Polimom Says....

Yup. Polimom is down... (updated)

2006-12-13T08:58:00.000-06:00

Just a quick little post to let y'all know (those who remember about this old blogsite) that Polimom Says (http://www.polimom.com) has been down since yesterday evening (Tues., Dec 12).

I'm working to get it back up, obviously, but the background technical "stuff" is pretty opaque to me.

Sigh...

Update:

Just a quick note -- it appears that somebody isn't happy with me, and the host temporarily suspended my account because a Denial of Service attack (DOS) crashed all their servers.

Working on it

A new home for Polimom

2006-02-21T19:44:00.000-06:00

Polimom ~~is moving~~ has moved!

http://www.polimom.com

Originally (long months ago), polimom.com was dedicated to the people in Algiers, and New Orleans, so they could regroup after Katrina, check on each other, their houses, find out about insurance problems... you name it.

But now, six months later, Polimom is reclaiming the domain name and moving off of blogger.

The old forums have been preserved in the new location as a Katrina archive. (You can find them here.)

I've also imported all the posts from blogger, and I'll probably spend the rest of my life categorizing them! (No - seriously....) Okay. Maybe not. Maybe just some....

I know this is an inconvenience for many folks, who have set up RSS feeds, etc., from this site. I'm very sorry to be a pain, but I really was about to go nuts with all the up/down time here.

So come see me at Polimom... I'll be looking for you! (And don't forget to change your bookmarks!)

2006-02-21T09:15:00.000-06:00

Posting will be light today (and late, too!). I'm working on a new site...

XX for president!

2006-02-20T09:42:00.000-06:00

It's about darned time!

Poll finds readiness for female president

What's been the hold up, anyway? It's been obvious for years that America is stuck in a political rut.

Polimom's had fingers and toes crossed for months, hoping to see a race between Hillary and Condi. Talk about leveling the playing field, while simultaneously pushing everybody's hot-buttons! A choice between them would give everybody something to get behind (or in front of, depending...).

If, however, the next campaign for the White House includes only one of these ladies, Polimom thinks it's a near certainty that such a race would devolve into a chromosomal bash-fest. In fact, those possessed of the fearless "Y" have already started trying to spin things:

"I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates. And whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger," Mehlman told ABC's "This Week."

Sorry, Mehlman, but I don't see Hillary as a seething volcano about to erupt. By the same token, Condi's foot doesn't fit the hair-trigger warmonger slipper, either:

Rice has a handicap because of her assiduous cheerleading for the disastrous war in Iraq. Before the U.S. attack, she appeared often on the Sunday talk shows to promote an invasion and warning that Saddam Hussein had a "smoking gun" that would turn into a "mushroom cloud."

None of that was true, of course, but we have heard no apologies from her.

I do, however, sense enormous frustration from many Americans, who are positively disgusted with the American political scene.

Time for a change? Oh, yes! Please!?!

Ready? SWAP!

2006-02-18T07:31:00.000-06:00

Last week, in the somewhat off-color spirit of the Krewe du Vieux, Polimom suggested that perhaps Houston could send its "native" criminal population to New Orleans, in exchange for receiving NOLA’s highly over-rated criminal talent:

[On] behalf of Houston, I'd like to acknowledge your generous offering of those one-way bus tickets. I can’t promise, though, that we won’t reciprocate by sharing some of our own, locally-grown talent. Consider it a well-meaning cultural exchange that could have some real economic benefit.

Given the size of the Houston market, I'm thinking we could make up some "Thanks, New Orleans" bumper stickers, and donate a percentage of the proceeds to the police departments in both cities. Outta be good for millions of $!

So much has been made of the crime spike here, and the related drop in crime in New Orleans, that the well-intended and heart-felt “Thanks, Houston” bumper stickers have developed a second meaning.

So I can only be amused by these stories from yesterday:

Houston Police Say Violent Crime Falling

While Houston had a spike in homicides in November and December, Sgt. Brian Harris said Friday the homicide rate has stabilized and is only slightly up from this time last year.

If we’re going to be analyzing trends on a monthly basis, Houston’s in for a wild ride, emotionally. Up one month, down the next… one can’t draw conclusions based on such short-term data. However, there seems to be some sort of corresponding uptick over in New Orleans:

Last week, the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office booked a former MS-13 member with marijuana possession, said Maj. John Doran, head of the Special Criminal Investigations Division.

"The stories this guy was telling," Doran said. "Bad stuff . . . contract killings. We're not used to anything like that around here."

And in Kenner, gang graffiti is popping up on some buildings, including "MS-13" painted on a store on Williams Boulevard. Capt. James Gallagher, a Police Department spokesman, said there's been no indication that the tagging is connected to actual gang activity

Given a choice between the New Orleans housing project punks and the MS-13, which would you choose, Houston? It’s kind of a no-brainer, eh?

Polimom was kidding when she suggested we send the Houston gangsters over to New Orleans. Honest! But I’m thinking I should go ahead and get those “Thanks, NOLA” bumper stickers made. They're liable to start selling well soon...

A cautious thanks

2006-02-17T05:59:00.000-06:00

George Bush has done an about-face and is requesting $4.2 billion more for housing and rebuilding in Louisiana.

‘Tis wonderful, yes? Yes!

But Polimom’s curious as to why this beneficence comes now of all times, at nearly the end of a special legislative session, when there was little or no time for Louisiana to react? Even without this complication, welcome though it is, rivalries and petty infighting have made the session a sad joke, and even the desperately needed housing recovery plan has hit uncertain water. Now, this same legislature has one day left – today - to re-work its approach, so Louisiana can distribute the much different amount of grant money.

There appeared to be some continuing confusion -- and possibly friction -- between state and local leaders Thursday over precisely who would have the authority to dole out the federal grant money.

Though the money initially will flow to the state, New Orleans officials think they should receive an allocation to deal with buyouts and renovation grants in the city, an opinion that may not be shared by state officials. [...]

One key problem for either proposal is that the legislation, which is Senate Bill 49 by Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, could be on life support.

Proponents were unable to wrangle the support of two-thirds of the House members present in the chamber in a procedural vote that would have allowed a committee to consider the legislation Thursday evening. The bill cannot be considered by the full House on the last day of the session without another, successful procedural vote.

Polimom is always suspicious of sudden sea changes, particularly by government. Clearly, something more than love for fellow man is driving Bush’s request. Do you suppose some of the boon stems from this?

Exhibit A is the revelation that FEMA purchased 24,967 prefabricated homes at a cost of $857.8 million, and 1,295 modular homes at a cost of $40 million. The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, Richard Skinner, told the Senate that "it is unclear how the decision was made" to spend $900 million on the more than 26,000 homes. It is clear, however, that almost every penny of that money was wasted, since FEMA's own regulations prohibit the use of mobile homes in flood plains. […]

Given the acute lack of habitable residences in greater New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast, how could FEMA waste nearly $1 billion on unusable housing?

As a taxpayer, I’m sick that my money has to be spent twice - but apparently it must. Even though our behemoth of a government has wasted months, and billions of dollars, on ill-conceived “help” for the Gulf Coast (and I’m sure it will continue to do so), New Orleans remains in desperate straits.

Let's just hope Louisiana and NOLA can pull their acts together and get things started down there. Finally.

Apologies won't fix this

2006-02-16T06:31:00.000-06:00

Immediately after September 11, I remember having discussions about what might happen next. I clearly recall feeling that the world was holding its collective breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop... and drop it did, right on Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Had the U.S. stopped there, and not pressed its agenda into Iraq, would today’s situation look different?

Yes and no.

We would not have the Abu Ghraib pictures and films resurfacing, stoking anger in the Middle East. We probably would still have had the cartoon protests. We’d still be having problems with fundamentalist Islam, though.

World War III has come sneaking into our lives when we weren’t watching.

In the 1980s (in some ways another lifetime), Polimom traveled in the Middle East, and the memories from that trip have not faded with time. Traveling with a small group of westerners (male and female), we were careful of our hosts’ cultural mores, covering our heads and bodies, visiting only areas and sites that were permitted, observing border sensitivities… yet we were still treated differently – because we were from the West.

Among other things, Polimom and her female friends were groped and mauled by men on the streets. Publicly. We were told it was because all women from the west are whores, and thus deserving of such treatment. Syria, in particular, was a terrifying place for us, because all the men who approached and groped were armed with semi-automatic weapons.

It just was.

By the time we got to Jordan, Polimom was getting pretty angry. However, a gentle young man and his family befriended me, calming my outrage. He spoke about Mohammed, and a peaceful message of Islam. Before we left Amman, this young man gifted Polimom with a dual-language Koran, which today sits on Polimom’s bookshelf alongside her other religious texts and writings from around the world.

The next country visit, however, put Polimom right over the top with disgust. On the docks of Suez, we were approached yet again by a man feeling as if he could freely touch and handle Western women. But this young many was not armed, and Polimom was done with these sinister abusers. Polimom picked up a rock, threw it in his face, and kicked his ass all the way down the dock. He ran away, and Polimom reported him to the Suez police (who were unimpressed and slightly amused).

Polimom has American female friends who have converted to Islam who have not experienced these problems, so the line actually is not drawn on the West so much as it is on whether one is Muslim or not.

Some years later, Polimom found herself in the military’s foreign language institute in Monterey, where she learned Arabic, and revisited the human, moderate side of Islam. Many of Polimom’s instructors were from Iraq, and all of them were like the young man in Jordan.

Polimom re-evaluated yet again, and opened her mind back up to the possibilities of diversity and tolerance. It’s much easier to do from a distance.

Today, people are writing and talking about a gap that “has opened between Islam and the West”. Offended by the Danish cartoons (and corresponding support for free speech), the mullahs and leaders in the Middle East are citing grievances against America, against Europe, and against Western ways, in general.

This culture clash didn’t spring up overnight, folks. There is a vast chasm between these societies, and what we’re seeing has been coming for a long time.

Christianity has extremists, as does Islam. But in the West, our extremists tend to be a fringe group, universally condemned and mocked by us. Contrary to WaPo’s slightly bizarre article and theories yesterday, Christians long-since internalized a “turn the other cheek” philosophy. That, to Polimom, is tolerance. The West is far more capable of overlooking cultural gaffes, and we’re notorious for lampooning pretty much everything.

Islam’s fundamentalists are not a fringe. They exist in enormous numbers, from the very lowest street-cleaners to the leaders of entire countries. Unlike the secular west, where we ridicule religious zealots (think Pat Robertson), Islamists one-up each other in their quest to demonstrate the depth of their fervor.

One simply isn’t Muslim enough if one isn’t outraged by slights to the point of raving.

American papers are apparently under the impression that if they don’t re-publish the cartoons (or new lampoons), the zealots will not focus anger against the U.S. Such a stance is naïve. The fundamental discord is much deeper, and everything is fuel now.

There is no room for accommodation of extremists or threats, and apologists in the West are missing an important component that distinguishes the Islamic culture from the Western: contrary to our expectations of a civilized society, the moderates are not running the show, and there is no way to rationalize with the insane.

Polimom still has many moderate Muslim friends, and she’s sad for them. They are voiceless and powerless in their own societies, and while Polimom wishes it were not so, neither they, nor we, can change that.

World War III was coming, whether September 11 had happened or not, and we’re going to have to get used to the idea.

Masochistic Christians

2006-02-15T15:15:00.000-06:00

Polimom's been wondering about an interesting phenomenon: Why does the American stance on free speech only apply to lampooning some religions, but not others?

WaPo's Neely Tucker has an interesting article about how blasphemy is apparently okay against Christianity, but not against other "minor" religions. One of Tucker's sources is Mark Galli, who apparently provided this gem:

First, he notes, Christians worship a man who was persecuted, beaten and killed. The sense that people might persecute Christ's followers is an inherent part of the Christian ethos, he says, so Christians are inherently likely to tolerate offense. Muhammad, a prophet who died after an illness, did not leave behind a religion with that mindset, he says.

Let me see if I understand this correctly... Because Christ was abused, Christians have internalized an expectation of persecution. Maybe that explains self-flagellation, too (something else I've never understood).

A religion of masochists... hmmmmm.....

American mediocrity

2006-02-15T07:04:00.000-06:00

The Houston Independent School District has been fretting lately about how to improve math and science scores, and widen the district’s Gifted / Talented programs. Like George Bush’s SoTU speech writers, they seem to finally be waking up to an unpleasant truth: America is producing mediocrity.

We’ve lost our edge.

Polimom keeps wondering when somebody will just come out and state the obvious, so we can have a National Hissy Fit and move on. Since it’s pretty evident everyone’s going to pussy foot around this indefinitely, I thought maybe I’d help the process a bit.

We are NOT all created equally – at least not in terms of intellectual ability.

(Gasp. Polimom! What are you saying?)

I’m saying that little Johnny, who was reading books at age 3 or working negative numbers at 5, has much different educational needs from little Jimmy who learned letters and phonetic sounds via circle time in Kindergarten... and those needs are not being met.

We're producing mediocre thinkers because the Holy Grail is the middle of the Bell Curve. We've forgotten that the curve is very wide; in our zeal to bring the left side toward the center, we've ignored those on the right.

America does a pretty good job educating “to the middle”, and public schools have also made enormous strides toward helping those who have learning disabilities or are otherwise "at risk". These are laudable achievements, but we've sacrificed the children who have the capacity to soar along the way... and everything has a price.

We’re failing them, we’ve been letting them down for years, and now it's time to pay the piper.

Blockade, anyone?

2006-02-14T18:40:00.000-06:00

Rex Noone at Voices of New Orleans thinks maybe it's time for a fresh new approach:

No more. The time has come to line up our boats, to tie them together and to stop the traffic on the Mississippi. We should do this right by the Crescent City Connection, the big bridge that connects downtown to Algiers.

This will be our sit-in on the river.

We should stop the traffic on that river until the country realizes who we are. There is no more time to wait patiently, to trust the government. There is no more time to be the Big Easy. It is time to get angry.

Think that might get some attention?

Iranian Freedom Fries!

2006-02-14T14:20:00.000-06:00

This is kinda fun!

TEHRAN, Iran - Not content with pelting European embassies with Molotov cocktails to protest against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Iranians have decided to rename the “Danish pastries” relished by this nation of cake lovers.

From now on, the sweet, flaky pastries which dominate the shelves in Iran’s cake shops will be known as “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad,” the official IRNA news agency reported as pressure on Denmark over the cartoons took on a new dimension.

Way to go, Iran! That's showin' those Danes!

I bet this'll have about the same global impact as Americans renaming French Fries "Freedom Fries".

::shaking head in wonder at the stupidity of it all::

What excites the MSM?

2006-02-14T14:00:00.000-06:00

Let's see...

More rioting in the Muslim world about the cartoons.

(MSM: Yawn...)

Hmmm... Carlie Brucia's killer whines and snivels about his tough life.

(MSM: snore...)

New Orleans gets a hospital opened!

(MSM: Where's New Orleans again?)

The White House didn't tell us IMMEDIATELY about a hunting accident!

(MSM: OHMYGOD! THAT'S REALLY CRITICAL!!)

The man accidently shot by Cheney has a heart attack from bird-shot lodged in his heart.

(MSM: Was that the guy Cheney didn't want to tell us about?)

Polimom actually thinks this last one outranks the ridiculous hysteria about Cheney's press-release protocols by rather a lot. But then... I'm not the MSM.

Thank goodness we all have something to get excited about today.

Update 7:15pm: I guess I don't pass the inkblot test. I really dislike the current administration, but I still think the MSM has lost its metaphorical marbles over the "Cheney's Got a Gun" event.

NOLA's CJ system - another failure

2006-02-14T09:28:00.000-06:00

How broken do you suppose a Criminal Justice system can get? At what point does the problem get so bad that a state recognizes it has failed?

Would this be bad enough?

If the state can't find more money for indigent defense, the defenders' office plans to seek the release of its estimated 4,000 defendants, White says. "This is unprecedented. The majority of the accused crimes are going to be serious offenses. In New Orleans, they don't prosecute forgery and stolen cars very often."

This problem pre-dates Katrina; all the storm did was hasten the total breakdown.

Without divine intervention (since LA's Legislature obviously isn't much help), Polimom thinks New Orleans will have to free all of the indigent accused. Their constitutional right to a "fair and speedy trial" has already been stomped into the dust, given that many of these individuals have already languished for six months - in jail - without even a call to an attorney, much less a trial.

Combine that with the moldy, flooded evidence and lost DNA, scattered accusors or witnesses, and I don't see any way this situation can be salvaged.

Why on earth was Louisiana the only state in the union allowing traffic fines and court costs to fund the public defenders' offices?

Funding local public defenders' offices has been a problem across the nation. Louisiana is the only state that relies almost exclusively on local traffic-ticket revenue and parking fines — rather than a significant contribution from the state — to finance its low-income residents' constitutionally protected right to a lawyer.

This is just stupid, considering that Louisiana is one of the poorest states, per capita, in the country, and has a greater need for public defenders as a result. Last week, nola.com reported:

Citing state laws that require the Legislature to provide adequate funding for the program, Hunter issued subpoenas for state Senate President Donald Hines, D-Bunkie, House Speaker Joe Salter, D-Florien, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

I'm curious: If there are state laws requiring adequate funding from the Legislature, why wasn't that happening?

Oh. Lemme guess. This wouldn't by any chance be yet another example of the beautiful, harmonious, well-oiled Louisiana Legislative Machine, would it?

Almost 4,000 folks will no doubt be rejoicing that Louisiana has elected these people, as they walk away from whatever crimes they were accused of - whether they commited them or not.

Well done. Again.

Un-American

2006-02-13T11:38:00.000-06:00

It's hard to imagine a better summarization of the Katrina reponse failures than this:

A congressional report to be released this week slams the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, calling it a "failure of leadership" that left people stranded when they were most in need. "Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," the report says. "At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw."

Yup - I'd say that about sums things up - right up into today's failures. I can hardly wait til the report actually releases Wednesday.

And this just makes me sick:

The two audits, released at a Senate hearing, found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program — which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees — were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.

Lovely, eh? And worst of all - FEMA and the Red Cross were actually doing the right thing there by cutting red tape and moving money into the hands of people who needed it. I'm thoroughly disgusted that people apparently ~~took~~ stole money so desperately needed - still - in the region.

Polimom says that's flat-out un-American. If we catch these people, can we put them on a slow boat someplace? Maybe with some leftover MRE's (about 3 days worth...)?

Baffled by the bullshit

2006-02-13T09:15:00.000-06:00

Louisiana, you guys appear to be in a world of hurt over there. Even if the entire elected legislative body was as clean as a whistle, and there’d never been Whiff One of corruption or cronyism, the parochial yahoos running the state would appall.

Let’s see…. So far, in this second emergency legislative session, the obviously unenlightened leaders of Louisiana and New Orleans have managed to derail or kill the government consolidations and the assessor reductions.

He called the duplication of courts, sheriffs, clerks and other offices "arcane and ancient" on the "Isle of Orleans" at a time when post-Hurricane Katrina dollars are short in the city. He said other large parishes in the state survive well with one sheriff, one district court, and one clerk of court who also who performs the duties of the conveyance register, notaries archivist and recorder of mortgages.

"It has nothing to do with the individuals," he said. "It has everything to do with the system. . . . Less means more savings to the taxpayers."

Rep. Joseph Toomy, R-Gretna, a friend of the sheriffs and judges and sponsor of several pay raises for them over the years, said now is the time to change the system in New Orleans. "Consolidation will be best for the city of New Orleans," he said.

"Why are we picking on Orleans?" asked Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, a major opponent of the bill. "Is it because a lot of citizens are not there? And why are we doing it in a special (legislative) session. . . . ?

Hunh? Picking on New Orleans? Can somebody help the esteemed Representative with a reality check?

Now, these short-sighted non-cooperatives are derailing the proposed consolidation of the levee boards / districts. Do these officials think New Orleans’ future is completely unlinked from Jefferson Parish, the southeastern Louisiana parishes, and/or the rest of the state? They seem to believe that the success or failure of the largest city in Louisiana has no bearing on their little kingdoms.

It's kinda hard to understand how Louisiana can get upset with the federal government when things look this bad at the state level.

From here, this all looks like Grade-A bullshit.... and Polimom's totally baffled.

Neighbors for life

2006-02-13T06:58:00.000-06:00

Between the Houston Chronicle and the Times-Picayune, there was an abundance of articles the last few days about the New Orleans evacuees in Houston… and I don’t know about you, but Polimom thinks a total change of focus is required. New Orleans isn’t coming back “on-line” in the near future, and many of the people who think they’re here temporarily are probably going to be Houstonians for many years.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem. The city of Houston could not be more different from its Louisiana neighbor, and Polimom is worried that without some enormous effort, many of our new residents aren’t going to make the transition.

If you’re thinking this isn’t your problem, Houston, you’re out of your freakin’ minds.

For instance:

"The combination of everything the kids have gone through — all the complexities in moving to the city, the standards being so much higher (in Texas), them being so far behind and them missing so much school — yes, I think there is going to be a huge dropout situation," warned Gary Robichaux, principal of New Orleans West, or NOW, College Preparatory School, which opened in Houston several weeks after Katrina. "And especially the kids that stay in Houston. This might end up being an issue for Houston."

This isn’t a short-term situation; the people who lost everything in New Orleans are here for the long haul – and how well they integrate into Houston’s city culture (or not) is going to have enormous impact.

Early on, much was made of the term “refugee”. It understandably offended people who had to flee their homes along the Gulf Coast, because it implied a “foreign-ness” – a sense of not belonging to America. Unfortunately, pressing that distinction subjugated an important fact: culturally speaking, New Orleans was totally, profoundly unique.

Houston has to reach out further to the folks from NOLA who are (probably) permanently transplanted for precisely that reason. The way of life in New Orleans wasn't superficial; it was bone-deep. Wiithout a major shift in how cities and communities perceive their new neighbors, the transition may fail.

Sunday's Times-Picayune ran an article and a series of vignettes describing the impact Houston is having on New Orleanians here, some of which were hopeful, and some that were not.

Do you know what this Houston Police officer is seeing, when he describes the New Orleans attitude?

"I've met three nice people from New Orleans," King said, "out of hundreds."

He said the difference between the hometown folks and the evacuees is in their demeanor.

"Their attitude is not something we're used to encountering," King said. "Most of them are -- I'm trying to think of a good word -- wiseasses. Yep, wiseasses."

Is he describing everybody? NO. However, Polimom doesn't think he's fantasizing, either. I've encountered that attitude myself - many times. He’s talking about something the New Orleans Police Department understands well: an incredible disconnect between law enforcement and/or authorities and the population they are sworn to serve. The NOPD knows this attitude intimately; it’s a large part of how they’ve ended up with their reputation.

Do we want to see the HPD go the same way? Hell no! But they will, if we don’t find a way to shift perceptions and help the evacuees integrate.

And what future do you see for these seven kids (story linked above)?

Fondren Middle School is 27 blocks from her apartment — too far, she says, to send the children walking in an unfamiliar city. Powell, who dropped out of school in the 11th grade, knows the children have to return to school, especially her oldest daughter, Brittany. "She's a bright girl."

They tell her they want to go back.

"I want for them to finish school and educate themselves as much as they can so they'll be able to handle their things," Powell said of her own children, Brittany, 13; Brione, 11; and Brishawn, 7; her nieces, Jhoqueal, 16, who is three months pregnant; Bionne, 14; Deiondrea, 12; and nephew Myron, 2.

Those kids have already been out of school for FIVE MONTHS! They came from a school system that failed its children so miserably, they are way behind their peers. Do you suppose they are going to be able to provide for themselves, or get good jobs, or even finish school?

Guess what? These kids – and 20,000 more – are likely to be part of the fabric of Houston’s tomorrow.

Houston is not New Orleans – and that's both good and bad.

The good? We have excellent schools in the area, tremendous employment opportunities, affordable housing, and genuinely warm people.

On the bad side, we are not a walking city, and we are transitory. People here move around. A lot.

For a population without cars, education, job skills, and family networks, Houston must seem more than alien. It must feel hostile – and that unintended hostility is going to set this city up for failure unless we get in front of this now.

Last September, Houstonians absolutely redefined the terms generosity and neighborliness. They opened their hearts, wallets, and city right up to those in need, but at the time, nobody knew that this was a permanent situation. Everybody was thinking in terms of weeks, or a few months.

The evacuees are not going home tomorrow. They may not be leaving Houston this year – or next. In fact, many of the folks from New Orleans – perhaps most – are here to stay, and that alone is setting up further unintended problems. Because they don’t want to be here. They want to be back in New Orleans…. and they can’t.

What on earth are we going to do?

The Christ of Politics?

2006-02-12T17:44:00.000-06:00

Polimom laughed right out loud at the Italian Prime Minister for this one:

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics," Italian media quoted him as saying at a dinner with supporters on Saturday night. "I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone."

It makes Ray Nagin's gaffe look pretty tame, eh?

What a dope.

Now, I'm sure good Christians all over the world could take Berlosconi the wrong way (and totally overlook the obviously warped ego). I sure hope we won't be reading about how the Italian embassies are being attacked...

Is fear winning?

2006-02-11T11:43:00.000-06:00

The Mohammed cartoon insanity has taken a turn in Sweden that is bothering Polimom enormously:

The Swedish government has moved to shut down the website of a far-right political party's newspaper over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The site's host, Levonline, pulled the plug on the website of the Swedish Democrats' SD-Kuriren newspaper after consulting with the government.

It is believed to be the first time a Western government has intervened to block a publication in the growing row.

It seems that the Swedish government initially said that they didn't make specific demands of the ISP, but it looks to me as if they leaned on Levonline pretty hard. Evidently, Islam is pleased (and here).

Apparently - at least in Sweden - fear (not to be confused with respect) is winning out over freedom of the press.

Thanks, New Orleans

2006-02-11T08:46:00.000-06:00

I laughed til I cried at Markus’ latest West Bank Guide blog entry. Consider it a type of Mohammed-cartoon for New Orleans. If you don’t find something that offends you personally, or you can’t laugh at yourself yet, be sure to drop Mark a note; no doubt he’ll be glad to lampoon your group or area specifically.

For instance:

The bridges will no longer be called the Crescent City Connection, but will revert to the proper name, even though there are now two of them. If you don’t like the fact that New Orleans [is] in the name, why do you tell everyone when you’re out of town that you’re from New Orleans? You are not. You are from Marrero.

Yes indeed, Markus – I’m with you. I stumble all the time with that CCC thing. I suspect, however, that Gretna has finally managed to put themselves on the map. They should have no trouble at all these days with name recognition.

The King of the Ferries will greet every boat and bus arriving from the West Bank, and be empowered to conduct full strip and cavity searches of everyone arriving from over there, to make sure they are not the wrong sort of element.

I wanted to see if Markus would make an exception for Algiers with that strip and cavity search, but when I read this in NOLA.com this morning, I decided he probably had it right:

Algiers residents will hold a rally today to protest plans to establish a trailer park in their neighborhood that would house emergency officials and other residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Between Algiers' NIMBY-mania, Jim Tucker's stance on the levee board unification, and Jeff Arnold's support for the traditional bajillion (sp?) assessors, Algiers isn't standing up well to the scrutiny. (Since I'm having a lot of trouble laughing at that just now, I'm hopeful Markus can come up with something...)

And finally - I think the suggestion for the School Board has real merit. They’d end up with an enormous cash surplus for a change, since there’s NO chance they’d ever agree on how to split it up amongst themselves.

The Orleans Parish School Board will be relieved of its responsibilities for public education, but the board members and all of their family member formerly employed by the school system will hold the rights to the concessions at all future Hornets games. They can divvy up the takings from the popcorn and cokes and beers anyway they like.

Thanks, Markus, for the laugh. I was having a lot of trouble finding anything “fun” out there in the world this morning…

Oh! And on behalf of Houston, I'd like to acknowledge your generous offering of those one-way bus tickets. I can’t promise, though, that we won’t reciprocate by sharing some of our own, locally-grown talent. Consider it a well-meaning cultural exchange that could have some real economic benefit.

Given the size of the Houston market, I'm thinking we could make up some "Thanks, New Orleans" bumper stickers, and donate a percentage of the proceeds to the police departments in both cities. Outta be good for millions of $!

[smile]

Ego no te absolvo

2006-02-10T05:42:00.000-06:00

It seems Donald Powell was feeling talkative at lunch in Baton Rouge Wednesday:

Louisiana must make do with the $6.2 billion in block grants authorized by Congress on all of its housing relief, and if it spends the money wisely more could follow, Don Powell, the former FDIC chairman overseeing the Gulf Coast recovery, said Wednesday.

Does that sound just a smidge paternalistic to anybody but Polimom?

Looks like they had quite the Q&A session, actually, and a lot of very good questions were asked - some of which he answered (although he couldn't explain where that "lot of money" is being spent). He did address an important one, though, that has confounded many people: Why did the White House stomp on the Baker Bill?

According to Powell, it’s because they feel that if you live in a flood plain, you should have had flood insurance.

Period.

Fifth District Savings and Loan Association chairman Michael Nolan asked Powell: If the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed in the levee design and construction to protect the city, why wouldn’t homeowners be made whole by the federal government?

“If a homeowner suffered damage because of a failure by a federal agency of government, why should they settle for less than 100 percent?” he said.

Powell answered that residents living in the flood plain should take responsibility for their own property.

“I have flood insurance for my home (in Amarillo, Texas) where it rains 17 inches a year,” said the wealthy former head of First National Bank of Amarillo. “Is that wasting my money? Yes maybe, but it’s responsible.”

As I said once before, I understand this. However, like the City-Journal, I don't see that the situation in New Orleans as quite so cut and dried:

But the moral-hazard issue here is not as clear-cut as it seems. New Orleans residents understood that their properties would flood sometimes, but not catastrophically; they thought, reasonably, that the levees designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in response to previous floods would protect their homes. Those levees, of course, gave way after Katrina, due in part to failures on the part of the Corps as well as on the part of state and local officials, who were responsible for maintenance.

The article goes on to explain how the federal government could work with the Baker Bill, to create a scenario in which the homeowners themselves take on much of the responsibility:

Baker has shown himself willing to modify his bill in response to reasonable criticism, and the administration could help him perfect his plan by asking him to change it to place more financial responsibility for rebuilding flood-wrecked properties in the hands of exiled Big Easy homeowners. Such a move would join reasonable federal supervision with the power of the ownership society that President Bush rightly values.

[..]

Washington can pave the way for reconstruction by working with New Orleans to build adequate levees, of course. It should also work with local authorities to set out clear and non-negotiable reconstruction standards. No house will be issued a permit for occupancy unless its main living quarters are elevated enough from the ground to withstand future floods. Properties must be built to wind- and flood-resistant standards, as has happened in vulnerable areas of Florida.

But evidently the feds aren't interested. They have absolved themselves.

Taking responsibility for the enormous damage in New Orleans is, I think, a two-way street. Yes, many people did not have adequate flood insurance. To balance that, the Army Corps of Engineers did not build adequate protection.

Polimom isn't ready to say "Te absolvo" for the sin of the failed levees.

Has the non-stop blame-gaming that we've seen since August 29 contributed to this sullen "not my problem" on the part of the feds? I dunno.

Was pushing for 100% compensation what ticked them off? I dunno.

Is there anything that will bring the two sides together in a shared way, so that New Orleanians can find their way out of the tunnel?

Sigh.... I dunno.

This was an option?

2006-02-09T19:28:00.000-06:00

Was this actually under serious consideration someplace??????

Sheehan won't challenge Feinstein for Senate

That poor woman hasn't had all her tools in the mental shed for quite a while. I have to tell ya, just the headline blew me away.

Is this what you want, Algiers?

2006-02-09T06:52:00.000-06:00

UPDATE 12:15pm: Some info in the comments...

Once upon a Katrina time, Polimom’s lens was focused tightly on Algiers – the largely unflooded portion of Orleans Parish that lies across the river from Greater New Orleans. It’s been months since I’ve spoken directly to all those folks, and I don’t know how many of Polimom’s old friends still visit here regularly.

This morning, though, Polimom’s thinking hard about Algiers again – and I have a question:

Did Representatives Arnold and Tucker head off to Baton Rouge this week with your input regarding a unified levee board? Did you ask them to resist?

Polimom is not attacking Algiers; I'm sincerely concerned, because there's a lot at stake.

Polimom has a “here we go again” feeling in the pit of her stomach when she reads:

Levee board consolidation bill passes out of committee while Senators maintain its death

The legislation has been strongly opposed by some West Bank elected officials, who say their constituents are in a different flood basin and are better served by a separate board.

The legislative representatives are purportedly speaking for their constituents on the West Bank, which should mean that West Bank residents agree that their communities cannot be served by a unified levee board. Is that true?

Because this is not a small issue. People everywhere are watching to see whether Louisiana (generally) and the New Orleans area (specifically) can work together, or are doomed to be at cross-purposes forever. The New York Times spelled it out clearly this morning:

This week the State Legislature convened its second special session on Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Legislature had a chance to reform the system at the special session in November, but the governor backed a weaker oversight measure that failed to pass.

That cannot happen again. This time they must overcome rivalries for the greater good. Storms do not pay attention to parish lines, and neither should the system to defend against them. While much of the blame for the failures of the defense system falls at the feet of the Army Corps of Engineers, Louisiana should focus on what it can do to improve organization and accountability on its end.

If you’re still out there reading Polimom, Algiers, could you talk to me about this for a sec? Are your elected officials truly articulating your views on the unification of the levee boards?

Fear is not Respect

2006-02-08T13:23:00.000-06:00

It seems someone has come up with a few more caricatures of Mohammed, and at least one of them sounds pretty funny (although Chirac is not amused):

Besides reprinting the drawings, the satirical French weekly Charlie-Hebdo also printed new caricatures of its own, including one under the headline "Muhammad Overwhelmed by the Fundamentalists" that showed the prophet with his head in his hands, remarking, "It's hard to be loved by idiots."

Indeed. If Islam is truly a religion of peace, as moderates say, then Mohammed must be rolling around in sheer agony at these grotesque displays… and frankly, Polimom has a great deal of sadness for those moderates. They, too, must be absolutely aghast – not just at the outrageous antics of their fellow (but evidently far less civilized) Muslims, but also to be watching years of work toward promoting understanding going right down the drain.

Of course, if one read the editorial in today’s Washington Post, one might have concluded that the original publication of 12 Mohammed caricatures is the work of right-wingers (those devious, bigoted Danes!).

The cartoons, whose vulgarity and offensiveness are beyond question, were published as a calculated insult last September by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem. The Danish government depends for support in Parliament on a far-right populist party with an anti-immigrant agenda: Maybe that's why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen arrogantly refused to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries last fall, when the controversy might have been defused.

Yet Charlie-Hebdo is known to be very much on the left.

What Polimom cannot understand anymore is, what are these violent, rioting maniacs hoping to achieve? Is it respect? If it is, then they are failing miserably.

Polimom wanted to find the latest cartoon (the one with the humorous description) so I could show you (like last week), but I'm embarassed to say I've decided not to… but this is not out of respect.

It is because I find that I’m afraid.

I, an American, with a lowly blog and freedoms granted by the Constitution of the United States, am afraid to post a cartoon.

There’s something very wrong with this picture.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a post about the Lying Imams.

