Impatient for the DVD set!

Having been completely engrossed (and appropriately depressed) by The Wire, I'm already excited for David Simon's new series, Treme, which takes on the challenge of conjuring the complicated atmosphere and culture of New Orleans. We don't pay for fancy TV channels, so will wait for Netflix to get its hands on some DVDs (or maybe we'll just spring for the set ourselves).

Meantime, here's an episode of NPR's Fresh Air that combines description and interview to preview the show. Also, I immediately wondered how Harry Shearer would feel about it, since he's a native, an opinionista, and a man who's had a lot to say about the nation's inadequate handling of Katrina -- here's his first take. I can't wait to get a look for myself!

Political radar, not so much

Heckuva job, Brownie! eesh.

Two birds with one . . .

Get Your War On has another great recent strip, pulling together the high points of our recent foreign and domestic policies.
Sigh.

Update: a little older, but still funny (both topically and for injections of randomness) here.

Quote of the day

How many minutes of the war do you think you'd have to divert funds from to rebuild New Orleans as a fucking stately pleasure dome? ... Five minutes?

- Jick (Zach Johnson) on KoL radio, 8/30/2007

From the Department of We Learn Nothing

FEMA finds yet another way to screw Katrina survivors . . .

The unseen aftermath

Think that the ravages of Katrina are behind us? In fact, New Orleans is still being decimated by an inadequate healthcare system, especially for the poor -- few resources, lost clinics, and a huge reduction in regional health care providers (probably many among those who relocated) are leading to radical undertreatment of all sorts of serious ailments.

As a result, people with severe mental illness often go without medication. Heart patients cannot get prescribed follow-up care, and some cancer patients must travel hours for chemotherapy. People line up before dawn in hopes of getting care at clinics staffed by volunteers.

More bifurcation of living conditions between Haves and Have-Nots, more dropped responsibility. Katrina is a weeping sore on our national conscience.

(via Follow Me Here)

Aftermath to a cleansing

We're not talking about New Orleans much anymore, so it looks like the displacements are becoming permanent. The radically smaller size of the city is given visual expression here, in a comparison of Before and After phonebook thickness...

Ouch.

Highs and lows

A jumble of quick links worthy of note:

• Blue at Alas, a Blog shares a glimpse of the life of someone in a wheelchair encountering children -- by mail, in person, and via parental reaction. Both serious and sweet.
  
  
• August notes a Texas radio host extending the anti-immigrant phobia to Katrina refugees. Can't have those people around...
  
  
• Webb's latest ad shows what it looks like when a Democrat takes a firm stand on Iraq. Now, was that so hard?

Next steps in the dismantling of the Constitution

Remember freedom of the press? Apparently it doesn't extend to, say, journalists filming Katrina refugees in a squalid government camp. Our federal police-corporate overseers will make sure of that. Yeesh.

(via Medley)

Little rays of sunshine

Amid the enormity that is the destruction of Katrina, tales of progress, one house and a few volunteers at a time. I'm really proud of my spouse, who went and worked for a week with a church group helping rebuild along the Gulf Coast (although not in New Orleans itself) -- a real work-out for body and spirit. Good to see some making headway, even while not forgetting that many may have no choice as to where they end up...

(via boing boing)

If you read only one story on New Orleans

There will be a deluge today, on the one-year anniversary of Katrina's landing, on the hope and the rebuilding and the almost unchanged acres of destruction. It can be hard to believe that so little has been done; we want to move on to other things. Matt at the inexplicably named 1115.org, gives a moving overview of a recent visit to New Orleans, with wonderful images to accompany his ruminations on the place, the political sideshow, and what it all means. I recommend it highly.

(via Albert at dragonballyee)

A cluster of tidbits found via dailyKos

• Tom DeLay intends to stay active in politics from behind the scenes, colleagues not entirely enthusiastic...
  
  
• Jeb Bush takes first stand against national Republicans in claiming that current anti-immigrant fervor is personally hurtful.
  
