The Battle for New Orleans (MUST READ)

[funkybutt]

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/news_feat.php

Fixing New Orleans should make as much sense to conservatives as it does to liberals. So why isn't it happening?

By Quin Hillyer

Some conservatives think that President George W. Bush approved too much federal money in response to Hurricane Katrina. Many liberals think he hasn't approved enough. Nearly everybody believes that whatever money has been spent has not been spent wisely.

They're all correct.

What's most distressing about the Bush response, and non-response, to Katrina is that all the President's promises for a creative new approach to major-disaster relief have gone for naught. One of the world's great cities is dying before our eyes, yet the Bush administration has actively fought against the very recovery proposal that is the most pro-free market, most pro-private enterprise, most taxpayer-friendly, most accountable disaster-relief legislation imaginable. And when under fire for his opposition to that plan, the President instead touted yet another scheme to throw more money down an unaccountable rat-hole -- and compounded the error by including legislative language that would preclude the very uses of the money for which the President explicitly dedicated it.

[MadMaddie]

1. * let Katrina become a disgrace and a disaster that could have

been mitagated with some true leadership...

Well, I say let New Orleans repay the favor and destroy him and his * cabal...I hope Katrina and the entire Gulf Coast eat at his soul and whats left of his presidencey....for the rest of his life....and I hope that everyday that he is cursed....(It seems Katrina put a voodoo hex on him and anyone that he touches)

[funkybutt]

2. Bush Record

-snip-
"It is here that the Bush record, when compared to the opportunities available, is so poor as to go beyond incompetence to sheer negligence. This is where Rep. Baker's bill comes in, and where conservatives more than anybody have reason to be furious with this bullheaded administration.

First, a word about Richard Baker: He's a conservative stalwart and a long-standing supporter of all things Bush. The National Journal recently ranked him as the 17th most conservative member in the House, and he served as the Louisiana campaign chairman way back when for Bush pere. That's why it has been so baffling to see the current Bush White House treat him, with attacking press conferences and op-ed pieces, as if he were a hated member of the Schumer-Pelosi brigades."

[MadMaddie]

3. Those that think that * is a friend hasn't clued in that he has no

friends....everyone is an enemy....and that is what is destroying this administration....

It is pathetic isn't it?

Thanks for the article..

[funkybutt]

5. a proud KICK

Y'all should read this if you have a chance

:hi:

[MissWaverly]

15. I saw this special last night

Where they were talking about the needs of a parrish down there: Plaintains Parrish (?)
and they said it was sparsely populated and why bother with rebuilding the levees. But
someone else came on and said that parrish provides 25% of the oil and that a hefty
portion of the nation's seafood comes from the Gulf Coast, why aren't the oil corporations
who are experiencing record profits helping to pay for rebuilding.

[Swamp Rat]

4. HELP!!!

Last time I screamed that was last August... :(



:kick:

[intheflow]

11. Another good graphic, Swampy!

:hug:

[suffragette]

6. I'm becoming concerned that their unspoken plan is to allow

New Orleans to be washed away by future storms.
In every action and inaction, it seems to lessen the opportunity for people to return and rebuild and to make it extraordinarily challenging for those who are there to do what is needed to protect and save the city.

[electricmonk]

7. Reminds me of an excellent commentary

in this months Metropolis Magazine. Black Like Me

-------
I've been black for four months, one week, and five days. I'm still not used to it, and that's kind of a funny thing since I grew up Jewish in Waco, Texas. Believe me, you know what it means to be different when you grow up Jewish in Waco. But over the last four months I've learned that being black means more than just being different: it means being forgotten. It means being ignored. It means being insulted. It means being stripped of your dignity repeatedly. It means being the object of mistrust, ignorance, and fear. It means many, many unpleasant things.
.
.
.
But hell soon belched its way up and through the city, and my emotions came back to life. As we saw people suffer and watched the federal government decide to sit this one out, I got angry. Later as we learned the whole thing could have been prevented--that our levee system had been improperly engineered, badly built, and poorly maintained--I got angry again. And then I sat and listened to the ranting of one Republican congressperson and senator after another--implying that this was somehow our own fault, that New Orleanians were shiftless people who couldn't take care of themselves, that the city had only high crime and good music to recommend it, and that the rest of the country had begun to "fatigue" of us. They said these horrible things directly to us, things you wouldn't say to someone you hated, and said them as if they couldn't see us, as if we weren't there. That's when I noticed I had become black.

[funkybutt]

8. That's brilliant

It's nice to know that we're understood. This writer is right on point. We're being treated like we are less worthy of support (than Iraq) because we made bad decisions. Don't lose me: THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINNERS who report to the federal goverment are responsible for flooding my home. Study after study concluded that we weren't adequately protected yet the Corps continued to ignore the concern and neglect their duties without adequate checks and balances.

[Swamp Rat]

9. yep

Way'at funkybutt! :hi: :hug:

[No Exit]

14. Wow, that writer voiced my very thoughts!

I wasn't a resident of N.O. during Katrina (though I did live there for many years, in the past, and deplore what is happening to N.O. now.)

But about a year ago it occurred to me (a white middle-class person): "We're ALL 'n-words' now." Yes, we're all despised black people now. That's what this administration has done to us. For the first time, we whites get to see what it feels like. And it ain't pretty.

Of course, before the pestilence that IS the Bush/Cheney administration, I used to think all that stuff about what blacks suffer was exaggerated. Turns out it wasn't. How do I know? Because now I've seen it from the inside. The corporatists don't care what happens to us non-rich individuals: they don't care if our children are dragged off in a military draft and sent out to be killed; they don't care if we die of preventable illness because we can't afford health care, they don't care if we have to breathe and eat and drink in the midst of the deadly poisons their businesses belch out, they don't care if some of us get wiped out by a huge storm/flood, they don't care if we can't afford to buy gasoline to help us escape a big storm/flood, they don't care if our children go uneducated, they don't care if we get arrested and held without bail and without any right to have our detention reviewed by any court, they don't care if we are tortured, they don't care if we are arrested for having a certain bumper sticker... etc.

We're ALL "n-words" now! Welcome to the slums, everyone.

Now that I'm black, too, Cynthia McKinney's worry about her treatment by Capitol Police, and her resulting aggression, make perfect sense to me.

And I'm reminded of the bumper sticker I used to see on the bumpers of cars driven by black churchgoing people: "Pray every day that the Lord will take the drug epidemic away!" I want to rewrite that bumper sticker to read: "Pray every day that the Lord will take the Bush/Cheney plague away!"

[Kurovski]

10. K&R(nt)

[annabanana]

12. It is heartbreaking

I know that this is "if wishes were horses, beggers would ride".. but if an administration (even a real republican one) had been in charge when Katrina landed, instead of a crime syndicate, the story would be so different.

[Anita Garcia]

13. Thanks, FunkyB! kicked for NOLA!

[funkybutt]

16. thanks Anita

:hi: