North Coast Online

Taking Charge In New Orleans

Faced with spiraling violence, residents of New Orleans are arming themselves.

The number of permits issued to carry concealed weapons is running twice as high as it was before Katrina - this, in a city with only about half its pre-storm population of around 450,000. Attendance at firearms classes and hours logged at shooting ranges also are up, according to the gun industry.

Gun dealers who saw sales shoot up during the chaotic few months after Katrina say that sales are still brisk, and that the customers are a cross-section of the population - doctors, lawyers, bankers, artists, laborers, stay-at-home moms.

"People are in fear of their lives. They're looking for ways to feel safe again," said Mike Roniger, manager of Gretna Gunworks in Jefferson Parish.

I hope it's a trend that continues.  Faced with a populace that fights back, the criminals of the Big Easy who've been coddled by a dysfunctional to non-existent city legal system for decades might begin to think twice -- or move.

New Orleans

While New Orleans' hospitals operate under drastically curtailed conditions, several FEMA mobile clinics sit unused.  Bush's fault?  Nope.

LSU Health Science Center officials said the trailers were ordered after Katrina destroyed many medical facilities and arrived about seven months later. Each is capable of handling a half dozen or more patients at a time and the idea is to spread them out around the city, in damaged areas, so that more routine care can take place there, freeing up hospitals for real emergencies.

LSU and Tulane doctors are ready to staff the facilities that will include primary doctors and some specialists, but they say they’ve had problems with zoning issues, that may be finally be getting resolved.

LSUHSC officials said that one of the concerns was opening the clinics on school sites, bringing adults into close proximity with children, but Fontenot said the center had plans to avoid any problems.

There's a problem bringing adults into close proximity with children?  What, do they keep the kids locked up far away from adults each day when school's out?  New Orleans needs adult supervision.

America's City

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Mayor Of The Chocolate City

The execrable Mayor Nagin showed up in front of a Senate committee Monday to once again demonstrate his incredible lack of perspective and, well, intelligence.

Mayor Ray Nagin told a Senate committee Monday he doesn't see the will to fix his hurricane-battered city when compared with the billions spent on the war in Iraq.

That's a bit like whining that the city hasn't repaved my street even though it's spending $1 billion to rebuild our schools.  The one does not affect the other and they're done for entirely separate reasons.  And as the article points out, his biggest beef should perhaps be directed toward his own state government.

As of January 18, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay for $334 million for infrastructure repairs in New Orleans, but the state only has forwarded $145 million to the city so far.

State officials have said city leaders failed to provide required documentation, which called cumbersome.

To which Nagin replied:

"I strongly urge you to return responsibility and accountability to the local government," he said.

And for those of you who are not familiar with the Southern dialect means, "give me the money, no strings attached.  You can trust me (wink, wink.")  There was, however, at least one person in the gallery who evidently supported the good Mayor.

Earlier, a protester shouting "Stand up for Justice" interrupted committee chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman as he opened the hearing.

The man yelled, "Stand up for justice! We want somebody to stand up for justice!"

At which point a law enforcement officer did and escorted him out of the room.  And so it goes.

The Longest Hurricane In American History

The media's making quite a bit over the President's failure to mention the plight of New Orleans in his speech last night.

President Bush miffed some people in Louisiana, not necessarily by what he said in Tuesday night's State of the Union Address, but by what he didn't say. He did not mention Hurricane Katrina recovery. Governor Kathleen Blanco was visibly angry on Wednesday.

In last year's State of the Union, you heard the president speak of Katrina, but people who remain in FEMA trailers say the lack of mention this year leaves them angry.

One person we spoke with says, "It doesn't make no sense what he is doing. And now he's asking for more money for troops to go to Iraq."

Another says, "Shock. Because in our world down here, it's the biggest thing happening."

There still seems to be a lot of sentiment on the left and in the media (but I repeat myself) that it's Bush's responsibility to make New Orleans and its residents "whole."  But why?  It's true that they suffered through a terrible and life-changing natural disaster but once they were fed and housed during the frightening weeks following the storm, the government's role should have properly ended.

It remains to the good people of New Orleans (and those formerly of New Orleans) to decide what makes sense and what's economically feasible now. To put that burden on the rest of us through the convenient means of blaming Bush is childish, selfish and greedy.  It would be a financial burden and a stupidly, shortsighted burden to rebuild that corrupt and dying city located on a sinking piece of land at the taxpayer's expense.

Now, I can understand the love many of its residents must surely feel for their old city -- I remain in Buffalo despite the odds after all -- but to expect us to support them in the face of all common sense is incredibly arrogant.  Cities, in the end, are nothing but collections of people who choose to live in close proximity to each other for mutually beneficial reasons.   

It's time now for New Orleans to define what those reasons are.  If the only mutually beneficial reason is to band together to attract federal money, then I say cut 'em loose.   

Morality Tall Tale

We have a moral obligation to rebuild New Orleans

As far as I'm concerned, it's enough to point out that if the essential duty of government is to protect its citizens - as President Bush is fond of reminding us concerning his "war on terror" - then our government grievously failed the people of New Orleans and has the absolute obligation not to fail them again.

