God Is Watching Us

Here's a music video of my visit to the 9th Ward...
Music: Nanci Griffith
9th Ward: God is Watching Us

I'm in New Orleans

I hope you'll
go
to
the
New Orleans Blog

Big Announcement

OK last week I hinted at more news to come. Well here it is. Some folks who are regular commenters at another blog have decided to try to raise funds to send me to New Orleans! A website is now up and running that explains what is happening and how to contribute if you so desire. It is also an opportunity to get involved in the news you want.
So I hope you go vist the site HERE.
Peace
scout

UPDATE: Grand News! In less than 24 hours we have met our fundraising goal!!!!
Thanks to everyone. I will be blogging from New Orleans Feb. 27-March7
scout

We're Hanging At First Draft

We're hanging out at First Draft.

I'm not abandoning this blog but my energy will be going into First Draft.
Teddy and I hope you will come visit.

Nagin has a story about Chertoff

Nagin had this story about Chertoff today.

CLICK to VIEW Video

Change Is Good

Remember in the movie Apollo 13 how the astronauts felt when they finally abandoned the LEM that had saved their lives? I'm feeling a bit like that now.

I have been offered the opportunity to join the great blog First Draft and I have accepted. I will reach many more people than I do here in my cozy little lem. But I know I have some wonderful people who visit here regularly and I do hope you will follow me over to First Draft. I hope you will bring your comments because I truly love reading what you think. Now I know registering at First Draft can sometimes be difficult...something to do with ferrets and chinchillas. If you have any trouble email me and I'll move heaven and earth to get you settled in.

I won't jetison my little (lem) blog just yet. In fact I hope to have another big announcement in the next day or 2. But starting tomorrow I will be at First Draft. Well in fact I put up a small post there tonight on the SOTU.

So I hope to see you there. And thank you for the wonderful journey we've had here.

Riesz and EPT could you email me? thanks-- scoutprime@charter.net

Female Soldiers Died to Avoid Rape

Pam's House Blend has a disturbing post on females soldiers in Iraq who died of dehydration and the reason why will piss you off.

May she rest in peace

"She'll be remembered as a strong woman whose grace and dignity held up the image of her husband as a man of peace, of racial justice, of fairness," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King and then served as its president for 20 years. "I don't know that she was a civil rights leader in the truest sense, but she became a civil rights figure and a civil rights icon because of what she came to represent."

I would agree with Rev. Lowrey on the first point and disagree on the latter.

I met Coretta Scott King once when as a young teen I spent parts of a summer doing civil rights work in a small Missisippi town. (story here) There was a voter registration drive going on at the time and Mrs. King and Ralph Abernathy came to town to speak at a small but packed church.

What I remember is a women of strength and Grace. I can not remember a thing she said but I remember her presence and the importance of her being there to the people who respected and admired her. She was definitely a leader of civil rights to those in that church. She was an inspiration to carry on what could still be dangerous work even then. I am grateful I had the opportunity to be inspired by her presence.

Landrieu to Run For Mayor

The Times Picayune reports that Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu will soon announce he is running for mayor of New Orleans.

Say bye bye to Ray Nagin

NOLA Society Women Hit DC

(Women of the Storm with blue umbrellas to symbolize blue tarped roofs of NOLA)

140 of NOLA's prominent women lobbied members of Congress today to come to NOLA and see it for themselves. They call themselves Women of the Storm and offered members an all expensepaid trip to NOLA. They believe if more would see it for themselves they would realize the need for more federal support. So far only 55 representatives and 30 senators or 16% of Congress has visited NOLA. Some of the prominent women included:

Verna Landrieu, the 73-year-old matriarch of one of Louisiana's political dynasties
Olivia Manning, wife quarterback Archie Manning and mother ofPeyton & Eli
Anne Milling, 65, an eminent community activist

The Times Picayune reports this .....

While images of poor, black residents stranded at the Superdome have lingered, many middle- and upper-class neighborhoods also were flooded but received far less attention. The women, who represent a Who's Who of New Orleans society, offer a starkly different image of Katrina's victims. Along with their designer bags and strings of pearls, they carried bright blue umbrellas, symbolizing the tarps covering their pockmarked roofs.

I don't care Who they are at least they're organizing and doing something.