The tail of the sick dog

2006-02-08T09:34:00.000-06:00

Polimom is disappointed this morning by the oh-so-fleeting sense of unity in the Louisiana legislative session. One would think that well over 50,000 signatures would send some signal to elected representatives; surely at least a hint of public sentiment should have come through.

The administration rolled out a long list of supporters for the Boasso bills, including the Public Affairs Research Council, the Council for a Better Louisiana, the Louisiana Association for Business and Industry, the Louisiana Home Builders Association, the Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region and the Jefferson Business Council. A grass-roots group called Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans had collected 52,959 signatures supporting a levee overhaul like Boasso's.

I understand the skepticism coming from the West Bank, and while I agree that historically, Algiers has indeed been the tail on the Orleans Parish dog, wagging that tail right now is counter-productive in the extreme… or hasn’t anyone noticed that the dog is very, very ill at the moment?

"Our constituents don't want to go into a regional board that may not pay attention to the West Bank," said Rep. Jim Tucker, R-Algiers, who submitted House Bill 25 to create a West Bank board called the Barataria Basin Flood Authority. "We remember what it was to be the tail on the dog and we don't want to go back to being a tail on the dog."

In life, one picks the battles. Is this the hill upon which Louisiana chooses to die fighting?

C’mon. Surprise everybody and pull together for a change.

Crazier and crazier

2006-02-07T09:04:00.000-06:00

Just when you thought it couldn't get any wierder:

The West's publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over Hamas' win in the Palestinian elections, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Polimom sources say that NASA has intercepted a mysterious inter-galactic transmission:

"Maybe we should have waited a while for this experiment..."

In other news, while neo-Nazis seemed initially supportive of Iran's bizarre attacks on Israel and the Holocaust, they are angered by the demeaning images of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank, and have vowed to kill the Hindus in protest. In a public statement, the leader of one of the more prominent radical factions (who requested to remain anonymous) said:

"We don't like them, either."

Sigh...

Another finger raised

2006-02-07T08:22:00.000-06:00

Hey Wally! Do you think the White House might notice New Orleans if they ask for international aid?

Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says he's thinking about looking outside the country to get the money it will take to rebuild the city. Nagin says he's considering getting international financial assistance because the US has not done enough to get the city back on its feet. Dignitaries from several different countries have met with Nagin since the disaster.

Dunno, Beav. It's pretty neat, though, huh?

Game Day

2006-02-07T07:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, Gov. Blanco opened Louisiana's special legislative session with a bang:

"If no effort is made to guarantee our fair share of royalties, I have warned the federal government that we will be forced to block the August sale of offshore oil and gas leases," Blanco said. "It's time to play hardball, as I believe that's the only game Washington understands."

It's not clear to Polimom whether there's anything but pure grit behind those words, but I loved them anyway; they were a balm for the open wound left by Bush's SoTU snub.

Does Blanco have the ability to block the sale? Some analysts say no - and while I hope those folks are wrong, the message itself is just as important. What the Governor has effectively said is, "Louisiana's not your doormat, and I'm done with being treated like crap."

Polimom's thrilled to see Louisiana raising its metaphoric finger to the White House. Since Sunday, Jim Hoagland's analysis of why Bush felt that he could almost totally ignore the Gulf Coast has been circling endlessly in my head:

If you believe that Rove and Bush are too deep in a bubble of isolation or oblivion to see the shortcomings of their energy "plan" and the conflicts swirling around New Orleans, they have a midterm election they would like to sell you. It is far more damning -- for what it would say about them and about the public -- to suspect that they have carefully weighed the pluses and minuses of devoting more attention and resources to New Orleans and have pegged public sentiment just about right.

Polimom wants to vomit all over "public sentiment", but he nailed the problem - which makes this Louisiana legislative session infinitely more important. The state can't afford to indulge in the partisan hostility that has defined America for almost six years, and reactions to Blanco's opening speech indicate that Louisiana officials finally get it (maybe...):

Her speech was interrupted 19 times with applause from the crowd, which included lawmakers, their guests and hundreds of ordinary citizens.

She drew a standing ovation for her line, "We had all better put Louisiana politics aside and worry about Washington politics or our people and our state will lose."

Yes indeed. Time to get that team on the field and limber up those fingers. It's Game Day.

Tell me the plan again, please

2006-02-06T09:20:00.000-06:00

Since late last week, Polimom’s been wandering in and out of the office… staring at the computer monitor… drafting and discarding one thing after another… trying to respond to Donald Powell’s explanation of why the White House is holding up rebuilding funds for Louisiana (and thus, New Orleans).

The rejection of the Baker Bill - a whole separate kettle of fish - was only part of what Powell wrote in the Washington Post [my emphasis]:

Last week we announced that Louisiana will receive $6.2 billion through the well-tested Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. This will be available once the state submits a detailed plan to the federal government on how it plans to use the funds.

There it is - that "plan" thing. Apparently, it isn't just the Baker Bill that won't go anywhere; the CDBG is likewise stalled.

The pat answer from nearly everyone has been, “But there IS a plan!”. Is that really true?

It wasn't until I found myself in a (slightly heated) debate, attempting to defend "the plan", that I uncovered my own faith-based assumptions - and discovered that I still don't know the answers to these key questions:

Does the city plan to support the entire former footprint? If it does, by when? Immediately? Or are neighborhoods at risk of being bought out and massively redeveloped? Or would a "non-viable" neighborhood become a park/flood-plain?

At the moment, it looks like New Orleans is going with the entire footprint – but only as a “non-plan”. Adam Nossiter of the NYTimes writes:

House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.

And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."

The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."

Is this the missing plan to which Powell and Bush have alluded?

Unfortunately, the federal authorities don’t seem to understand that New Orleans officials are politically hamstrung. They cannot simply say, “These neighborhoods will not be rebuilt and those will”. Even if someone dared make such decisions, it will all be up for grabs again in April.

Somebody must uncouple the question of funding (the "how") from neighborhood planning (the "what") and unequivocally define the neighborhoods of tomorrow, of 2010, and 2020 - without dream-like embellishments of light rails and Storyvilles. Lovely as those visions are, they've obfuscated the most important issues.

Of course, such an uncoupled plan was presented to the city months ago, and it was blown away by emotion and politics. (Remember the ULI plan?) Has enough time passed for reason to enter the equation?

Meanwhile, Crosby said he felt it time "to grab the city by the lapels and say, we know people are hurting, we know people are suspicious, but we must come to the table and set aside mistrust to have a conversation about our future."

If local officials can’t do this (and Polimom believes they can’t), then someone else must – because a default plan is no plan at all.

House-cleaning in Houston

2006-02-05T08:26:00.000-06:00

Many Houstonians will no doubt be outraged by the Chronicle’s report about New Orleans' pre-Katrina Criminal Justice system:

The crime commission's damning report less than a week before the hurricane said that only 7 percent of those arrested were ever convicted and that 60 percent of all convictions were for misdemeanors. It also said violent offenses such as murder, rape, battery or assault made up only 5 percent of all convictions during 2003-04.

Seven percent? How is that possible?

Kim Cobb writes that killers like "B-Stupid" were enabled by criminally lax bond-setting, setting the stage for witness intimidation and murder… and that certainly is a facet of the problem. New Orleans’ stellar Times-Picayune wrote extensively on exactly that – way back in 2004:

But in New Orleans, as Turner well knew, fear of retaliation has made witnesses a wary group, a problem that repeatedly sabotages homicide prosecutions. People step forward, identify a suspect, but later refuse to cooperate. They change their stories, accuse detectives of coercion and skip court dates. With nothing left to build a case on, prosecutors drop charges, and suspects, many with violent pasts, hit the streets again.

In many other cases, police remain empty-handed because no one comes forward at all. In at least two cases last year, witnesses who came forward were shot dead.

For Houston, these systemic failures are important to understand. Yes, the New Orleans Police Department has an appalling reputation, but there’s an important issue consistently overlooked by citizens and watchdog groups: the NOPD has been laboring under totally impossible conditions for decades. The police and the citizens they were sworn to protect were caught in a vicious, closed loop from which no-one had any hope of emerging… before Katrina. In September, I wrote:

This is a violent sub-culture gone mad, and the real tragedy for those who are poor, and trapped economically, was merely compounded by Katrina. The families, elderly, and children in these neighborhoods were already living a nightmare.

Houston’s forums and blogs have been peppered with comments about New Orleanians – ridiculously short-sighted statements like “send them all back”, or “maybe we can put them in the New Orleans jails”.

Houstonians need to get off the smug self-deception that this city was some kind of crime-free Nirvana before our influx of people. It wasn’t. Houston already had neighborhoods over-run by gangs and drugs - the same areas to which the New Orleans criminals thronged. Why? Because they fit right in there. Furthermore, finger-pointing is (as ever) a waste of time, because this is Houston's problem now. Heads in sand don't solve anything.

Down the line one day when a major disaster strikes Houston (and it will), one hopes that this city’s evacuees will not strike fear into the communities that give them shelter. It’s time to clean house, folks.

But our dance card is already full

2006-02-04T08:03:00.000-06:00

I'm pretty sure everybody can see where "we" are going next:

Rumsfeld: Iran Regime Sponsors Terrorism

The only question in my mind is who's going to the ball with us this time:

IAEA to Report Iran to Security Council

VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. nuclear watchdog on Saturday reported Iran to the U.N. Security Council in a resolution expressing concern Tehran's nuclear program may not be "exclusively for peaceful purposes." Iran said it would retaliate immediately.

Polimom's unimpressed in the extreme by militant Islam, but the U.S. can't afford another half-trillion dollars. If "we" are going down this road without the rest of the West, we're going to destroy ourselves economically... and hurricane season is coming. Again.

A little domestic:foreign balance would seem to be in order here.

Religious terrorists - they're all nuts!

2006-02-03T10:51:00.000-06:00

Many years ago, Polimom got very tired of the bloated, self-serving rhetoric that flies from pulpits. Millions of people have died in the name of one god or another, which long-since led me to conclude that fanatics simply can't read their own "good books" - which invariably exhort their followers to not kill.

Recent events surrounding the caricatures of Mohammed have not only confirmed Polimom's thinking, they illustrate how far Islam has yet to travel to arrive at anything resembling "civilized". From the Brussels-Journal:

Yesterday (Thursday) Mullah Krekar, the alleged leader of the Islamist group Ansar al-Islam who has been living in Norway as a refugee since 1991, said that the publication of the Muhammad cartoons was a declaration of war. “The war has begun,” he told Norwegian journalists. Mr Krekar said Muslims in Norway are preparing to fight. “It does not matter if the governments of Norway and Denmark apologize, the war is on.”

Islamist organizations all over the world are issuing threats towards Europeans. The Islamist terrorist group Hizbollah announced that it is preparing suicide attacks in Denmark and Norway. A senior imam in Kuwait, Nazem al-Masbah, said that those who have published cartoons of Muhammad should be murdered. He also threatened all citizens of the countries where the twelve Danish cartoons [...] have been published with death.

As it happens, I like the cartoon about the virgins (which has always struck me as a really stupid reward for suicide).

Freedom of speech, thought, and expression - the very foundations of democracy - are foreign concepts, apparently, to those imbued with righteousness, and although the madness seems to be centered on Europe thus far, I'm relieved to read that the LA Times will be publishing those controversial cartoons this weekend.

And just in case anyone is concerned that Polimom is somehow biased against Islam, I'd like to take just a minute to mention that fundamentalist Christians are every bit as loony, particularly when they seem to think "their" god gives them the right to blow up clinics or public buildings.

This is okay (I'll be avoiding the show just because Brittany is on it - ::shudder::).

This is not.

Islam has no monopoly on terrorism. They just haven't polished the veneer.

Update: The US apparently has an official position on the cartoons. Unfortunately, the Reuters story makes no mention of how the State Department views extremist threats to kill everyone involved.

The Katrina Index - 156 days on

2006-02-02T17:19:00.000-06:00

From the Brookings Institute, Feb. 1, 2006 (.pdf file):

FINDINGS
Days Since Katrina Made Landfall: 156

Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. But, the city lacks enough essential services to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. What key trends were available this month for the states suggest little progress in both Louisiana and Mississippi. In particular, we find:

Demand for essential services in New Orleans continues to overwhelm the supply. Only 32 percent of the city’s hospitals are open, and waits for emergency room visits have exceeded six hours. Over 9,000 children have now enrolled in the city’s schools but only 15 percent have reopened and some of those are reporting difficulty accommodating demand. Electricity has been restored to about 95 percent of former customers, but power is only being used by 30-35 percent of the former customers, as many customers have either not returned or wait for the city to certify the safety of their electricity connections.

The dramatic drop in the unemployment rate is almost entirely due to a decrease in the size of the labor force in New Orleans and Louisiana. In particular, the metro area lost 42,000 people in its labor force between November and December, while the state of Louisiana lost over 100,000 people.

Louisiana created over 11,000 jobs between November and December, but lost over 100,000 people in its labor force. Mississippi, on the other hand, lost 2,000 jobs and about 2,000 of its labor force.

Hundreds of thousands of households continue to face major obstacles restarting their lives. Nearly 750,000 households remain displaced by Katrina, of which about 650,000 are receiving rental assistance, or about $800 a month. Mortgage delinquency rates skyrocketed between the second and third quarter of the calendar year. In the state of Louisiana, for instance, nearly one out of every four loans is now 30 or more days past due.

Traffic in and out of the city continues to increase, along with the number of people flying in and out of New Orleans' airport. In particular, over 47,000 cars now make there way across the Huey P. Long Bridge on a typical day, and nearly 174,000 people arrived at the city's airport in December.

The slow pace of recovery on fundamentals strongly suggests that the city and state will be unable to restore essential services on their own, and require direct federal assistance to do so. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially not known. With New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi still facing massive economic and infrastructural challenges, it is likely that many of these households will need federal assistance for many months to come.

'Nuff said.

The Iberville

2006-02-02T08:15:00.000-06:00

For better or worse, they've reopened the Iberville projects:

When every public housing development on the east bank of New Orleans was damaged during Hurricane Katrina, federal housing authorities promised a new way of rebuilding them, but the old buildings have currently been renovated and many residents of the Iberville development have been told by HANO to come back home.

The entire subject of the NOLA housing projects is a tough one. Yes, housing is desperately needed... but a couple of New Orleans' most difficult problems were embodied in those projects: poverty and crime. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if change is on the agenda there in the foreseeable future, either [my emphasis]:

“Right now, we’re talking about families needed a place to live, a roof over their head. We do have a long term plan in place. For example, I think we talked about C.J. Peete, and a redevelopment of that housing community, so perhaps down the road, the Department and the Housing Authority will be able to look at how the public housing is situated and perhaps make some improvements.”

Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson responded, “HUD is responding compassionately to the immediate need of people to come home to live their lives. However, I am working with HUD and HANO to create a long term plan that will provide a greater quality of life in Iberville.”

HUD officials said they have been trying to contact former tenants of Iberville to tell them they can come home as their apartments are repaired and pass safety inspections. They also said there is no timeline on when any housing developments will be replaced with more modern, mixed income living.

And so it goes...

Silence isn't always golden

2006-02-02T07:00:00.000-06:00

Daily, we’re bombarded with stories about Houston's problems with its “guests” – and that temporary terminology is causing any number of problems. Somehow, neither the guests nor the hosts are getting an important message: many evacuees can’t go back to New Orleans.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Maybe never.

Judge Eckels, who was instrumental in opening Houston’s resources to Katrina evacuees, traveled earlier this week to New Orleans to assess the situation there. Unsurprisingly, he returned to Houston with bad news for evacuees (KHOU by subscription):

Judge Robert Eckels saw a couple of homes still standing, but for the most part, there was only destruction and a lot of rubble.

Eckels found that little had changed in the Ninth Ward since Hurricane Katrina struck.

That worries Eckels because a lot of people who think they're living in Houston temporarily, may be living in Houston a lot longer than they expected.

"The real question is many of those folks think they're coming home. They think this spring, March or the summer they'll be back here either in New Orleans or in some other place nearby. We wanted to see for ourselves the devastation of this city and what impact it's gonna have on both Harris County and the Houston area and the prospects of folks coming home," said Eckels.

The problem is that when the FEMA vouchers run out, people will not have found jobs or places to live.

Umm… well… YES. That would be exactly the problem.

What Polimom doesn’t understand is why this information isn’t being broadcast loudly around the city?

Houstonians seem to think that people from New Orleans should have either moved on with their lives or gone home by now, while many New Orleanians aren’t settling in because they have no information about their futures. Officials at every level are afraid to tell them the truth.

The continuing silence is contributing to false hopes and skewed perceptions on all sides - and that's unfair to everyone. It's time to start talking about it.

Time to drive on, Louisiana

2006-02-01T10:37:00.000-06:00

Alrighty then! Enough time has been spent waiting for Bush et al to grasp the situation in New Orleans and the decimated coastal parishes. Louisiana needs to take charge of its own destiny – and I like the sound of this:

Blanco: No offshore signoffs unless La. gets royalty share
Money could finance hurricane protection

Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned this week that the state would not support future offshore lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico unless Louisiana gets a share of the federal royalties generated by oil production there.

That’s the right answer! Good on ya!

And as long as folks are getting proactive, Rodger has another good idea over on his blog.

Let's stop begging Washington. After Bush's speech tonight it's obvious we are off the agenda.

We should impose a tax of one dollar on every barrel of oil [produced] in the state.

Between one thing and another, Louisiana does have assets and leverage.

No time like the present to put things into motion - cuz you're on your own now.

American values a la G W Bush

2006-02-01T07:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, when I suggested that Bush probably wouldn’t have much to say about the Gulf Coast, I was still hopeful. Maybe – just maybe – he would speak to the damaged souls and psyches of those who have lost everything.

