Speaking of Jazzfest, Mr. Davis was not ready to discuss whether there will be a festival next April. "First I'm dealing with the lives and subsistence of the people who produce it," he said.)

And most jazz in New Orleans has a directness about it. "Everyone isn't searching for the hottest, newest lick," said Maurice Brown, a young trumpeter from Chicago who had been rising through the ranks of the New Orleans jazz scene for the last four years before the storm took his house and car. "People are trying to stay true to the melody."

Gregory Davis, the trumpeter and vocalist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, one of the city's most successful groups, said the typical New Orleans musician was vulnerable because of how he lives and works. (Mr. Davis's house is in the Gentilly neighborhood; he spoke last week from his brother's home in Dallas.)

"A lot of these guys who are playing out there in the clubs are not home owners," he said. "They're going to be at the mercy of the owners of those properties. For some of them, playing in the clubs was the only means of earning any money. If those musicians come back and don't have an affordable home, that's a big blow."

Louis Edwards, a New Orleans novelist and an associate producer of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, said, "No other city is so equipped to deal with this." A French Quarter resident, Mr. Edwards was taking refuge last week at his mother's house in Lake Charles, La.

"Think of the jazz funeral," he said. "In New Orleans we respond to the concept of following tragedy with joy. That's a powerful philosophy to have as the underpinning of your culture."

In the meantime, Mr. Boudreaux, chief of the Golden Eagles, has a feeling his own Mardi Gras Indian costume is intact. He was careful to put it in a dry place before he left home. "I just need to get home and get that Indian suit from on top of that closet," he said.

NEW ORLEANS -- On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.
....

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.
Calvin Fayard, a wealthy white plaintiffs' lawyer who lives near Mr. O'Dwyer, says the mass evacuation could turn a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one. Mr. Fayard, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, says tampering with the city's demographics means tampering with its unique culture and shouldn't be done. "People can't survive a year temporarily -- they'll go somewhere, get a job and never come back," he says.

Mr. Reiss acknowledges that shrinking parts of the city occupied by hardscrabble neighborhoods would inevitably result in fewer poor and African-American residents. But he says the electoral balance of the city wouldn't change significantly and that the business elite isn't trying to reverse the last 30 years of black political control. "We understand that African Americans have had a great deal of influence on the history of New Orleans," he says.

A key question will be the position of Mr. Nagin, who was elected with the support of the city's business leadership. He couldn't be reached yesterday. Mr. Reiss says the mayor suggested the Dallas meeting and will likely attend when he goes there to visit his evacuated family

Black politicians have controlled City Hall here since the late 1970s, but the wealthy white families of New Orleans have never been fully eclipsed. Stuffing campaign coffers with donations, these families dominate the city's professional and executive classes, including the white-shoe law firms, engineering offices, and local shipping companies. White voters often act as a swing bloc, propelling blacks or Creoles into the city's top political jobs. That was the case with Mr. Nagin, who defeated another African American to win the mayoral election in 2002.

Creoles, as many mixed-race residents of New Orleans call themselves, dominate the city's white-collar and government ranks and tend to ally themselves with white voters on issues such as crime and education, while sharing many of the same social concerns as African-American voters. Though the flooding took a toll on many Creole neighborhoods, it's likely that Creoles will return to the city in fairly large numbers, since many of them have the means to do so.

(that's almost all the article. i took out a little bit that didn't say much.)

I've read a lot of articles that have stated that FEMA is planning to somehow pay for transportation back to New Orleans for the currently displaced residents. Can't find any right now, but I remember reading about it on nytimes.com

Anyway. wsj.com sometimes drives me insane (see above article) but today have a lot of other good articles on the hurricane besides that idiotic one. It's the only subscription site I pay for & I think it's well worth it- mostly I read the tech news, but they cover a lot of interesting things.

That's nothing. Chertoff apparently thinks Louisiana is a city!

Mighty white of him to "understand."

I had thought she might slip up and call it 'Condoleezza'.