A Ban I Can Get Behind

From WaPo.....

At least five Midwestern states are considering legislation to ban protests at funerals in response to demonstrations by the Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church, who have been protesting at funerals of Iraq war casualties because they say the deaths are God's punishment for U.S. tolerance toward gays.

Though the soldiers were not gay, the protesters say the deaths, as well as Hurricane Katrina, recent mining disasters and other tragedies are God's signs of displeasure. They also protested at the memorial service for the 12 West Virginia miners who died in the Sago Mine.

Here's a Candidate for Worst Person in the World

Leonard J. Samia is "one of Boston's largest and most notorious landlords." His Samia partnership owns Louisburg Square Apartments in New Orleans. After Katrina hit many of the apartments remained intact and unharmed. So evacuees who had not yet returned home thought they had dodged that proverbial bullet. But Samia launched an aggressive 3 month campaign to remove all the tenants from the 200 apartment complex in order to lease the apartments for higher rents to contractors and such......

In interviews with the Globe, former tenants, their lawyers, neighborhood residents, housing advocates, and community activists said it was a concerted, relentless eviction effort. In those interviews, stories emerged of attempts by the complex's managers to oust tenants despite a statewide eviction moratorium; of demolition crews gutting the apartments of tenants who had not yet returned after fleeing the hurricane; of units emptied of personal possessions by contractors, and of contractors and building employees who then cherry-picked valuables such as VCRs and televisions from trash heaps; of contractors now living in the same apartments that tenants were told were uninhabitable; of license plates removed from tenants' cars in the complex parking lot and then towed as abandoned vehicles; of access to mailboxes blocked by the demolition and locked laundry facilities; and of garbage and construction debris piled near doorways, attracting flies and vermin that created intolerable living conditions.

Samia has been unavailable for comment so the Globe went to his home.....

Samia did not return several calls for comment and was not available at his Brighton office last week. A woman who answered the door at Samia's house -- a six-bedroom mansion perched on a one-acre wooded lot with a gated driveway, high stone fence, security cameras, and a statue of a large camel in Lexington's wealthy, historic Meriam Hill neighborhood -- said ''no comment" and slammed the door.

Read the rest though be forewarned it will piss you off because Samia is the Worst Person in the World. I wonder if Keith has seen this story?

New Documents Show Further FEMA Failures

Documents released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee show that FEMA refused aid from The Interior Dept which offered FEMA:
300 dump trucks and other vehicles,
300 boats,
11 aircraft
400 law enforcement officers to help search and rescue efforts.

An internal email shows that FEMA called off its search and rescue operations just 3 days after Katrina struck.

This makes me wonder what horrors the Bush administration is hiding in the documents it refuses to release to Congress.

Bush Won't Meet with Blanco....Again

From WWLTV....

Blanco is scheduled to attend President Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday and testify before a Senate committee on Thursday.
Bottcher (Blanco's press secretary) says Blanco asked to speak with Bush about housing assistance for hurricane victims but has not heard back from the White House on whether that discussion will occur.

Bush refused to meet with Blanco when she was in Washington in December.

Seems a "uniter not a divider" would meet the governor.
I bet Haley Barbour would get a meeting.

If it happened to them it could happen to any of us....

The Times Picayune has a great editorial entitled "Don't Leave Us to Foreclosure" on the need for the Baker bill. If you're not familiar with it this editorial will get you informed. They also take Bush and his "reconstruction czar" Powell to task and blow holes in their reasoning to block the Baker bill. Finally they make the argument as to why the rest of America should perk up and take heed. I love the Times Picayune. They are what a paper should be. Here's part but read the rest too......

Rep. Baker's plan would make it possible for homeowners to avoid foreclosure, get at least 60 percent of their equity back and have resources to use toward a new home. This is not a government giveaway. The government bonds used for the buyouts would be repaid by the sale of property to developers, who would have to put the land back into use. It is a practical, targeted solution to an immense problem.

There seems to be some sentiment that South Louisiana has gotten enough government help and that people here should have expected flooding. That ignores a crucial fact: the federal government's Army Corps of Engineers told us that our levees would keep us dry.

Families who settled inside the flood plain knew to expect occasional street flooding during a rainstorm. But they had no expectation that canal floodwalls would buckle and fill their homes with 8 or 10 feet of water for weeks on end.