What a load of tripe.  The "essential duty of government" is to protect its citizens against foreign invasion, not to immunize them against the effects of hurricanes.  We have absolutely no moral obligation to rebuild that city.  Any moral obligation Americans had to New Orleans ended the day the last survivor was plucked from his rooftop and given food and shelter and provided money to live on for a few weeks.

The last moral obligation Americans had to New Orleans could also be said to have ended the day the last body was recovered, taken to a morgue, identified and the family notified.

There are no moral obligations beyond those that any human should have toward another.  New Orleans can rebuild itself -- if it even wants to.  And if that happens it will be through simple self-interest -- no morality involved.

Maybe We Should Call It 'The Big Hard'

OK, I'm sick to death already with the stories about New Orleans one year after Katrina.  The media is still portraying Its lack of progress in rebuilding as a failure of the federal government and President Bush and a lack of concern on the part of white America.  It's everyone's fault but theirs. Rubbish.

The federal government has committed hundreds of billions to New Orleans and private donors hundreds of millions more.  People across the country devoted much of the last year to the rescue of Katrina's victims and provided for their housing and upkeep.  No one has ignored New Orleans any more than the 1/4 million former residents who are evidently sitting and waiting for the rest of us to rebuild their homes and fly them back.

Their city was a mess before Katrina and its proved its lack of mettle since.  This doesn't apply to everyone of course, there are some 250,000 hardy souls who refused to give up, have moved back and begun to pick up their lives -- and they're the future of New Orleans.  But overall, New Orleans as a political and economic entity has been a beggar-city for decades.

It was well-known as the most corrupt of American cities and, alone among the big cities of the south, had been sinking economically for the last half of the 20th century.  Beggar cities have lost their reason to exist and their will to grow.  But as long as someone else is willing to prop them up, they'll always be happy to accept a handout.

One woman quoted in today's Leonard Pitts column expresses that view well.

"We're different, no doubt about it. But the world already has Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Chicago. The world needs New Orleans."

Well, I'm not so sure about that, but if true, the world still has the New Orleans it probably wants.  The New Orleans of Bourbon Street, big-casino gambling, mild climate and colonial French architecture remains.  It's the New Orleans of poverty in the lower 9th, corruption and never-ending misery that hasn't come back yet -- and I don't see why we should pay for its restoration.

Let New Orleans be whatever it decides on its own to become.

How Can I Sleep Tonight?

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government provided thousands of people with trailer-homes to live in.  Now it turns out that basically one key fits all of them and the government, under heavy criticism, is scrambling to replace the locks.

It is unknown how many trailers will need to have their locks replaced, said FEMA spokesman Pat Philbin.

Sen. Mary Landrieu , D-La., called the lock risk "very troubling."

"While this development certainly adds to a long list of oversights lost in the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the agency, I'm encouraged that FEMA has already begun to take steps to ensure the security of the residents entrusted to it," Landrieu said.

OK, it's a screw-up to be sure.  But a year on, can't these poor victims find the motivation to buy a goddamned lock for themselves or maybe even put a chair against the doorknob? 

But, I suppose, if you didn't have the commonsense to get yourself and your loved ones out of harm's way to begin with, why should we expect you'd have the moxie now to see to it that your front door is locked without a check from Uncle Sam? 

Statistics Prove That New Orleanians *Are* Coming Home

Murder Making a Comeback in New Orleans

For Want Of A Dictionary . . .

The media's W-O-B (War on Bush) continued apace today with the breathless headline Bush warned on Katrina, tape shows.

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

It's a bald-faced lie.  From the transcript:

One of the valleys here in Lake Poncetrain [sic], we've got on our forecast track, it if maintains its intensity; about 12-1/2 feet of storm surge in the lake.  The big question is going to be:  will that top some of the levies?  And the current track and the forecast we have now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself, be we're -- we've always said that the storm surge model is only accurate within about 20 percent.

If that track were to deviate just a little bit to the west, it would -- it makes all the difference the worl.  I do expect there will be some of the levies over top even out here in the western portions here where the airport is.  We've got valleys of 10 feet that can't overtop some of those levies.

The problem that we're going to have here -- remember, the winds go counterclockwise around the center of the hurricane.  So if the really strong winds clip Loke Poncetrain, that's going to pile some of that water from Lake Poncetrain over on the south side of the lake.  I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levies will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very grave concern.

Is that a warning or a discussion of the possiblilities?  And do you read anywhere in that statement the word "breach"?  No.  No one seriously considered that the levees would be breached -- although there was some worry that the storm surge might be so high as to overtop them.  Now this is only important because of a later Bush quote that the media is now trying to work up into another "Bush-lie."

Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm - and Bush was worried too.

The disastrous flooding of New Orlean occurred, not because the storm surge sent the lake higher than the levees as was feared (overtopping) -- but because the levees broke apart (were breached) in two separate places allowing Pontchartrain to empty itself into the city.   This "revelation" that Bush was "warned" about the "breaching" of the levees is as ludicrous as Dan Rather's AWOL story backed up by those fake documents.