I got a bird that whistles I got a bird that sings
Got a bird that whistles I got a bird that sings
But I ain't got Corina and life don't mean a thing

Corina Corina Ah you're on my mind
Corina Corina you're on my mind
I think about you girl and I can't keep from crying

In other news, FEMA just changed their minds(again) and are now shipping at least 500 folks to Oregon. Some are already here, "thru their own means", according to the local radio.

we can only shoot at him and maybe wing 'im like once or twice a week

Now, suppose that the purpose of government is not necessarily to use taxpayers’ money responsibly. Suppose - just suppose - that an equally legitimate purpose of government is to create a live-action video for an yet-to-be-released glam art-concept rock opera based on the conceit that extraterrestrials have come to Earth in order to blow our minds and save humanity...

(better in idea than in execution, but oh well)

I listened to Rush Limbaugh a little today, as I am occasionally wont to do (only to know what the enemy is saying, of course). You could really tell how much he was struggling when even the soundbites he played from Democrats that were supposed to illustrate how "those liberals have gone wacko" actually sounded really reasonable and convincing.

I also love the new Republican song: "Let's Not Point Fingers (It's The Mayor's Fault)"

-- Hurting (Hurtingchie...), September 8th, 2005.

-Rep. Joe Barton - TX
-Jeff Flake - AZ
-Virginia Foxx - NC
-Scott Garrett - NJ
-John Hostettler - IN
-Steve King - IA
-Butch Otter - ID
-Ron Paul - TX
-James Sensenbrenner - WI
-Tom Tancredo - CO
-Lynn Westmoreland - GA

Tom Tancredo, you'll remember,

...asked House Speaker Dennis Hastert not to send federal disaster aid to officials in Louisiana, calling state and local government there incompetent and corrupt.

In a letter to Hastert on Wednesday, Tancredo urged the speaker to create a "bipartisan select committee" of members of Congress to oversee federal disaster spending in Louisiana.

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

I guess it's impolitic to say this, but the NPR folk who moonlight at Fox strike me as Hume-cowed, easily-intimidated pussies and sell-outs (literally; surely their Fox salaries dwarf what NPR pays them).

Al Gore arranges for his own damn plane, personally evacuates victims and declines interviews. [www.dailykos.com]

- George Bush pulls Coast Guard and firemen off duty to be his backdrop as he finally pretends to give a shit on Friday, but his never-ending smirk betrays him. [www.dailykos.com] Said photo-op halts delivery of three tons of food. [rawstory.com]

- Rep. John Conyers wants to spare Katrina victims from the brutal new bankruptcy laws. [rawstory.com]

- Senator Rick Santorum suggests fining Katrina victims for being such a pain. [news.yahoo.com]



- Rumsfeld throws a party for Operation Enduring/Iraqi Freedom. [www.defenselink.mil]

- Cindy Sheehan and the Veterans for Peace stop their anti-war tour to take Camp Casey to Lousiana and start round-the-clock relief efforts. [www.vfproadtrips.org] (also, they need help. send them supplies)



- Congressional Republicans wanted a $231M Bridge to an Alaskan Island with 50 residents [www.salon.com] and got it.

- Congressional Democrats wanted to fund FEMA and give the Army Engineers the $40M they requested for New Orleans' Levees [dailykos.com] and lost.

- Howard Dean "has suspended political fundraising for now, directing all funds that come in to the relief effort, postponed the DNC fall meeting that was scheduled for this week, and granted leave to any staff member who wishes to aid in the relief effort." [www.dailykos.com]

- Speaker of the house Denny Hastert misses the vote for Katrina aid to attend a fundraiser. [www.google.com] In fact, most Republican fundraisers are still in full gear. [rawstory.com]



- Hillary Clinton calls for an independent investigation [news.yahoo.com]

- George W. Bush vows to investigate himself. [www.silive.com]

- Tom DeLay cancels an investigation started in the House. [www.cnn.com]

- Hillary Clinton says fuck the fuck off. [www.forbes.com]

- Harry Reid submits a plan allowing Katrina victims to receive Medicaid with no hurdles or copayments and getting them student loans. [www.democrats.org]

- Tom DeLay and Roy Blunt suggest we aid the economy with tax cuts for the rich. [fullcoverage.yahoo.com]