Last night, I let my 9-year-old stay up an hour past bedtime, so she could hear the President of the United States speak to his people. Right up to the end, we waited – with ever-decreasing hope – for some sign that Bush understands and cares.

Throughout Bush’s speech, as he held forth about what makes America great - about a “hopeful nation” - we waited for him to take the opportunity to speak to the millions of citizens who have reached out already to residents of the Gulf Coast. I wanted him to at least say Thank You to cities and communities around the country - places like Houston and Atlanta and Baton Rouge -that showed the world the American spirit... so that he could help renew their commitment, energy, and spirit.

But he did none of this.

Instead, he missed what was likely his last chance to publicly reach out to Louisiana, Mississippi, and SE Texas.

Some of what he spoke about last night had real value. We must reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The health care system is at terrible risk. Our education system is failing our children. But in a speech 51 minutes long, does it seem unreasonable to have hoped for more than two paragraphs - at the most general (and redundant) level - devoted to the greatest disaster in modern American history?

George Bush spoke again last night about values, but his words are empty. He invoked God, but overlooked that most basic tenet of the human spirit: caring for one another.

He believes we must be on the global stage, and lead the world… yet he sets no example. How can we – America – expect anyone to follow a country without a conscience?

Sometimes, I really hate it when I’m right.

Request Denied

2006-01-31T10:47:00.000-06:00

"What strikes me is the utter lack of coordination in the search and rescue," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told a panel of four front-line officials involved in the Katrina response. "Don't you all talk to one another?"

FEMA continues to defy the brain's ability to process stupidity.

And as long as we're on the subject of stupidity - I wrote about this once, but since the MSM has finally caught up with the story:

Louisiana officials did virtually nothing to prepare to evacuate poor, sick or elderly people as required under a state emergency plan adopted months before Hurricane Katrina hit, according to newly released documents.

State Transportation and Development Secretary Johnny B. Bradberry told Senate investigators that he was assigned the task in April, months before the Aug. 29 storm. But his department had no buses or drivers to execute the mission.

"We have done nothing to fulfill this responsibility," Bradberry said, according to a transcript of a Dec. 21 deposition obtained by The Washington Post. "We put no plans in place to do any of this."

Plenty of blame to be shared by all. Isn't that special?

Playing BINGO in Lala-land

2006-01-31T08:50:00.000-06:00

Just in case you were still doubtful that the Democrats have let go of the string tethering them to earth, here’s how the Houston group is planning to respond to this evening’s State of the Union address:

Join DEMOCRATS FOR PEACE at a protest to coincide with Tuesday evening's State of the Union address. We will gather at 7:00 PM for a rally with music, speeches, and chants. At 8:00 PM, when President Bush begins his State of the Union speech, we bring on the noise and drown out Bush's lies with kazoos, signs, noisemakers, and anti-war mantras. We will demand that Bush and his cronies be held accountable. Please bring signs, banners, pots, pans, stickers, flyers, metal spoons, wooden spoons, noisemakers, costumes, instruments, buttons, or anything else that you think will reinforce our anti-Bush, anti-war message. Come out and join fellow progressive activists to protest the fascist, divisive, and unconstitutional acts of the Bush administration!

Dunno about you, but I have a clear vision of my daughter, at age 2, with her fingers in her ears and eyes screwed shut, singing “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la”. (It wasn't cute when she did it, either.)

The more this kind of infantile behavior goes on, the more likely the United States is to remain in the hands of the radical right (these people scare me). Seems like the Dems can’t get a clue even if it’s fed to them through a tube.

I’m thinking the watch parties sound like more fun (via Slate):

At the Center for Global Development party, participants will play "SOTU bingo" listening for references to "HIV/AIDS," "trade," and "Africa" in the speech. Each time Bush says one of those phrases, players mark the box on their card, screaming "Bingo!" if they get a full plate. (They win mugs and T-shirts). Given how little Bush talks about those issues, the cards also have boxes with filler words like "peace," "freedom," and "democracy" that are more likely to be mentioned.

I bet nobody will hit a BINGO if their cards contain the terms “New Orleans” or “levees”. I think “terrorism” outta be the center freebie spot, though. We'll probably hear that one a lot.

I can hardly wait.

Wasting everybody's time

2006-01-30T14:36:00.000-06:00

Apologies to all of Polimom's friends who perhaps support the fillibuster effort, but I sure wish these folks would find something productive to do with their time and energy.

Democrats launch effort to block Alito confirmation

This crop of Democrats is apparently unable to find anything other than lost causes to champion. Alito was not the worst we could have ended up with from this administration... by a long shot.

Update 4:47 pm: The grand gesture has been made, and that's that. For the record - Alito would not have been my choice, either. But once the die was cast with this administration (and the religious conservatives), the best we could hope for was... well... somebody like Alito.

Is there anybody in Washington with guts?

2006-01-30T09:03:00.000-06:00

The president is a miserable failure when it comes to American citizens. Perhaps, as this NYTimes editorial seems to suggest, Congress can move things forward? (my emphasis)

Louisiana in Limbo

New Orleans waits. While some heroic efforts at rebuilding are taking place, hundreds of thousands of residents have put their lives on hold until they know what the government's next steps will be, leaving the shells of their houses as placeholders. But the Bush administration has now rejected the most broadly supported plan for rebuilding communities while offering nothing to take its place.

It has been five months since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and for many the norm is still the claustrophobic new reality of tiny trailers and multiple families crammed into single apartments. Louisiana is trying. You can hear jackhammers pounding and buzz saws whirring on Canal Street in New Orleans. Dedicated workers endure a grinding daily commute from points north, like Baton Rouge, as they try to make the city and the region whole again. But the mission is far from complete and the challenge is beyond the scope of a broken city and a poor state.

New Orleans's crisis has little relation to anything the nation has faced in modern memory, and traditional solutions will simply not help. Homeowners — many very poor people whose houses had been in their families for generations — had varying degrees of insurance before the disaster. When entire neighborhoods are devastated, their mildewed furniture and drywall piled on the roadsides, it's impossible to tell the people who are well insured to rebuild and hope that the houses all around them will somehow be reclaimed somewhere down the line.

But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.)

Instead of an alternate solution, the president's Katrina czar, Donald Powell, has offered sleight of hand, touting $6.2 billion in development money for Louisiana passed last year by Congress as if it were somehow a substitute. And in an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem, Mr. Powell says the government first needs to care for the roughly 20,000 homeowners without flood insurance who lived outside the federally designated flood plain. The real tally of destroyed or damaged homes in the region is well over 200,000. And the real need is housing for residents, whether they were renters or owners, insured or uninsured, living above the flood plain or trusting the federal government's levees to protect them from storms.

Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the wreckage of poor, low-lying New Orleans neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. That has sparked the unproductive, blame-the-victim debate revolving around whether people should have lived there in the first place. The Ninth Ward provides a misleading picture of the city, as do the relatively unscathed tourist areas like the French Quarter and the Garden District. Huge swaths of the city have the empty quality of a ghost town. Stores wait for residents to reopen; residents wait to see if neighbors will return. The city and surrounding parishes will not meet Mr. Powell's neat categories, when renters lived beside owners, insured next to uninsured. He is talking like an actuary when a leader is needed to rescue this region.

Now, Congress has a responsibility to follow its own lead rather than the president's. We were outraged once, shocked at the images on our television sets, at the poverty in our collective backyard and at the devastation of a great city. As the disaster threatens to become permanent, we have every reason to remain so.

Can you imagine the publicity that would result from a presidential veto if the House and Senate dared to moved the Baker Bill forward without the King's explicit approval?

Yes. My thoughts exactly.

2x+y=disaster

2006-01-30T08:31:00.000-06:00

The LATimes is running a series this week about some truly terrifying (to me) high school drop-out statistics.

The Times determined that at least 53% of the students who began at Birmingham in ninth grade graduated four years later, many from other schools.

Half? Holy cow! And today’s article – the second in the series – indicates that the big obstacle is Algebra.

In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44% flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds.

In all, the district that semester handed out Ds and Fs to 29,000 beginning algebra students — enough to fill eight high schools the size of Birmingham.

Is this an American educational phenomenon, do you suppose? Or could it be related to this article from the UK’s Times Online:

Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.

After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.” [...]

“It is shocking,” says Adey. “The general cognitive foundation of 11 and 12-year-olds has taken a big dip. There has been a continuous decline in the last 30 years and it is carrying on now.”

But what exactly is being lost? Is it really general intelligence or simply a specific understanding of scientific concepts such as volume and density? Both, say the researchers. The tests reveal both general intelligence — “higher level brain functions” — and a knowledge that is “the bedrock of science and maths” says Ginsburg. In fact it’s nothing less than the ability of children to handle new, difficult ideas. Doing well at these tests has been linked with getting higher grades generally at GCSE.

I have absolutely nothing that connects these two findings to one another, other than the shared problems with the math. Does it actually seem likely that the human race is getting less intelligent?

Scary thought…

If Polimom was President

2006-01-29T09:38:00.000-06:00

Sundays on the blog are fun for me. It’s the lowest-traffic day of the week, generally, which means I can talk about oddball topics and hardly anybody will care. So I’m assuming nobody will notice when I say that I’m declaring myself for the Presidency of the United States. (uproarious laughter)

Of course I’m kidding. I can’t imagine a worse job – unless maybe it’s Mayor of New Orleans. But I do have some ideas, and since I probably won’t be pencilling in “Polimom” on any ballots, I’ve decided to drop my ideas out into the world. Maybe somebody more masochistic than I can borrow them.

The United States’ ~~bipolar~~ bipartisan political system just isn’t working for me at all. I can’t get behind either party, and I find myself disengaging more and more from the democratic process. I simply don’t feel that I have a voice.

That is not to say I haven’t got ideas and opinions, though – and those are the basis for the Planks of…

Polimom’s non-Platform

The federal government has grown beyond all reasonable or manageable proportions – in large part because it attempts to define and administer every aspect of American life.

Polimom feels that States, like their populations, are not homogeneous. The proper role of Washington is to set high-level policy structure, within which the States work to provide for their unique needs and populations.

Polimom believes in competition as a healthy vehicle toward excellence in education, health care, etc...

Polimom is OH-so ready for honest government. No more behind-the-scenes PAC's, SIG's, or lobbying. Groups are required to disclose all contributions and sources of funding.

The federal government is the proper authority for National Defense and Homeland Security.

Domestic Policies

Health Care

In the United States of America – the richest and most successful system the world has ever known - nearly 20% of its population is without health care. This is an embarrassment, and a failure of nearly criminal proportions.

The federal government, in its role as policy-definer, must mandate health insurance for all Americans. Each state will create and fund its own health care insurance funding plan. States that have smaller populations may band together to create regional plans.

To ensure choice and quality, insurance companies will offer plans as they do currently, but the premiums will be funded by the states. States may derive money from any combination of sources, including corporations, bonds, taxes, natural resource revenues, etc. The states may NOT place more than 20% of the burden on individuals (such as taxes). Furthermore, Polimom feels that a sliding scale must be implemented to allow full access by the poor.

Polimom sees health, and access to care, as a fundamental right in the United States. Polimom does NOT see the federal government as the proper administrator. Ultimately, a healthier population will lead to enormous financial benefits to the American economy.

Crime

America’s bipartisan system has created a schizophrenic approach to social problems – including crime. The swing from left to right (and back again) - from treatment models to deterrent models to punitive models - has left America’s Criminal Justice landscape littered with failed programs.

Each of these approaches has meritorious aspects, but they should not be mutually exclusive. A further traditional flaw is their total reliance on government. We’re missing a middle layer: the people.

Polimom feels the crime problem requires a 3-way approach: bottom, middle, and top.

Bottom : Proactive. Treatment oriented. Values (teenagers who drop out of school to have babies), EDUCATION, EDUCATION. Maybe some education.
Middle: Proactive. Community efforts. Somehow, society has totally lost connection to one another. Somebody else is always expected to fix a problem. There will NEVER be enough police in the US to be "in the right place at the right time", every time. And frankly, if there were that many police, we'd not be in America anymore. People have to engage with both the top and bottom levels.
Top: Reactive. Prison. We need some hard-core legislative reform, particularly on the drug laws and sentencing disparities. The failure of the “War on Drugs” make Vietnam and Iraq both look like resounding successes. We also need to understand that the damage to society is vast, and there are many who cannot be "saved" (treated) and returned to society.

If the American political system would allow for all sides to bring their best approaches together at the same time, I think we could actually make progress.

Energy

If we (the United States) do not turn immediately toward domestic (North American) energy sources, I believe we are likely to move into global war as the supplies run out. The federal government must put enormous emphasis on development and implementation of non-fossil-fuel energy.

By 2007, all cars should have engines powered by an alternative source of energy. For example: diesel fuel (which can be created from any biomass).

Beginning in 2007, each year for the next 10 years, every state must increase its domestic energy use by 10%. At least 60% of the domestic source must be renewable.

Foreign Policies

Middle East (tightly intertwined with the Domestic Energy position)

We (the United States) are embroiled in issues that require re-examination, including historical and traditional alliances, and oil.

It is the second of these - oil - that worries me the most. We are involved in a region that, for the most part, does not want our help. It is our dependence upon their natural resources that has driven our foreign policy there. This policy is short-sighted, misleading, and destructive, because those resources are not only non-renewable, there are less of them than people seem to realize.

It is highly likely that within this generation, the oil supplies will dwindle to critical levels.

We need to disengage totally from the Middle Eastern countries at the earliest opportunity.

In terms of Iraq, we are committed to their stability and rebuilding, and until they are “on their feet”, we must stay engaged. However, if the Iraqi government at any time asks us to leave, we must honor their request. It is not our country.

So – there ya go. Polimom’s Sunday morning contribution to the blogosphere. It’s unlikely to change the world, but at least it’s out there.

Metrocide - America can't afford it

2006-01-28T10:02:00.000-06:00

Whether one thinks New Orleans is at risk of dying from neglect or via a deliberate death blow, it’s hard to avoid seeing the will of the White House regarding the city. In fact, it couldn’t be much clearer, could it?

What is it that Bush needs to hear, in terms of A Plan? He heard one already, and then rejected the pivotal lynchpin to move it forward. Is this a game of Twenty Questions, and the White House will only say “yes” or “no”, until Louisiana comes up with the right phrase?

How about a hint? Maybe some “warmer” or “colder” help here?

You know what’s hurting me the most about this whole situation? Knowing what it’s doing to the people to NO PURPOSE! Frustration, despair, anger, hopelessness - all of these, and more, but this is just the beginning. The ramifications to America, financially, will be enormous, and they'll span decades - all because this president has abandoned a half-million people.

I don’t agree – and haven’t for a while – that the entire city should be rebuilt. But there is absolutely NO WAY 200,000 households should have to face a new beginning, in unfamiliar territory, not only with nothing, but deeply in debt to mortgages on properties that are gone. It will take generations for these families to get back to even pre-Katrina levels. Does this administration think that won't cost anything?

What does Bush think will happen to the banking industry when this entire "part of the world" declares bankruptcy? They’re going to have to do that, you know…. And ultimately, that will cycle back around to the government who will STILL own the problem.

How can the government not see that as a result of this short-sightedness, the U.S. economy will have to absorb the costs anyway? They should do this the right way now, while there’s still hope for the people, instead of later… after lives are destroyed permanently.

Can the country survive without a fully-rebuilt New Orleans? Yes, I think it can. The port, river, commodities shipping… all of that can be supported by the surrounding areas and Parishes that were less damaged.

And I think Bush and Co. know this. They can commit metrocide because at the end of the day, the economic engines will continue to turn, and the administration simply doesn’t care about the hundreds of thousands of American lives that are trampled along the way.

They B-stupid to mess with Texas

2006-01-28T08:12:00.000-06:00

The Houston Police Department (HPD) seems to have started making some dents in the problem evacuees. Apparently, eleven of the recent homicides have been linked to a rivalry between two New Orleans housing projects.

KHOU.com (registration required) described it this way:

Investigators say the suspects and victims lived in rival housing projects in New Orleans. They say the rivalry goes back for generations and was probably the motive for many of the murders.

Yup. These would be the criminals who held their own communities hostage for years in New Orleans, and I couldn't be more pleased that Houston is starting to stomp on them. It would be absolutely wonderful, in fact, if the evacueees who have been terrorized by these punks would step up and communicate with the HPD... because that will get the three they're still looking for off our streets that much faster. I don't know if somebody who calls himself "B-stupid" can read, but I really hope so. He - and others like him - need to fully understand this message from the HPD:

HPD homicide Capt. Dale Brown noted that many of those charged have extensive criminal records in New Orleans and that some had been jailed but were out on bail.

"We're going to hold them to the justice of Texas law," Brown said. "We think they are going to find things are a little bit different than in Louisiana. We're very aggressive in enforcing our laws in Texas. We're going to take care of our business."

And New Orleans? While the system is being overhauled there, you might want to figure out how to keep this from happening in the future:

Although all the suspects named Friday are considered to be "extremely violent," a New Orleans police official confirmed that Harris, whose name appears on some documents as "Ivory Harris," has been suspected in other slayings there. Capt. Juan Quinton with the New Orleans Police Department confirmed that Harris was arrested and charged in the May 12 slaying of Yoshio Watson, 30, during a child's birthday party. The shooting occurred during a period of escalating gun violence in the city.

A check by a criminal district clerk in New Orleans also found a second-degree murder charge on Harris was thrown out as well as a concealed weapons charge. No details could be determined.

"He's a recognized name in our law-enforcement community," said Quinton. "Somehow in a short time he was released. He's managed to elude the judicial system."

Harris was in custody in New Orleans after the Dec. 17 Houston homicide that he is a suspect in. New Orleans police arrested Harris in a criminal trespass case Jan. 4, but he was released that day on a $2,500 bond, according to jail records.