If 180,000 families in greater New Orleans are left with worthless homes and no way to get rid of them, everyone else in this country who lives in a vulnerable spot should be worried. And that means that most of them should be worried.

More than half of Americans live along the 19,924 miles of coastline in this country. How many millions more live in river valleys, on fault lines or in Tornado Alley?

Yes, there are risks in living near water. But New Orleanians believed that those risks had been minimized. We should not be written off simply for choosing to make this place our home.

Who's Running the Show?

The NYT has a good article on a "White House that was plagued by the fog of war" in responding to Katrina. It raises grave concerns on how capable this administration is to protect us. However since the White House is withholding documents and not allowing aides to testify it is difficult to assess the problem and blame.

There is also a question of whether the White House should be making disaster decisions....

But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."

Mr. Rapuano is the deputy assistant to the president for homeland security who according to the NYT was "the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck."

What are Mr. Rapuano's qualifications for managing a natural disaster? Here is his work history....

• was previously the senior policy advisor for national security to the Energy Secretary handling a wide range of programs and issues related to nonproliferation, intelligence, counterintelligence, homeland defense and special access programs
• served as director of the international affairs and nonproliferation department at Southern Research Institute
• worked supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the development of national security policies related to weapons of mass destruction
• served as special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, as a foreign affairs specialist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense,
• counterproliferation program manager for DynCorp
• served on active duty as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps

I'm not sure if he's just a WMD policy wonk or a CIA spook but I would agree with Mr. Rapuano's assessment that the White House shouldn't make natural disaster decisions if a guy with his qualifications is to be in charge.

The NYT also revealed this tidbit........Mr Rapuano "acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit."

Like many others I know I was up past 2 in the morning on the 29th glued to CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina. But I'm just a concerned citizen. Just saying.........

Bush the Obstructor

Friday Bush criticized Louisiana officials for not having a recovery plan. Of course Mayor Nagin had to come out today and state that that there is indeed a plan.

It is ridiculous that any Louisiana official has to jump through these hoops to prove they are indeed working on recovery. More important it is incredibly disingenuous of Bush to point fingers at anyone.

It is Bush that has held up the Baker bill.
It is Bush that has cheated NOLA out of Cat 5 levee protection.
It is Bush's FEMA that hasn't produced the flood maps yet.

All of the above are critical corner stones of the recovery process.

The Baker bill is necessary for homeowners to decide if they will rebuild or cut their losses and move on.

Bush has only promised funding that will in effect bring Cat 3 levee protection. Without Cat 5 hurricane protection businesses and homeowners will be reluctant to rebuild if they are to be washed out again perhaps next year or the year after.

Finally FEMA is in charge of producing federal flood maps that will "provide critical information for residents trying to decide whether -- or how high -- to rebuild their damaged homes" and "could drive new building codes and standards that try to minimize future flood damage." But they are not done yet.

If presented with this I suppose Bush would say.... heh I'm a constructor, not an obstructor.
Perhaps I shouldn't give him any ideas.

For the Record...

I got an email from someone who thought that I lived in New Orleans. So for the record I do not. I live in Wisconsin. I know I have never said that I live in NOLA and people who have read my blog for a while would know I live in WI as I have written about that. It never occured to me before but I can see that someone new to this blog may think otherwise as I have written so much on NOLA and with some passion.

As I was writing this I got another email asking why I write on NOLA. Sometimes I am not completely sure myself but I just can not believe this is happening in America, at least not the America I once knew. And what has happened and continues to happen pisses me off and breaks my heart all at one time. We can not abandon our fellow human beings. Simply put...It is Wrong. At one point I had thought of not writing about NOLA anymore but then a story pulled me back in. So I decided to put that post up again as it explains best. So here it is.......

From scout prime November 30, 2005.......

It Pulls Me In
I have never meant for this to be a blog about NOLA and Hurricane Katrina but I have done quite a few posts on that. And just when I think it will be my last there is another story that pulls me back in to it again. There has been just such complete devastation and such horror that it is beyond compelling. It reaches my humanity to the core and I feel such empathy for victims and survivors. I wonder what would I have done in their place? How would I cope in the aftermath?