Harris cycled through the Orleans Parish jail at least six times last year after he was arrested on charges including disturbing the peace, illegal possession of a weapon and resisting an officer. Within days of each arrest, he was released on bail.

I think I understand now why NOLA has been dragging its feet to reopen those danged projects. What a cesspool. I feel SO sorry for the people who've been living in them, trying to raise families, while trying to stay alive in the face of this crime and violence... for years.

All in all, this was very good news for Houston, and ultimately for everyone. Keep it up!

John of Gamala Part 2

2006-01-27T11:40:00.000-06:00

So - lawyers for both the priest and the atheist have had their say, and a judge is now deliberating on whether the priest should stand trial for criminally misrepresenting a fictional Jesus.

Was Jesus of Nazareth actually John of Gamala? Intellectually, it's a fascinating question, but it's meaningless in the larger scheme of things.

How on earth can this matter to anyone? The only religions that should be in a tizzy are those that interpret the Bible literally (which has always confounded me). The Catholic Church has long-since admitted that the Bible was put together from a host of choices, selected for inclusion based on their own agenda. So this won't be a problem for them.

Myself, I still see the entire situation as identical to ideological reactions to the Da Vinci Code. People are getting stuck in the details, and missing the larger message. If the point was to set a moral compass for society, does it really matter who said things?

Not to me - but it sure makes for some interesting discussions! I can't help but feel sorry for the priest, though.

NOLA's image - it's more than the corruption

2006-01-27T10:39:00.000-06:00

Beyond Mardi Gras, incomparable food, awesome music, and several parts of town, what was the New Orleans known for before Katrina? Corruption and racism.

I’m not trying to pick on anybody here. It just is. Contrary to some opinions (like Holocaust deniers), history cannot be re-written – at least not overnight. The happy-go-lucky days of Edwin Edwards are long gone, but the legacy continues into today, as this article shows:

Joseph Impastato conceded he took the two cashier's checks worth $85,000. The whole thing was captured on tape by the FBI, so it would have been difficult to deny.

But it was no kickback, the councilman from St. Tammany Parish said. It was business.

When he cut a deal to receive half the money from a government contract to haul away hurricane debris, Impastato said, he was acting as a private businessman, not a public official.

Federal prosecutors are not buying it — and neither apparently is the Louisiana public. After a federal grand jury indicted Impastato on felony extortion charges last month, making him the first Louisiana politician accused of Hurricane Katrina corruption, citizens condemned him in newspapers and on talk radio and the Internet as an embarrassment to his home state.

When people around America think about New Orleans today, though, what do you suppose comes to mind? Corruption? No doubt - but that's really just icing on the cake. Five months after Katrina blew the stuffing out of the Gulf Coast, I think the view people have of New Orleans is possibly much different – and far worse than it was.

Below is an excerpt from a story in the Nashville Scene, where the author takes a deep look at the misery of the St. Bernard projects. It’s a long article (with some adult language), and at the end of it, my conclusion is that there’s NO WAY the city should be bringing things back “as they were”.

… He isn’t going anywhere. He is at home in the projects, where he knows everybody and everybody knows him. He can find his way around without a car and knows where to go to satisfy his “little vices.”

Stolen goods were dispensed in the projects as if it were a giant flea market. “You could buy any kind of weapon,” the man says. “As much as you wanted of whatever you wanted. Uzis. AK-47s. Car rims. Sound systems. Put your order in. If you didn’t like it, you could return it. Money ran through the projects all day. People thought we were a bunch of poor black folks. But we had money.”

Groups of young men calling themselves Hard Headz and Young Gunnerz terrorized the neighborhood. But they were gangs in name only, he says. “There ain’t no gangs in here. Just killers.”

People who need help badly to get their lives back together are being caught up in this entire image / perception problem, and I have absolutely no idea how the cycle can be stopped.

If you do a google search on the terms “New Orleans” crime evacuees, there are 367,000 hits! Do you suppose this is impacting anything?

Here's another little tidbit that jumped out at me recently, in an article about the highly-publicized Ninth Ward:

"You do the right thing, pay your taxes, and the government's supposed to take care of you," Lewis said. "I'm not going to let them run us away."

I suppose it's possible that I'm over-reading that quote, but it struck me as descriptive of a crippling dependence. How on earth has this come about, in America? And how can it be "fixed" in time to save New Orleans?

People need help - whether it's to rebuild, or restart elsewhere. I'm afraid they're not going to get it.

Hamas comes to power

2006-01-26T13:13:00.000-06:00

As if Arafat and Sharon’s passing weren’t enough to shake up the game pieces in the Middle East, certainly the apparent landslide victory by Hamas should do it.

The situation is fascinating, but only because I’m sitting safely in my house, far removed from local events there. I’m not nearly as optimistic as… say… Time magazine’s analysis:

The election victory has added new incentive for Hamas to maintain its current cease-fire with Israel. It has no interest in provoking the Israelis, because it is now determined to carry out its promises to the Palestinian electorate — promises which are very much based on local concerns over corruption and lawlessness. Before the election, many commentators had asked whether Hamas entering parliament with a minority share in power would create pressure for the movement to disarm. Now, the situation is turned on its head: Hamas will appoint its own people to run the Palestinian security services, and will make sure that many of its own militants are now drawn in to those forces. And they will have an interest in clamping down hard on violations of law and order by armed groups. It will likely instruct its own supporters to stop bearing arms in public, and it will expect the same from Fatah.

Time seems to feel that the violence of Hamas’ Izzedine al Qassam wing will be reined in by the grown-ups, now that they’re in power. At the moment, I’m more inclined the think the elections in Palestine may usher in even greater hostility and polarization over the subject of Israel and Palestine. This paragraph from an al Jazeera article says it well:

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, who apparently was re-elected on a moderate platform, said the Hamas victory was a dramatic turning point. She said she is concerned the fighters will now impose their fundamentalist social agenda and lead the Palestinians into international isolation.

Furthermore, it seems terribly unlikely that Hamas is going to blithely overlook Ehud Olmert’s push forward on unilaterally setting Israel's borders and speeding the construction of the W. Bank barrier.

Nope. The Palestinian people have spoken clearly, and all in all, it looks pretty volatile from here. In fact, the situation qualifies for an "oh shit", don't ya think?

Assailing the traditional. Again.

2006-01-26T08:22:00.000-06:00

This is a problem that is near and dear to my heart:

The idea of flexible work arrangements isn't new — it was a hot concept a decade or more ago as companies were eager to encourage working mothers to stay at work by instituting work-life balance programs. But the mayor hopes to make it popular once again by selling it simultaneously as a productivity enhancer and a mobility solution.

I suspect there are MANY jobs – far more than the 200,000 described by the mayor - that fall under this category. Furthermore, I can tell you that as a single parent, the single hardest problem was dealing with school schedules, illnesses, and the general overall need for flexibility.

Unfortunately, there are companies that suffer from extreme paranoia. Shortly after coming to Houston in 2000, I went to work for a well-known Houston company that was widely touted as employee-focused. They talked a good talk, but when faced with delivering the promised flexibility, positions like mine (that traditionally allow for telecommuting) remained locked into offices. I don't think I met a single person with that company that was happy. Furthermore, companies that are frozen in the traditional mold like this are often run by micro-managers – a terribly wasteful way to run a business.

While it's true that not everyone possesses the personal discipline to work without supervision, those who cannot are quickly and easily identified. Companies daring enough to try flexible work options, however, usually see major increases in productivity and job satisfaction.

Productivity jumped by 12 percent, turnover is nil, and the employees who assign the codes critical for insurance reimbursement and medical research report that they're exercising more and suffer less stress.

The concept of flexible workplaces, telecommuting, and compressed work-weeks has been faltering in the trenches for years. It’s high time this issue landed front and center again – particularly here in the Houston area, which boasts some the world’s most extensive parking lots (elsewhere referred to as highways).

I'd be happier if Mayor White would put some "teeth" into his gentle suggestions, though. Talking the idea up "CEO to CEO" is all well and good, but some carrots and sticks would probably go further in the long run.

Can you say Cover-Up?

2006-01-26T06:20:00.000-06:00

Polimom needs a bit of assistance, because while I'm typically able to see both sides of an equation, I’m lost this time.

White House accused of gag order
Katrina questions hit brick wall, officials say

Can someone who supports the current Bush administration help me get this? I tried hard this morning to find a view from the right that might shed light into this dank, smelly cesspool, but no luck. How is it that Louisiana officials have been giving out internal information for the hurricane response investigations, but the federal administration’s actions and motives are being shrouded in secrecy?

The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering questions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation said Tuesday.

In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In addition, agency officials won't answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said.

I looked high and low, and even conservative voices were unable to make this sound any better.

"There is a deliberate process, and the White House has always said it wants to cooperate with the committee but preserve any president's ability to get advice from advisers on a confidential basis," Duffy said. "And that's a critical need for any U.S. president and that is continuing to influence how we cooperate with the committees."

What I'm seeing is, “We don’t want to tell you what advice was given to the president, because you’re really not gonna like what was said.”

It's no secret that I’m supremely unhappy with the current federal administration – so maybe I’m missing something a supporter can see? Because this just smells sky-high of cover-up.

Criminal Background Checks

2006-01-25T08:30:00.000-06:00

I've been curious about the crime on my side of Houston (the far west), and whether we've been having problems I'm not hearing about - so earlier this week, I went out and about to talk to several apartment complex managers. Found an interesting little tidbit:

Every manager I spoke with said they screen all potential residents over the age of 18 for criminal records. If someone has a felony conviction – ever – they deny the application. Sounds pretty straightforward on the surface.

Turns out that in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, as hundreds of thousands of people were trying to find housing accommodations, the Criminal Background Check(CBC) website overloaded and stopped responding to Louisiana requests. For most of September, there was no way to know who was a felon and who was not. It wasn't until about six weeks after the queries were made that fax results starting coming in.

Furthermore - while the CBC for other states runs a statewide check, Louisiana requires that a Parish be specified... and charges for each Parish query. Obviously, that would limit how carefully apartments screened.

Managers were faced with limited choices: deny everyone because they couldn’t check, or let everyone in (for the same reason).

So…. Thinking about those crime-ridden complexes that dot Houston’s cityscape. Which choice do you think they went with?

I’ve read many forum dialogues and posts online, where people are wondering how felons slipped through the “cracks”. Now ya know.

Plan C?

2006-01-25T05:54:00.000-06:00

Well now. This is starting to look pretty bad, overall:

In a severe blow to state and local plans for rebuilding hurricane-devastated areas, the Bush administration Tuesday came out against a homeowner bailout proposal that many in Louisiana saw as the key to economic recovery and the rebirth of a redesigned New Orleans.

Is that it? Bye-bye Baker Bill?

Louisiana, it sounds to me as if there’s a message being broadcast: That’s it for money from the federal government.

Last Friday, there was this:

Echoing a common sentiment in Congress, Davis said that for the time being he was satisfied with the $2.9 billion Congress has allocated to build the levees to Category 3 strength by the start of hurricane season June 1.

Now, about the Baker Bill, there’s this:

Donald Powell, President Bush’s choice to oversee the Gulf Coast recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said that grant money already appropriated by Congress — as much as $6.2 billion for Louisiana — would be “sufficient” to take care of homeowners who suffered the most in the storm.

Just at the moment, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission has two choices: abandon the dream to haphazard rebuilding and hope for the best, or fire up the eminent domain engines… unless there’s another possibility?

Joe Canizaro, who chaired the BNOB’s land-use committee, has said there are ways besides the Baker bill to accomplish buyouts.

Let’s hope Joe was serious about a Plan “C”.

Shoulda coulda

2006-01-24T06:41:00.000-06:00

This just TICKS ME OFF!

Everybody knew that if New Orleans took a direct hit from a major hurricane, there was enormous risk to the levees – and thus the city.

So who's everybody?

The people in New Orleans knew. In the back of everyone’s mind was always that little niggling voice. Time, and many "near-misses" allowed for jokes and complacency, hurricane parties and a totally false sense of security. But those that coulda got out, shoulda.

But by everybody, I mean EVERYBODY KNEW!

In 2004, Homeland Security and the federal Emergency Management Agency ran an exercise called "Hurricane Pam" that provided a dire prediction about a Category 3 hurricane hitting New Orleans. It found, among other things, that flood waters would surge over levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation

They KNEW the citizens in New Orleans were sitting ducks.

How can government at ANY level have watched storm after storm come in – year after year – and just hoped for a miss? What did those conversations look like, I wonder?

"Gosh, here comes another major storm into the Gulf. Sure hope it doesn't hit New Orleans."

"Yup, that'd be really bad, hunh, cuz those levees won't hold, and we won't be able to get people outta there."

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said he was not familiar with the documents but that the levees situation was one likely reason the government urged an evacuation of New Orleans before the storm hit.

"I think Katrina's gonna kick 'em right in the teeth down there this time. Darn. Tomorrow's lookin' bad for New Orleans."

"It's okay. We told 'em this mornin'. "

Too late now. Shoulda. Coulda.

Owning the crime problem

2006-01-23T11:25:00.000-06:00

Polimom is a firm believer in personal responsibility and accountability. It’s probably what makes the political positions on this blog occasionally difficult to pinpoint... because it’s hard to take a purely liberal, social-consciousness approach when one holds firmly to this core value.

One can only ask so much from a government, whether federal or local, and crime control is a case in point. Social reform (also desperately needed in NOLA) is only part of the equation.

In the comments, I was recently asked, “what do we do to curb the crime?” I want to bring my response (and ideally the entire dialogue) up out of the comments section, because I think it’s too important to bury:

New Orleans has an unprecedented opportunity to "own" its neighborhoods, because the people who are there know each other, block by block.

As a community-based effort, simple refusal to just turn the blind eye, or taking conversations beyond the front porch about specific drug trafficking (etc.) while the police have the ability - the space - to be proactive, might slow resurgence. Now. While crime is low.

I like the Guardian Angels, not as a specific group, but as a concept. It isn't about vigilante-ism, but vastly heightened awareness combined with a desire to shut it down at the micro-level.

Beyond those approaches, though, the solutions are elusive. Throwing money at an entrenched crime problem doesn't make it go away. Once the cycle has started for an individual, or a neighborhood (or a city), it is like a cancer.

There is an elephant in the New Orleans rebuilding room, and everybody is just dancing around it. I can’t count anymore the number of posts I’ve written on this topic, and they just languish. It’s possible that I just wrote them badly (I definitely write my fair share of lame posts…), but I’m concerned that people are in the “ignore it; maybe it’ll go away” mode, and if they are, the entire situation is likely to come back and bite them in the behind.

Is the situation being ignored because of confusion of what role race plays in the issue of crime? That's my guess, actually. I think that very confusion was behind a lot of the recent NIMBY-ism and the long-standing racial suspicion and hostility in New Orleans. If that is why the topic is being avoided, then people need to get it out in the open, so they can get educated on the subject... because it's not a function of race at all. With the exception of the predators and socio- or psychopaths (who tend to be white), crime is a social and cultural issue.

Many – maybe most – of the hard-core criminals are elsewhere just now (Houston seems to have been a popular destination). So how do Law Enforcement and city officials plan to keep the gangs and atrocious crime levels from returning? So far, all I've seen are naïve statements like, “we’re not going to let the criminals come back”. I’ve seen nothing resembling a plan for how that would be accomplished.

Admittedly, New Orleans is not going to get all their criminals back, if only through attrition. Some are dying here in Houston, and others are off to the Texas Criminal Justice system. But those left standing at the end of the day are very likely to head back to New Orleans when the situation becomes too “hot” in the host cities. Is NOLA ready for them?

I was asked, “what does a community-effort look like?” It’s a big step beyond “Neighborhood Watch”, which all too frequently leads to people watching their neighborhoods go to hell. Here’s a true story, from my recent past:

In my ordinary, middle-class neighborhood, we had a teenage boy who was clearly on the wrong path. Things like suspensions from school, fights, late nights outside with his buds, increasing numbers of cars cruising the block (both fast and slow)… there was a lot of build-up. So when the situation escalated, we weren’t surprised. We were, however, afraid – particularly since the defining moment was a gang fight in the street, with bats and weapons.

The police were called, but by the time they got there (and it wasn’t all that long), the young punks – all about 18 years old – were long gone. Unsurprisingly, our neighbor kid who was at the heart of the mess wouldn’t give any names. He was all about “getting them back”, and “you don’t narc on people”.

So, the cops were limited in what they could do. Yes, they could react to the next problem, and the next. They could step up patrols… but they can’t be there every minute of every day. We, however – the residents of the block – had things we could do. And did.

We started “hanging out” a lot on our front porches. If there was a car coming down the street full of punks, we became very visible. We made a big show of watching those kids every time they were on our block. We wrote down license plates; we engaged kids on foot in conversations (“Good morning. Where ya goin’?”). We had a phone tree for each house on the block, so we could call one another and put all this into play when the need arose.

And guess what? The problem went away. Totally gone. Poof.

To me, that’s what community intervention looks like. Furthermore, the police knew we were doing this, and we all had 911 running constantly in the backs of our minds… cuz there was NO way any of us wanted to confront a gun. We never did have to actually call 911, but we were all prepared to do so.

Given New Orleans’ currently reduced population, this is one way to keep the criminals from coming back: make it an unpleasant place to be. It requires working with the police and the neighbors – but it also requires a fervent desire to not go back to the same old patterns. Citizens have the power to do this, but they have to want it.

If you wait until the neighborhoods are riddled with gunfire again, it's too late. New Orleans needs to step in front of this now, as a community. While they still can.

Catch-22

2006-01-23T08:21:00.000-06:00

Da Po’ Boy said something in his blog yesterday that struck me as important:

People in Southeastern Louisiana have to be smart. If the government says, “We will no longer protect you,” then we can’t rebuild in the same places. However, the government *can* protect us. They just won’t.

I think he’s right; the protection can happen. The jury is still out, though, on whether the government will or won’t deliver it.

Much of the paralysis surrounding the rebuilding decisions for New Orleans is rooted right here. If people aren’t protected, then they can’t rebuild in the same places. Sounds simple, yes?

Here’s what keeps giving me indigestion:

Even if the government commits today to a levee system that encompasses all factors, including wetland restoration, it will take years to reach fruition.

Will it take five years? Ten? I don’t know, but in those intervening years, the storms will still come. If people rebuild before the city is safe, who will then be responsible if New Orleans takes a direct hit next hurricane season, or the season after that?

It’s a Catch-22. For everybody.

The Katrina evacuation: more questions

2006-01-21T07:26:00.000-06:00

This article, KATRINA: DOT Audit Probes Katrina Evacuation Fiasco landed in my inbox last night, and its implications are disturbing:

The U.S. Department of Transportation may hold the key to one of the biggest unanswered questions from Hurricane Katrina:

Why did it take nearly a week for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to mobilize private buses to evacuate thousands of city residents desperately seeking rescue from the horrific conditions in the Superdome, the Convention Center and the open tarmac of Interstate 10?

Ray Nagin has taken a lot of heat for how he handled the New Orleans evacuation in the face of Katrina, but did you know FEMA has a contract with the FAA (which in turn contracts with a logistics company) to handle emergency evacuations? I didn’t. I bet it won’t surprise anyone to learn that apparently FEMA didn’t know about it, either:

By all accounts, the FAA and Landstar failed miserably to help the citizens of New Orleans escape from their drowned city. And when the crisis hit, FEMA, whose bungling during Katrina has become legendary, was unaware that it had even contracted the operation to FAA, or that FAA had subcontracted the work to Landstar

Beyond the FEMA implications, however, I’m somewhat confused by this comparison to how the Rita evacuations were handled in Texas:

FEMA's record during Katrina contrasts sharply with how Texas handled Hurricane Rita, which hit the Gulf region shortly after Katrina.

About a day before Rita's landfall, Pantuso said, he received a call from the Texas Office of Procurement asking how they could direct buses during and after the storm. The bus association, using the spreadsheets it put together during Katrina, did a "blast e-mail" to companies in about 14 states and "within an hour and a half had heard from 30 to 40 companies." As a result, that evacuation went smoothly.

If a Texas state agency initiated the evacuation call to the American Busing Authority (apparently circumventing FEMA and the FAA altogether), who actually dropped the ball in Louisiana? This article implies that the responsibility resided with FEMA. Is that true? And why would the protocol for Rita have been different?

As ever, I suspect we’re not getting the whole story…

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it

2006-01-20T06:42:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, it’s hard to know what the actual context was for quotes rendered by the press. But even with the normal, skeptical filters in place, Rep. Tom Davis' statements in this article set off alarms for me:

Echoing a common sentiment in Congress, Davis said that for the time being he was satisfied with the $2.9 billion Congress has allocated to build the levees to Category 3 strength by the start of hurricane season June 1.

Unless Rep. Davis has been living under a rock, he knows that by June 1, a bunch of band-aids will have been applied to the breached and broken levee sections. The best outcome by the start of the next hurricane season is levees as strong as they were for the 2005 season... and those were not Cat 3.

But he’s satisfied. That’s scary.

Asked if he supported protection capable of withstanding the strongest hurricane on record, a Category 5, Davis said he wanted to see how much it would cost. The White House, too, has been reluctant to commit to Category 5 hurricane protection, which Louisiana leaders say they need to draw evacuees back to the state and restart the economy.

And they offered no advice to city officials on whether to try to shrink the footprint of the city to sustain key services for a smaller New Orleans population. Market forces and the will of displaced people to return will drive that issue, Davis said.

We'd like to see the whole city come back," he said.

Who is the "we" he's referring to there? We, as in his committee? Congress? The American people?

I don't believe Davis has the slightest interest in seeing the "whole city come back", unless he means, "If they want to, residents can come back, rebuild homes and lives, and then watch them go under water again because the levee system cost too much".

If the cost of those levees is more important than the lives and safety of American citizens, something is wrong wrong wrong.

There’s an old saying: “If you have to ask what it costs, you can’t afford it.” The United States of America – widely touted as the richest country in the world, has to ask?

The names of the missing

2006-01-19T07:42:00.000-06:00

Every time I think about the devastation in New Orleans, and how they continue to find bodies all these months later, my stomach turns over – because there are still over 3000 people missing.

Where are they?

Are some still in the rubble waiting to be discovered by relatives? Were they washed into Lake Ponchartrain, as some reports are speculating?

I don’t even want to go there in my mind. It’s too terrible a thought. I’m hoping that the vast majority of these folks are at work today, or at school, or just going through the normal activities of life somewhere.

If they are, then somebody probably knows about it. Everybody needs to look at this list of names, and see if they can help answer some really scary questions.

The alternatives are unthinkable.

UPDATE - 8:22 am: One of the missing accounted for already!

"Unity" and the One Drop Rule

2006-01-18T16:08:00.000-06:00

Between one thing and another, it looks like New Orleans' image problem is picking up steam, folks... and that's a major issue about now, when the city is dependent on outside money for any hope of recovery from Katrina.

While Nagin's faux pas with "God" and the "Chocolate City" isn't the only major problem brewing in the background, it is certainly going to kick the city right in the teeth. Because it absolutely was racist.

I'm just not sure the racist is Nagin.

What happened to Nagin on Monday was more than his mouth disconnecting from his brain. He finally succumbed to the pressure he's been under from his "black" constituents -- the folks who haven't trusted him or didn't vote for him because he wasn't "black" enough.

For months, every single thing he's done has been analyzed in terms of black and white. We've heard, in excrutiating detail, about the racial composition of every meeting, panel, and commission he's been involved with. He even had the daring audacity to meet with some "white" business-people in Dallas right after the storm. Horrors!

Nagin's been walking a fine line that mixed-ancestry people have tried to walk for generations... because they're not "black" enough, and they're also not "white" enough.

This, folks, is the One Drop Rule in action.

TMI moment: I'm a genealogist. More specifically, I'm a specialist in mixed ancestry... for the obvious reason that my ancestry is mixed. I have two paternal lines that descend from 18th century slaves in New England. Culturally speaking, my family has been "white" since about 1885.

When I visited New Orleans recently, I had a disturbing conversation with someone about race and ancestry. I was told that in New Orleans, I would be considered "black"... because of the one-drop rule.

It is a seriously bizarre thought for me - not because I have a problem with my ancestry, but because I don't have a point-of-reference, culturally. How many people would actually think that? I have no clue, but I'm 100% sure that some would - because I've heard it before. "Wow. I'd have never guessed you're black" (which has only been said to me by "white" people). Furthermore, the "black" community wouldn't see me as "black", either.

What Nagin fell prey to was the very divisive fallacy that you can group an entire "people" by "race".

No. This whole "black community" thing is hogwash. "Black" people are as diverse as the stars in interests, colors, educational levels, economic status - the whole kit and kaboodle. Just like "white" people are.

The very call to "black unity" is a lie. And Nagin fell for it.

To learn about the One Drop Rule, and what it's doing to society today, I strongly recommend this site: Backintyme: History of the U.S. Color Line.

Houston's crime - and the evacuees

2006-01-18T12:05:00.000-06:00

New Orleans, you need to pay attention to what’s going on over in the Houston area. The ramifications of a “glad they’re there and not here”, laissez-faire approach to the future (in terms of crime) are going to hurt everybody.

Police chief ties Katrina evacuees to more killings

Katrina evacuees were the victims or suspects in 23 homicides between September and December, Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt said this morning, doubling the department's earlier numbers on how many killings have been linked to people from Louisiana.

The 23 homicides account for nearly 20 percent of all homicides in the city during that period of time, according to Houston Police Department numbers. Citywide, the homicide rate rose 23 percent last year, with the largest increases in homicides coming at the end of the year.

Obviously, the Katrina criminals aren't functioning in a vacuum; they've run smack into Houston's own merry men (and women) of the underworld. Unfortunately, all the rational discussion in the world about what percentage of evacuees are actually involved in this mayhem will do little to blunt public perceptions of evacuees as a whole.

Very, very bad situation.

Update: January's numbers to date indicate a 50% increase in homicides.

Timing is everything

2006-01-18T06:33:00.000-06:00

The Guardian Angels arrived in Houston yesterday, and the city delivered – in spades:

Minutes before the Guardian Angels arrived at Sharpstown Mall today, a brawl erupted near the entrance of the shopping center and a teenager pulled out a gun, firing three shots before fleeing the scene.

Lovely.

Sharpstown used to be an okay side of Houston. I lived there for a couple years in the early 1970s, and “hung out” at this very mall, but I sure wouldn’t do my shopping there these days. It’s going to hell over there.

Houston Police Chief Hurtt is not impressed that the Guardian Angels are coming to town, but I fail to see how this is a bad idea. It is WAY past time for people to take their neighborhoods back. Punks with guns should not own our streets, neighborhoods, or lives.

The Guardian Angels might not be a bad thing for New Orleans to think about, too. This is precisely the type of problem the Crescent City doesn’t want to have back, and right now – before incidents like Sunday’s second-line shootings start repeating themselves, is when New Orleanians need to claim their streets for the future. All the levees in the world won’t stop bullets.

It’s all in the timing...

Nagin needs a handler and NOLA needs a mayor

2006-01-17T07:48:00.000-06:00

C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, needs a handler – somebody to stand right behind him with a hand ready to clap over the man’s mouth when he goes off into the weeds of rhetoric. Since there was no alert person ready to hit the “off” switch on Nagin's microphone yesterday, his primary message got completely overrun by divisive, racist remarks.

It isn’t as if there was no warning that something really stupid was about to be said, either. He warned everybody, right out of the gate, that he might be suffering from "Katrina post-stress disorder”... and then he proceeded to prove it. (Here’s the video, located courtesy of Schroeder’s PGR blog.)

Yesterday after his speech, I was too horrified and shocked to write. I couldn’t believe he had made statements like:

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

God wants this? The God I grew up with doesn’t handle urban planning. And who is “us”, Ray? Did you mean to alienate the folks Uptown, and “them”?

This, right here, is the kind of crap that keeps American racism alive. Racists of ALL colors got fed by this speech.

It wasn’t just that he was uncontrolled enough to say these things; it was the occasion he chose for the remarks: Martin Luther King Day. The day America has set aside to honor a visionary who hoped for a unified society.

What Nagin did yesterday, intentionally or not, was water the seeds of paranoia and suspicion. At any moment, I expected to hear about the levees being blown.

Sadly, if one could pull the front and back ends off of his speech, there was a worthwhile message hidden in there - one that most people could agree on and support. For the briefest of moments, he sounded like somebody who was concerned about the social issues besetting poor urban communities – problems that pre-Katrina New Orleans had in abundance, and that nobody wants to see come back.

But he got lost – again – in the weeds. Some people should never, ever, be allowed to speak in public… and when that person is the mayor of a troubled and challenged city already suffering from racial suspicion and hostility, it’s time for a change.

And while waiting for those elections, could somebody please get that Mayor some treatment for his KPSD? Maybe some valium...?

Moving Left? Moving Right?

2006-01-16T14:26:00.000-06:00

I’ve had some interesting dialogue lately about reactions to Katrina, and whether how the situation has unfolded may (or may not) have shifted political “leanings”. I’ve talked to several folks, actually – and most of them report a political change that they attribute directly to events in New Orleans.

I found this so fascinating that I have shared (parts of) a couple of discussions below, and created a poll for people to register their own views on this (it’s in the left nav column). Feel free to share any of your thoughts in the comments.

One person moves right

The “goings on” in New Orleans (both immediately after through today) brought the liberal media bias to front and center for me. Even though I’d shifted toward the middle years ago (from pretty far left), I had a tendency to judge conservative writings far more harshly than liberal. I filtered, but only for radical bias to the right or left.

There’s more to this, though, then the media bias. The tragedy of New Orleans is, to me, more a function of political failures over time – not racism. Yet the left continues to press a racial agenda. As much as anything else, that slant has left a very bad taste in my mouth. The result is a big question mark for everything, and an overall political shift slightly right of where I was on August 28.

One person moves left

Prior to Katrina, I was a pretty strong supporter of Bush, and definably conservative. The lack of attention, funding, and support for SE Louisiana and New Orleans, however, has been very disillusioning.

I find that my views are tending more toward the liberal side recently than they did. I think I’m pretty much in the middle now.

So – where are you these days?

Moving beyond "evacuee"

2006-01-16T04:51:00.000-06:00

There’s an interesting “Letter to the Editor” in the Houston Chronicle, in which a reader wonders,

Why do we use the phrase "Katrina evacuee"? The people from New Orleans who moved here because of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina are remaining here, have gotten jobs here and are adjusting to their new lives as Houstonians.

Leaving aside the usual definitions of “moved here”, this person’s letter brings the New Orleans question front and center. Who is going home? Or rather... who wants to go home?

People who are living in transition – in limbo – are not settled, and if they’re waiting to go home, they haven’t adjusted, either. This is the other side of the BNOB equation. The impact of that controversial proposal goes wayyyyyy beyond New Orleans. The author of the Chronicle letter said,

I think these people deserve to start rebuilding their lives.

Calling them evacuees continues to verbally set them apart as different from us. Let's let that go so they can start to feel they are building a new, stable life here and that they belong.

They do deserve to start rebuilding their lives, and I can tell you from personal experience that starting from scratch takes time. A lot of it. But it starts by mentally letting go of the past – by turning one’s mind forward to the future. One can't do that by living in limbo.

The real question is not “who is staying in Houston?” (or Dallas… or Atlanta…), but “who wants to go back to New Orleans?” - and that's exactly why the Urban Planning proposal from the BNOB commission suggested a four-month planning phase for the badly flooded New Orleans neighborhoods.

Somebody should ask the people who came here. All of them. Because the letter-writer is right – everybody deserves to move beyond “evacuee”.

Without those levees...

2006-01-14T10:41:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking about Tim's call to bloggers, asking for everyone to speak up about the need for much stronger levees for New Orleans. And while we've all been talking about the levee problems for months, he's right - because EVERYTHING depends on strengthened levees for a safer city.

I spent two hours this morning, looking at properties for sale in NOLA – partly from curiosity (what are prices looking like these days?), and partly because I had some hare-brained idea about investing, and seeing if I could find an evacuee family who’d like to fix up something while they lived in it for a low price.

It turns out I’m not enough of a risk-taker to pull that off. It isn’t that there are no damaged properties to buy. In fact, that’s the majority of what’s on the market.

No – the problem is that without major levee protection, I don’t feel like I can safely invest in the city... and I’m already about priced out of the market for areas that fit the former, historical city footprint. As much as I love New Orleans, I can’t help with this.

How sad is that?

Without a commitment from the federal government to bring the levees up to Cat 5 protection, the future looks really dim to me – at least in terms of affordable housing. I don’t see the “Disneyfied” version of New Orleans coming that so many are worried about. Instead, I see the possibility of a well-to-do city that will, in the end, lose most of its tourism and diversity - and pretty much everything that requires lower wage workers to function.

Maybe the federal government sees this coming, but is just okay with it? It would explain Bush's silence around the Baker Bill:

In particular, he has kept silent about the legislation proposed by Rep. Richard H. Baker (R-La.) that would create an agency mandated to buy the remains of flooded homes, allowing their owners to pay back mortgages and relocate to drier parts of the city.

Of course the White House isn't going to support the Baker Bill if they know it will mean buying out 300,000 people... and that's what they'd have to do, cuz there just isn't that much room - affordable or not - on that rarified higher ground.

IF the government were to fund the levee upgrades and wetlands restoration, the city would still be much different; the damage was just too great. But it might at least have some hope of keeping its historical uniqueness.

It has no chance, though, without those levees.

Reading between the lines

2006-01-13T07:08:00.000-06:00

Behind George Bush’s hyper-happy photo-op in NOLA yesterday, there's a disturbing message. I think he may have been laying the foundation for some upcoming bad news: they aren’t going to bring the levees up to the level the city needs, nor is there going to be White House support for the Baker Bill.

Instead, I’m guessing any new money coming out of this administration in the coming year or so will fund the next round of pre-emptive activity in the Middle East. (Iran's looking good lately...)

Apparently acting before an event only applies to war, and this President simply does not care to be remembered for his domestic policies.

If Bush is pulling out his “Happy Happy Joy Joy” paint palette as a precursor to “They’re doin' fine down there in New Orleans. Just fine!”, then I think Eugene Robinson’s Requiem for the Crescent City is appropriate. I don’t think, though, that the blame can be laid at the feet of the BNOB proposal.

It doesn't have to go this way. I hope I'm wrong.

That massive BNOB file

2006-01-12T18:51:00.000-06:00

For those of you who wanted to download yesterday's entire Bring New Orleans Back presentation, but were blind-sided by the astounding size of the file (34mb), Chris Martel at Metroblogging New Orleans has compressed the beast (to ~6mb) and made it available to the world.

(Technology's a good thing, but only if you can use it.)

Where was Bush today?

2006-01-12T18:19:00.000-06:00

Anybody know where George Bush was today? Rumor has it he was in New Orleans, but I don't see how that's possible, when he said,

"It's a great place to find some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun."

Would this be the same place I was a week ago? Wow! Musta been a heck of a lot of progress since then - assuming he and I were looking at the same New Orleans.

I'm all over the concept of positive thinking - but this sounds like maybe they stopped off for a Hurricane (or three) someplace.

ENOUGH already!

2006-01-12T10:42:00.000-06:00

[Begin rant. Language warning.]