The story of St. Rita's Nursing Home touches all of that. In the initial aftermath of the storm it was believed that the owners had abandoned the residents. Now it is found that this is not true. Though they must face consequences for not evacuating we learn that the owners and staff were present among others and fought to save lives as a wall of water came crashing down on them. Here is how some experienced that.....

Alonzo recalls the floodwaters flowing from the direction of the lake, a few miles north of St. Rita's.

Trishka Stevens, Jodi Hanson's grandmother, says that when the water burst into the building, it cascaded through air-conditioning vents "like Niagara Falls." Stevens, 75, who has not walked in five years, was in her bed in Room 407 as water rose around her.

"It was up to my chin," she says.

In the pandemonium that followed, nurses and aides waded and then swam through the halls, unhooking the straps that held the wheelchair-bound upright and pushing them onto mattresses. They then shoved the mattresses outside so the evacuees could be taken to higher ground by boat.

Alonzo, 55, says he put his 52-year-old brother onto a mattress, then grabbed Carlos' roommate, Harold Kurz. Alonzo recounts the frantic effort by nurses and others to save as many as possible:

"You can't get out a door, so they're kicking out windows to float the residents out on mattresses to put them on the roof. In every room, people were hollering. They were screaming like somebody was murdering them (and) ... for God to help them. It was a horror scene."

Stevens was saved by Steve Snyder, 29, an offshore oil rig worker who had motored past St. Rita's in a boat while fleeing his own flooded house nearby. By then, Snyder says, rescuers at St. Rita's were chopping holes in the roof to pull out residents who were floating just below the ceiling.

Snyder says he and his brother-in-law swam from room to room, searching for survivors. They gave up, he says, when "we just didn't hear no more screaming, no more people calling for help."

I doubt one gets those screams out of their mind perhaps ever. That's trauma. Alonzo faced another......

Alonzo returned to St. Rita's a month after Katrina to get belongings from his ruined car. He calls the place haunted, and says he will never go back.

"Can you imagine being in your wheelchair ... and that water came up over your head? I guess that's why people are so mad."

He tears up, and then says quietly he wasn't strong enough to hold onto both his brother and Kurz. "You can't swim with two people. I had to let Harold go. I still think about that when I fall asleep."

Maybe I can't let go because people like Alonzo had to.

Baker: Bush Offers NOLA "Death Blow"

Louisiana Republican Richard Baker of the Baker Bill said this of Bush's approach to NOLA..."There is a price to pay for blind neglect. The current plan would be a death blow to the state's economy." So Baker has vowed to continue to fight for legislation to bail out homeowners and educate Bush and the nation on the necessity of it.

He says that his bill is not as costly as Bush has made it out to be. Here's how the plan would work....

Baker's bill, which enjoys broad bipartisan support among Louisiana politicians and planners, would create a public corporation financed by the sale of federal bonds. A board appointed by the president would use the proceeds to offer buyouts to the owners of flood-damaged homes for at least 60 percent of the equity based on pre-Katrina value. It also would pay off the mortgages, heading off a possible wave of foreclosures.

Unlike the block grant approach, Baker said the corporation would attempt to recoup some of the money -- and fuel the economic recovery of the region -- by selling tracts of land to developers who would rebuild communities according to local plans.

The Mortgage Bankers Association who supports the bill out of "fear that widespread homeowner bankruptcies in metropolitan New Orleans will cost them dearly" says this....

"Some people will simply never be able to repay those loans if the property is worth nothing," Kurt Photenhauer, a lobbyist for the mortgage bankers, said. "Any proposal, including Congressman Baker's, which proposes a method of restoring value gives lenders and borrowers something to work with."

Keep in mind Baker has been a loyal Bush ally voting with the administration 91% of the time. However now he finds himself allied more with LA Democrats. Yesterday he complained Bush "misconstrued" his bill as a drain on federal treasury when in fact 50% would be "repaid when land, whose value would presumably increase, is resold to developers."

Also keep in mind what I wrote yesterday that without the Baker bill those developers will make a killing on cheap land.

It should be asked everyday. Who is Bush working for........ The people of NOLA or his Cronies in NOLA?

The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee has agreed to a Feb. 15 hearing on the legislation.

Do something for the people of NOLA and Call your Rep and tell them to support the Baker bill.