After twelve hours of reading, talking, and listening to the BNOB’s first presentation (and reactions), I’m coming to some unhappy (and probably unpopular) conclusions. People aren’t thinking or listening; they’re emoting – and it’s really hard to have a rational discussion.

To make matters worse, the “leaders” are grandstanding. Not only did the City Council condemn the whole thing before the official presentation yesterday,this was the WWL radio scrolling headline this morning:

“A key mayorial commission plans to announce today that every part of New Orleans, even those that look like war-torn blocks and sit below sea-level, should have a chance at being rebuilt.”

Well no shit. You'd think there was something original in there someplace, wouldn't you?

Let’s have a Zen moment here.

[pause]

Where does it say that all areas don’t have a chance? By calling for total collaboration, yesterday's BNOB proposal seems to say exactly the opposite. Furthermore, the building moratorium "thing" isn't carved in stone.

Joe Canizaro, the banker and developer who chairs the land use panel, said after the meeting that he does not believe the plan requires a halt to permitting for it to succeed.

YES, okay! Let people who desire to rebuild do so if they choose. As long as they understand the risks, it’s their right, is it not? Would you wait for the new floodplain maps before rebuilding? I believe I would, but it's not up to me unless it's my house sitting there in a badly-damaged area. Those are not my shoes, ya know?

But dang it! WTF is this?

"If this plan goes forward as it is, many people's worst fears about our African American heritage and population will come true," said Sue Sperry of the New Orleans Preservation Resource Center. "It's almost like it will be extinguished from this earth."

Hunh??? If this type of knee-jerk hysteria continues, NOLA's leaders and residents are going to put the final icing on their own cake - because sooner, not later, the decisions are going to be taken totally away.

Why? Because Louisiana and New Orleans DON'T HAVE THE MONEY TO FIX THIS BY THEMSELVES!

The city is going to be rebuilt. I really don't think there's much question about that (in spite of some true wierdness here and there about "moving the city", or "abandoning NOLA". What idiots). But if New Orleanians want to have a voice, they're gonna have to work with the larger picture, not against it.

In a sense this plan is a punt, because the commission has effectively said, "We can't figure this out by ourselves." Get organized and step up to the plate, people – or all the decision-making power will move elsewhere… and I don’t believe for a minute that New Orleans should be planned by Washington. Do you?

Time's running out. Enough. [End rant]

Infill Development

2006-01-11T16:53:00.000-06:00

Part of the Urban Planning Committee's recommendations for rebuilding New Orleans today (see earlier post) included sections for "infill development" projects:

The report also recommends that a number of large tracts be demolished and repackaged as "infill development areas" for commercial or industrial projects with housing for workers nearby. The dozen sites identified in the report include a number of public-housing developments, including one in Central City in the vicinity of the C.J. Peete and Guste complexes; a huge parcel in the area of the Florida and Desire complexes; and another around the St. Bernard complex.

Other areas are identified as "infill" sites as well, including the portion of the Lower 9th Ward on the lake side of North Claiborne Avenue. While no mention is made in the report of any specific plans, commissioners say they have been approached by private developers -- whom they have declined to identify -- interested in pitching large-scale projects.

I drew a total blank on this terminology, so I went hunting. Here (in part) is what PolicyLink.org says about them:

Local governments use infill incentives to promote the development of vacant land—or rehabilitation of existing structures—in already urbanized areas where infrastructure and services are in place. Prime locations for infill development include downtowns, transit corridors and locations near employment, shopping, and recreational and cultural amenities.

Local governments offer infill incentives for a number of reasons.

Infill development reuses properties that may have been underutilized or blighted, helping to catalyze revitalization.

Infill has the potential to boost jobs, purchasing power, and public amenities in urban core neighborhoods and generate tax dollars for local government.

Infill housing is dense in comparison with housing in suburban areas and represents an effective way to meet a jurisdiction’s affordable housing or population growth needs.

Located in proximity to existing transit routes or within walking distance of services and entertainment, infill development can reduce auto use and accompanying congestion and pollution.

The mental image I get here - dense housing in combination with "commercial and industrial" - is pretty grim, but maybe I'm not understanding this well...?

X vs Y - carpool insights

2006-01-11T16:18:00.000-06:00

Here’s the kind of weird stuff that can happen to parents driving carpools:

Yesterday, coming out of the city with five kids in the car (4 female, 1 male), the boy pops off with,

“Males are superior to females.”

The mom (me) puts antenna up immediately, and thus is paying close attention when one of the girls responds,

“Well, I know that God made woman from man, so I guess that makes sense… except that God probably used dirt and sticks and stuff on the man in the first place.”

I about drove off the road.

Still gotta have a conversation with my daughter about why I am not allowed to tell kids my opinions on this type of stuff when it totally disagrees with their parents. (That whole biblical approach to gender superiority kinda bugs me, ya know?) She was pretty outraged.

Given a free reign, though, I’d have stomped on both of the little turkeys. [smile]

Four months

2006-01-11T07:08:00.000-06:00

While we're all waiting with bated breath for today's Bring New Orleans Back commission's recommendations, the T-P has an early look at what's coming in that report. I think everybody's in for a wild ride.

I get it. Logically, I can follow this. (Emotionally, it's a lot harder to go down this path.)

When [the ULI proposal] drew public fire, panelists instead floated the idea of a three-year period during which neighborhoods on the bubble would have a chance to prove themselves. That timeframe was quickly whittled down to a year, before the panel settled on the proposed four-month window. […]

The suggestion to temporarily ban building permits in heavily flooded areas also was a last-minute addition, commissioners said. The rationale, they said, was that it would be unfair to allow homeowners in those areas to pour sweat and money into their homes, only to condemn them months later.

There’s a fair amount of good to be found in this idea, if they’re going to put a moratorium on building permits (although that doesn’t help people who’ve already started). It steps the pace up considerably, and if the proposal were to go forward like this, it will force some decisions on all sides of the issue.

People can’t sit forever in limbo. It’s compounding problems across the board, all over the country. But wow. Four months?

And how does a neighborhood “prove” itself, anyway? I'm looking forward to seeing how they plan to measure that.

Update: .pdf map and Q&A about plan

Some Subtle Spin

2006-01-10T10:59:00.000-06:00

I’ve read Eugene Robinson for a long time – and generally liked him – but this is not helpful:

The wealthy strip of high ground alongside the Mississippi River that didn't flood -- the French Quarter, the central business district, the Garden District, Uptown -- resembles the footprint of the city circa 1850. They call this strip the Island, and while life there hasn't quite returned to normal, it's close enough for people to spend time devising new post-disaster routes for the upcoming Mardi Gras parades.

Life’s pretty much normal on “the Island”? That may depend upon one’s definition of normal, which is often interpreted to include jobs, returned businesses, restaurants, day cares, etc. And while he’s right about the miles and miles of devastated wasteland, what's this about?

But the homeowners of Holy Cross didn't have flood insurance. They weren't eligible for it because the area wasn't considered a flood plain.

They weren't eligible? Mr. Robinson makes this sound as if they flat out couldn’t have it. Not allowed. Nope.

Is that true?

I just spent the last two hours online, trying to find something - anything - clear on this. Why, one might wonder, would it take so long? Because what was given out by insurers and New Orleans was misleading.

Yes, there are zones in New Orleans that were “not required” to have flood insurance. What I didn’t see much of – anywhere – were the words “optional” or “recommended” - and that is a real problem.

From FEMA’s National Flood Insurance site:

There's a big difference between having to buy flood insurance because the law says you must and choosing to buy flood coverage because it's in your best interests to do so. We recommend that all property owners purchase and keep flood insurance because it is the best means of recovery from flood damaged.

The floodplain maps contributed enormously to NOLA residents’ low flood insurance coverage, but that would be due to a false sense of security – not because they weren't allowed to have it.

Am I missing something? (It’s happened before…)

To me, this type of “spin” (and yes, I see it as spin) is divisive and misleading. I’m having trouble understanding his motives here.

Talent just ain't enough

2006-01-10T09:16:00.000-06:00

I haven’t followed college football since my LSU days – and I never paid attention to Virginia Tech. (The Hokies?? What’s a Hokie?) Recently, though, I’ve been watching the idiotic antics of one of their players – Marcus Vick – who just declared his intentions to move to the NFL.

Marcus Vick Arrested On Firearm Charges

Vick had faced a two-game suspension at the beginning of the 2006 season as punishment for stomping the leg of Louisville defensive end Elvis Dumervil during the Hokies' 35-24 victory over the Cardinals in the Gator Bowl on Jan. 2 in Jacksonville, Fla.

But Virginia Tech officials dismissed Vick from the team after learning he had been cited Dec. 17 in Hampton, Va., for driving with a suspended or revoked driver's license and speeding -- the eighth and ninth traffic offenses since he enrolled at Virginia Tech in 2002.

Hard to tell whether this is an impulse-control problem, or an anger management issue. Either way, it looks (to me) like he’s yet another very talented person whose emotional wiring is all messed up. Reminds me a whole lot of Mike Tyson.

HPD and NOPD - some good news for a change

2006-01-10T08:26:00.000-06:00

So - we're all worried about the crime, in both New Orleans and Houston. It's some scary stuff, and to control it (i.e. get the a--holes off the streets and successfully convicted), some changes have to be made in both cities.

The situation in Houston is bad, yes - but it's not nearly as bad as New Orleans will be without some major modifications to the PD before everybody comes home. NOLA has to be made safe, and Chief Riley's early descriptions of changes he wanted to make were not at all encouraging. They were matched by an equally surface-gloss approach recently by Houston's Chief Hurtt, too. Very discouraging.

Happily, this morning brings some brighter news for both beleaguered police departments.

For New Orleans, they're bringing in experts from around the country to design a more regionalized (and standardized) approach. It's still evolving, but like the school situation, they needed to come totally out of the box to solve this. It's a good early sign:

Task force: Rebuild, centralize law enforcement in four parishes

And from the Houston side there's more good news:

HPD offers big bonus to recruit officers

The bonus is a $7,000 incentive for experienced officers to come work in Houston. I hope the entire ~1,000-person shortage gets filled - cuz we need them. That massive shortage in police presence is exactly why Houston got caught "with its pants down" (so to speak) when Katrina smashed NOLA. Houston just didn't have enough law enforcement to cope with the influx of people (and yes, that included a fair number of criminals).

Kinda nice to have some good news for a change, eh?

"Deluged"

2006-01-09T12:02:00.000-06:00

From the New Yorker:

Deluged

When Katrina hit, where were the police?

I'm not completely speechless... but it's close.

If you have friends or family in the NOPD (like me), this is a very hard read. For many reasons.

NOLA Skills and Aptitude Assessment

2006-01-09T04:52:00.000-06:00

Did you ever take one of those “Skills Aptitude” tests? You know – the ones counselors give in high school to help kids figure out what types of careers they might enjoy based on their affinities or interests.

New Orleans needs somebody to come in and administer one of those tests, and then use the results to lure some real-live income-paying “industry” to the city… because if a long-term economy doesn’t start up some engines soon, the entire pre-Katrina mess is going to just wind back up. I don’t think anybody really wants to see that.

To even think long-term, of course, is very difficult for New Orleanians right now… but it’s time to start. Rebuilding and repopulating are immediate needs, but what will be different in ten years, if that’s all that happens? Nothing – and given the economic problems there before Katrina, that’s unacceptable.

So just for fun – let’s pretend the levees will be restored in the short-term and improved in the long. Will the economy grow? Not without some major effort and intervention.

What won’t help

It won’t help to expand tourism or gambling. Those are the traps that set up the city’s grinding poverty. Neither will overly focusing on Oil and Gas, because while oil executives may consider a return to New Orleans with major tax incentives, they require highly educated workers. Eventually, one assumes Tulane would reinstate its engineering program, but until they do, oil and gas will continue to bring in professionals from outside the local workforce. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t solve the employment challenge for the local people. (Note: There may be some other excellent engineering programs in the city that I don’t know about. Forgive me if I step on someone’s knowledge or feelings there…)

Manufacturing? Heavy industry? Where would one put a sizeable plant in the crowded urban landscape? The Port? That industry has modernized away many of the lower-skilled occupations.

Even if (big if) GW Bush delivers a Free Enterprise Zone for NOLA, who will set up there, when so many of the residents do not have the education or experience to work for many companies? (That’s not a permanent problem with no solution; it’s just today’s reality.) For businesses to come to New Orleans, the city initially needs to leverage innate skills and interests available today.

What will help

New Orleans is a right-brained city. It’s full of creative people who are familiar (and generally comfortable) with multiple cultures. It’s also a very tolerant city (racial issues aside). These are usable assets that would lend themselves to a number of business types, including (but not limited to):

International businesses - maybe France would be interested in getting an American foothold with a couple of companies…

Film industry - they already film lots of movies in New Orleans. Why not set up a major studio?
(NOTE: I read in the BayouBuzz that Nagin is going to be in Hollywood today, presumably for exactly this reason.)

Advertising (LOTS of out-of-the-box thinkers in NOLA, though evidently not in government)

Fashion design and/or production

Architecture

Any and all of these could come to New Orleans tomorrow and find local workers who would need a shorter ramp-up time than could be found in many other cities. NOLA could become an economic center supported by for several industries – without sacrificing its culture and uniqueness.

I know there are many more ideas that folks could come up with – those are just my own first thoughts. Eventually, though, people will start to emerge from the details of housing and returning, and when they do, the vehicles for forward progress need to be in place.

So where will the jobs come from? What is it that will make them come? What does NOLA need to be doing now to attract them (beyond the levees)?

Is anybody but me starting to wonder about the future, long-term?

Cat 4?

2006-01-09T04:51:00.000-06:00

Ummm.... did I miss something? From the Chartered Institute of Building:

New Orleans flood protection gets upgrade – but not in time for next hurricane season

Five months before the deadline of 1st June 2006 for restoring the New Orleans levee system to the Category 3 storm protection status it held at the time of the Hurricane Katrina onslaught last August, the White House agreed in mid-December to rebuilding the system to Category 4 standards

Cat 4? Has anybody else seen that?

del.icio.us

2006-01-08T12:04:00.000-06:00

One of the big disadvantages to using Blogger (as opposed to many other blog tools) is there is no easy way to post entries into categories. It's been bothering me for some time, so I finally gave in and set myself up on del.icio.us.

It's unlikely that I'll try to go back through 300+ entries and get them sorted, but I'm spending at least some of today working back through the last month or so. (sigh...)

I've added a "Categories" link to the left nav column. Let me know if it's helpful, or you notice some obvious taxonomy I'm overlooking.

High-level problem-solving

2006-01-07T11:25:00.000-06:00

Courtesy of the NYTimes: Plan Would Open All New Orleans for Rebuilding

Sounds like they're gonna go with the Canizaro Plan... and in a year, if your neighborhood doesn't "come back" well enough, you're outta there.

There's a technical phrase for this kind of problem-solving: "Ignore it; maybe it'll go away"

Social experiment for evacuees

2006-01-07T10:02:00.000-06:00

Hunh. This is an interesting story on so many levels:

Canadian Firm Builds Hamlet for New Orleans Evacuees

Company officials say they are building 49 houses for evacuees and pledging to provide residents with a free place to live for five years, as long as each able-bodied adult agrees to work and perform community service. If the residents have a tough time finding work, they will have the option of tilling the land on the 860-acre organic farm Magna plans to build near the property.

They’re setting this up in Simmesport, LA, and I dunno about you, but I had to hit the trusty mapquest to find it. Talk about a culture shock.

My first thought was that it sounds like modern-day share-cropping. After some reflection, I’m not so sure – particularly the free “for five years” part.

First story like this I’ve seen, though.

Algiers? I know it well...

2006-01-07T08:03:00.000-06:00

Every now and again, I have to go poking around online to read what people were saying about Algiers out there in the world when the Katrina chaos was going on. Depending upon which combination of search terms I use, I can get anywhere from a couple hundred to several thousand hits.

Some of it’s really pretty funny. For instance: this morning's combination of words produced a site that spent a lot of energy trying to decide whether or not Algiers was part of New Orleans… and some of the arguing was done by folks who supposedly are from NOLA. No wonder the MSM couldn’t figure it out!

"This report" links to this report. I read the report, which of course does not, contrary to Ms. Malkin's claim, give any details about gun battles between roving thugs and armed citizens. And furthermore (prepare yourself for the punch line), it doesn't take place in New Orleans. It takes place in Algiers!

Algiers! Ring a bell? Algiers is that neighborhood across the bridge, whose police chief fired shots over the heads of a crowd to prevent them from "invading" their quiet little crime free town!

I wonder whether they ever figured out that the “incident on the bridge” was Jeff. Parish and Gretna?

(Polimom Kudos to the poor guy who actually did some research and tried to explain things...)

The adults step in

2006-01-07T05:38:00.000-06:00

Allowing children to resolve their own disputes is all well and good, but sometimes, adult intervention is required.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco brought in a mediator and representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to meet with Nagin and the council members at the governor's home. [...]

"I think we have a general agreement that there will be no more bickering about sites," Nagin said, sitting next to Blanco and council members Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Renee Gill Pratt at the governor's home.

Can't wait to see people start heading home.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said city and state officials feel they have identified sites for temporary housing in New Orleans for about 40,000 of the almost 47,000 families that have sought a place to live after being swept from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

Thanks, Mom.

Toto???

2006-01-06T13:25:00.000-06:00

What’s that you say, Toto? You can’t tell that we’re not in Kansas?

I can see why you might think that…

Perry: Add intelligent design to teaching

Gov. Rick Perry thinks concept is 'valid scientific theory,' aide says.

::shudder::

(Hat tip: Tim Trentham at Metroblogging Austin)

Sure ya wanna mess with Houston?

2006-01-06T12:51:00.000-06:00

I know Houston is worried about the increased crime... but if I were a criminal, I think I’d be a tad worried about Houston, too:

Owner Opens Fire On Teens Breaking Into SUV

Florida's school vouchers

2006-01-06T09:48:00.000-06:00

When this ruling came out yesterday, I didn’t get it. Today – several analyses (and a full night’s sleep) later, I’m still seeing this as bad: Fla. Voucher System Struck Down

Basically, kids who are in underperforming public schools in Florida had been able to re-direct their public school funds (via a voucher) into a different (better) school. Sometimes that meant a private school, sometimes not.

It’s the basis for the ruling that's bugging me (from the Institute of Justice):

The Court ruled in an opinion drafted by Chief Justice Barbara Pariente that Opportunity Scholarships violate the Florida Constitution’s “uniformity” clause, which guarantees all Florida students a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools.”

If the public schools were uniformly up to snuff, the problem would never have come up, now would it? If they're going to enforce this, then it would seem that the Florida schools need to reduce their quality to the lowest common denominator. (Heck of a thought, eh?)

This makes no sense at all.

I rarely agree with Jeb Bush, but I do this time. Yes, Jeb, it is indeed a sad day.

The battle is joined

2006-01-06T07:08:00.000-06:00

This is what happens when communications break down, and officials talk out of both sides of their mouths to appease constituents:

I will rebuild and nobody's going to tell me any different," Marchand said Thursday at a news conference called by the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, which does not want a sliver of debris hauled away without property owners' consent.

Emotionally, I understood the city council’s vote a month ago, when they vowed to bring back all areas of the city – even though it struck me as pretty unlikely. At the time, I saw that as the morally correct thing to say.

I think I was wrong.

Whether the position is morally or politically taken, encouraging people with what may very well be false hopes is causing far more harm than good... because there isn't going to be any money for those areas.

According to the NYTimes, the Louisiana Recovery Authority has already made it clear that funding to rebuild the lowest-lying parts of the city won't be coming:

In a little-noticed vote last month, the authority agreed not to spend money on rebuilding that does not conform to federal flood maps, which experts expect the Federal Emergency Management Agency to issue shortly. Under those rules, all houses built in the lowest-lying areas would have to be elevated, a requirement that would add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost for each house and probably make it impossible for low-income families to rebuild.

The most damaged neighborhoods, including the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and Lakeview, would be the most directly affected.

This does not mean those areas won’t be rebuilt at all. It means that property owners who don’t have enough personal funds to raise their home elevations will be shut out of their neighborhoods - and possibly the city - permanently.

That’s the real tragedy. Stopping the removal of every board doesn’t fix this, because it's not the real problem.

This conflict has been coming for months now, and what we're seeing are the early skirmishes in the latest - and perhaps last - Battle of New Orleans.

What a sad mess.

A Texas-sized mess in Houston

2006-01-05T16:01:00.000-06:00

Nicole Gelinas at the City-Journal has been busy writing again, and like me, she's concerned about the spike in violent crime here in the Houston area.

She’s done some interesting statistical analysis, too, and although I have a deep distrust of statistics on general principle, hers is the first I’ve seen of what impact – specifically – the influx of evacuees might be having.

At least 35 percent of Houston’s December increase in homicides — five of 14 over last year’s level—directly stemmed from the presence of Katrina evacuees

December was the month we jumped 70% over last year - but will FEMA see it as their problem? They probably would, if Houston’s police had been fully functional before Katrina… but they weren’t. Furthermore, it's still not clear to me how much of the overall current crime can be traced directly back to the evacuees.

What is missing from the City-Journal article is that the HPD is abysmally understaffed, even for “normal” criminal activity (which already included the MS-13).

According to HPD, Houston needs 400 more officers to average 2.3 officers per 1,000 residents. The average for large cities is 2.8 per 1,000.

"The priority has to be rebuilding the police force," Radoff said.

An understaffed police department has been a growing concern since officers began retiring in April 2004 for better pension benefits.

So – we were already in a downward spiral over here. What the influx of that well-known criminal underclass did was give us a push down the slippery slope.

If I thought there was any chance that the MS-13 and NOLA gangs would just cancel each other out without killing innocent bystanders, I’d suggest letting them have at it. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to work out that way, and the thought of innocents being caught in the crossfire - wherever they're from - is horrifying.

Whoever pays to help Houston with its crime problem, though, needs to come through very soon. There is growing hostility toward the evacuees as a group, complete with petitions, suggestions that they all be “bused back”, and some truly appalling racism. (One has only to visit the Houston Chronicle’s own reader forums to get a vile taste.) The backlash is starting, and it's likely to get worse.

Yes, Houston has a problem and desperately needs some help. What a sad predicament for a city just recently named “Texan of the Year”, and the neighbors to whom it reached out.

A sinister embrace

2006-01-05T10:26:00.000-06:00

Hmmm.... The Guardian is really on a roll this week:

The Israeli government is planning to give up a large slice of land to American Christian evangelicals to build a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.

So glad ole Pat and Jerry are thinking out of the box on this one. Maybe they should contact the owners of the now-defunct Astroworld. There are probably some really good deals on roller-coasters to be had.

Furthermore, I can't think of a single reason why Jewish people would be a smidge uncomfortable with an alliance between the conservative Israeli right and the American Christian right. Can you? I mean, they haven't tried to sway politics here in the USA, now have they?

The primary reason is that according to the Old Testament, Israel was given to the Jews by God. Fundamentalist Christians believe that in order for Jesus to return, two preconditions are Jewish control of the land of Israel and the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.

..."As a Jew, they believe I have to vanish before Jesus can make his second appearance. As I have no plans to convert, as an Israeli and a Jew, I find this a provocation. There is something sinister about their embrace."

Maybe they should all just hang on until the Italian court decides whether that was Jesus or John hangin' out over there...?

(Note: I know I'm off the Katrina topics today. Sometimes, though, I just can't help myself.)

Laurel and Hardy and the CIA

2006-01-05T09:28:00.000-06:00

Here’s a tale guaranteed to make your stomach lurch, courtesy of The Guardian: Did the CIA give Iran the bomb?

The article is extracted from NY Times reporter James Risen’s book “The State of War”, and it reads like a very bad spy novel. For instance:

The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

And that's not even talking about the carefully befouled plans for a nuclear bomb. All in a normal day's work, apparently, for the CIA.

It’s hard to know what to think of this whole story, actually (double agents, fake nuclear plans and all…), but if it's true, we should all be very, very afraid - because these are the folks upon whom we are relying for our Middle East strategy decisions. (Yes Virginia, there is a war in Iraq.)

Then again, we already knew they were bumbling idiots. If they ever make this into a movie, I hope they find the equivalent of Laurel and Hardy to play some of the lead roles.

Update: It seems Iran is kinda mad at the Guardian.

John of Gamala

2006-01-05T07:55:00.000-06:00

This type of thought process has always fascinated me:

Did Jesus Exist? Court to decide

An Italian court is tackling Jesus -- and whether the Roman Catholic Church may be breaking the law by teaching that he existed 2,000 years ago.

Wow. Very interesting, particularly since I’d never heard of John of Gamala (or Gamala, for that matter). And do you suppose this would be an unbiased court venue? I’m pretty sure I can guess which way an Italian court will rule.

The whole argument reminds me a great deal of the recent controversy kicked up by Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which led to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code).

Update here: John of Gamala Part 2

The Ignored

2006-01-04T12:18:00.000-06:00

On January 6, the moratorium against bulldozing damaged properties in New Orleans ends. That’s Friday. Two days from now.

Do you think there will be any indication of what people in the 9th Ward can expect from the future by then? I doubt it.

Wanna know what it looks like there? Today? FOUR MONTHS after the storm?

As these pix show, it’s the same. From a photographer friend:

...Unlike my home in Algiers where the "government" had come in within a week or two and kindly removed the debris from my street and even the fronts of my neighbors homes nothing has really been done in the lower ninth.

... Please, enough is enough. It is time for ALL of us New Orleans citizens, friends and family from around the world to let our politicians (local, state and federal) know that something needs to be done NOW. New Orleans has a long way to go and it looks like we really haven't even begun to scratch the surface.

My friend’s right… at least about this particular surface. It’s hard to avoid drawing some pretty damning conclusions when officials aren’t talking to the people.

About that NIMBY "thing"

2006-01-04T10:28:00.000-06:00

So – now that I’ve been in one of those trailers, I am absolutely sure that I could not spend an indefinite amount of time living in one. Furthermore, I totally fail to see a family living in one of them for more than a very short span. Long-term, it would seem to be incredibly damaging to the fabric of a family.

These things are not – by any stretch of the imagination – homes. They’re big campers! They aren’t “trailers” as in.. “trailer parks”.

To my mind, the fundamental problem is not (as has been said) “Who would live in those trailers?” or “They need background checks”. And "Where will those trailers be?" would be totally irrelevant (and I'd joyfully stomp on those NIMBY'ers) if the underlying question was addressed. It all boils down to one thing: What the heck is the plan???

Would the FEMA trailers house homeowners who are trying to rebuild? If so, then could one assume that when power comes into the currently unlit neighborhoods, these folks could move the trailers to their own property? (Strikes me as pretty unlikely.)

And has anybody made a decision on whether all areas of the city can be rebuilt? Until somebody does, would all homeowners be in those trailers? To what purpose? Because at that point, they would be the same as #2:

If it’s not homeowners, then would it be residents who formerly rented in the city? Is there any reassurance that former renters will be able to afford the prices in the new market-driven economy? Are jobs paying enough? They didn't pay much before Katrina... remember?

And how long, after one has acquired the Holy Grail (a job) should someone be staying in a FEMA trailer? What if there isn’t enough rental property in a year?

Or (the real hot potato here) are the FEMA trailers intended to house those who formerly lived in subsidized public housing around the city? (Note: this does not by definition mean “the projects”.) Unsurprisingly, this has the same questions as #2, but with an additional caveat: when are they going to get that public housing opened? A fair amount (like the Iberville Project) is apparently livable…!

All of these people are New Orleanians. Period. They deserve answers to these questions, just as the paranoid folks do.

The real problem with the FEMA trailers is that they are, by nature, intended to be VERY temporary. Until the city delivers a real live Plan, people are likely to continue objecting with cries of NIMBY.

It’s too bad (pathetically so) that many of the objections are so obviously prejudicial, and Jackie Clarkson totally missed the boat here:

She dismissed worries that the trailer squabbles will disgust Congress and the nation when the city and the state are lobbying for record amounts of recovery aid, a concern of New Orleans resident Amanda Phillips.

"It absolutely gives us the wrong image after people have given to us so generously," said Phillips, who rejected neighborhood pleas to fight a trailer park planned at Uptown's Wisner Park.

Ms. Phillips is right. It gives NOLA a very bad image… and people are absolutely disgusted.

Unfortunately, the attitude displayed by uncharitable people all around the city is a symptom. The root cause of this entire debacle (imho) comes right back on the failure of the city’s “leaders” to articulate a plan.

Suck it up, Mayor Nagin. Stop talking out of both sides of your mouth and do what needs to be done already. Either the city intends to bring everybody back or it doesn’t.

What’s it gonna be?

Lakeview and the Breach

2006-01-03T08:57:00.000-06:00

Although most of our time was spent in and around Algiers, visiting with friends and family (and checking out their cool FEMA trailer living accommodations), we took part of New Year's Eve to drive around the city.

As has been said by many folks - the scale of the disaster really can't be appreciated without seeing it. We were unsurprised (and unoffended) to see many signs in the devastated neighborhoods asking sightseers to please not take pictures of their difficulties. (Okay, so maybe I didn't see please. That's kind of unsurprising, too. Smile...) We took only a very few pix, and none of them show anything different than we've all seen already.

Related to this, though: in Lakeview, at ground zero of the levee breach - water is still seeping! It is running across the road! Is anybody but me bothered by this?

My primary thought while driving around there, after we'd seen the water running into the neighborhood from the breach?

I didn't feel safe!

Scary.

Guardian Angels

2006-01-03T06:26:00.000-06:00

Well now. Here’s an interesting thought: bringing the Guardian Angels into the crime areas of Houston.

On Christmas Eve, Jeff Schmidt heard one too many gunshots popping in his southwest Houston neighborhood and decided to do something about it.

Schmidt bypassed 911 and the Houston police and called New York to seek help from the Guardian Angels.

I wonder what they’ll think of Houston? (If nothing else, it's a whole lot warmer here than NYC in January!)

More Algiers impressions

2006-01-02T12:14:00.000-06:00

Twenty years ago, Algiers Point was an unbelievably dangerous, drug and crime-infested part of Algiers. Even now, the house in which my boyfriend was murdered in 1977 still stands – a gray, dismal, rundown shotgun that looks just as dilapidated as it ever did.

Yet much of the Point is lovely now, with children, families, couples, and singles on the streets, walking about, playing, visiting... Homes are (mostly) well-kept, yards are immaculate, and while there’s still tremendous work to be done, I didn’t feel the depression that pervades the rest of the city.

I’ve read endlessly online (particularly post-Katrina) about Algiers Point, and how its gentrification is hurtful to long-time residents. Actually, it’s not all “gentrified”, and while those houses that have been rehabilitated and restored have increased tremendously in value, the biggest changes are in the spirit of community.

A fair amount of the Point is still – visually, at least – much as it’s been for many years… but it doesn’t have that dangerous edge anymore. I saw the Point as one of the most upbeat and hopeful places in the city. I was so very impressed by what is happening there, I can hardly give voice to it… and most amazingly, it has almost nothing to do with Katrina.

Algiers Point has something that cannot be bought at any price. It has civic pride.

What they've done can be done elsewhere. It can happen. It's kind of like that brass ring... you just have to reach out and grab it.

You have to want it.

In the fog...

2006-01-02T08:39:00.000-06:00

On New Year's Eve, we crossed the river from Algiers.
It was spectacular.

The city, rising from mist

Ghostly ships and tugs

And of course, the bridge.

And on the West Bank...

2006-01-02T05:42:00.000-06:00

Several times a year - for twenty years - I’ve been coming back to New Orleans to visit friends and my “second family”. I’ve been back for weddings, funerals, Mardi Gras, St. Patty’s Day, and just because. And for twenty years, I’ve looked at the city but not seen.

This time, I saw… and it broke my heart.

I expected the devastation across the river, and while it’s true that the full magnitude of the disaster can’t be appreciated without driving (and driving and driving) through miles of abandoned and damaged neighborhoods, that was, at least, a known entity. It didn’t prepare me for the West Bank.

Algiers – for how long has street after street been falling apart? You can’t even drive down McArthur without an off-roader! And what’s with the bottom end of Kabel Drive???

There are blocks of blighted, abandoned buildings along Gen. Meyer – never the best street even 20 years ago. Now, it’s like a war zone. Yes, some of it is attributable to the storm, but it’s more than that. Much more. And why are abandoned business buildings still standing there (like Schweggeman’s)? Who’s driving the planning bus?

It’s one thing to try and rebuild from Katrina. It’s another altogether to try to restore vitality and economic stability that’s been bleeding out for two decades.

Oh… this was a very hard visit, Algiers. I’m so sad.

Sleep is a good thing

2006-01-01T08:13:00.000-06:00

"Ringing in the New Year" has always been a fairly adult celebration - in large part because most kiddies (certainly mine!) are normally in bed by midnight (and if they're not, they're pretty grumpy).

On the last night of 2005, though, we wanted to celebrate as a family.

Some (of us) went to the Mid City Bonfire, but I wanted to watch the fireworks on the river. It didn't work out that way.

I don't know whether it was the driving around the devastated areas that we did during the day, or the never-ending conversations about trailers, rebuilding, and the future... but whatever it was, it took the "fun" right outta me.

We came home and went to bed before 11 pm.

In retrospect, I'm not all that disappointed (though I was last night). Sleep is a good thing, and greeting the New Year well-rested has a great deal to recommend it! Now I can start fresh, with some energy to go with it.

That's a good thing, cuz we're heading back to Texas today, and it's an unbelievably depressing drive. Pix and more thoughts later... from Katy...

Happy New Year, everybody!

MRE Memories

2005-12-31T08:28:00.000-06:00

This is a vegetarian tortellini MRE. I'm told it's very tasty - but I don't intend to open it. Ever.

This MRE is special beyond words, because it was a Thank You yesterday from an Algiers Point person. There's an entire library of stories behind this MRE.

Algiers - Thank you, for trusting me in those dark days, and for the hugs, gifts, and well-wishes yesterday. I can't tell you how that made me feel.

I'll see everybody tonight on the levee!

We'll be there soon soon soon

2005-12-29T07:53:00.000-06:00

Assuming everybody ever gets up, we get the hound fed and to the kennel, and we actually get into the car anytime soon (all of these are iffy), we’ll be in Algiers early this afternoon. (This probably means I won’t be blogging much…)

To say I’m looking forward to bringing in the New Year with my old friends and second family would understate things – but there are some mixed feelings all the way around.

As we prepared for this trip (mostly by procrastination and telling everybody about it), I had a glimpse into what Katrina’s media onslaught has done. The myths surrounding New Orleans and what people think is happening there are a reflection of how far the city’s reputation has fallen.

Two days ago, an intelligent, lucid, well-educated friend said, “Be careful there. The cops are shooting everybody.”

Last night (from another normally reasonable person) it was, “Are you bringing your gun? It’s very dangerous there.”

A year ago (hell - just six months ago!), when there were murders and violence all over the place, nobody said these things to me when I said we were off to NOLA. Talk about kicking somebody when they’re down.

Is this the net result of Katrina? Are people afraid of New Orleans now?

We’ll be there soon… soon… soon… and pfffffftt to all the nay-sayers! Where is Pollyanna when she’s needed, anyway?

Update: And for those of you who know what this means: I've got the gitfiddle. Puff cometh.