  
• Democrats come up with a new strategy to go on offense on the abortion issue, using an emphasis on prevention to reveal the splits within the Republican base.

  An overwhelming majority of Americans support access to contraceptives and sex education. This bill will force Republicans to go on record: do they really want to prevent abortions, or is all their anti-abortion talk the empty rhetoric of pandering politicos?

  Now we're talking!
  
  
• In breaking news today, the ongoing Fitzgerald investigation has for the first time uncovered direct evidence that President Bush was part of the decision to out undercover operative Valerie Plame. Yowza!
  
  
• Also, via Medley (not Kos), a painful story about the aftermath of Katrina and the systematic ethnic cleansing being wrought by those in charge of New Orleans' fate.

A small part of the rebuilding

The New Orleans public library system is looking for book donations to help rebuild their collection in the aftermath of Katrina. Hardcover, paperback, fluff or substance, you can send them your extras at special low postage rates. I suspect that most of us have a pile waiting to go somewhere, so this seems an excellent option...

(via XOverboard)

How does the public think?

I mean the real Katrina crime was failure to have resources ready to respond, failure to get down there are fix things, leaving people to fend for themselves or die trying. Will Americans be angrier after seeing direct evidence that Bush lied about how much they actually knew (and still did nothing)? This actually made me feel somewhat better about Brownie, and yet worse about the will of our leaders to respond to fellow citizens in crisis. As Greg said, it makes you wish we had a parliamentary style of government, so that they could be voted out immediately rather than continuing to bumble (or ignore) the reconstruction and/or the next crisis...

What would our leaders have to do (or fail to do) to justify impeachment? The current list of crimes is almost mind-blowing...

Sometimes the buck actually stops

This time, amazingly, it's an all-Republican House Investigative Committee releasing a devastating assessment of the response to Katrina.

"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted," the committee said.

No surprises for the reality-based, but heartening to see the bullshit-detection put on paper and with a GOP imprint. Of course, the 9/11 Commission report never yielded any results, so don't look for heads to roll (other than Heckuva Job Brownie). Also terribly reassuring to think that these major disasters leave us no better prepared for the next to come.

Painful irony

The national steadfastness and billions of dollars pledged by Bush to the devastated New Orleans region appear to have gone AWOL. In their place, the desperate mayor is appealing to other nations for aid in rebuilding his city. Even the news that France may take the lead fails to give me any amusement in the midst of this monumental failure of responsibility.

Update on New Orleans

The January 8 editions of Harry Shearer's radio program "Le Show" featured a number of locals from New Orleans talking about the state of their city in recovering from hurricane Katrina -- what is almost normal again, what is terribly in need of fixing, what kinds of difficult decisions are still to be made. They point out that news organizations aren't giving this much coverage around the nation -- because we've moved on to more exciting current news (Alito! wiretapping!), because the stories are complicated, and because the mix of optimism with devastation is hard to capture. But this discussion does a pretty good job, and I recommend giving it a listen.

direct link to Real Audio program
show archive, where you can select the particular segment and see some other content info

I recommend this show generally, for its mix of news with biting satire ("Apologies of the week," installments of "Clinton-something," invented discussions among national leaders) and great music along the way. Live on NPR, or streaming audio on the web.

Merry *#%$@! Christmas, y'all!

FEMA, not content to rest on its "heck of a job" laurels, is planning to cut off rent support for Katrina evacuees living in other communities. I guess, in the spirit of "out of sight, out of mind" (e.g., see this prev.), they're just letting the generous host cities shoulder the costs now . . .

Have I mentioned this idea lately? Put a little something in somebody else's stocking this year.

New Orleans being left to sink into the mud?

A grim editorial in yesterday's New York Times decries the "death of an American city" as the Bush administration sends a mere pittance to salvage New Orleans while spending unimaginable amounts in Iraq.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

Their point is that a slow response, in itself, dooms the city, as displaced residents make new lives elsewhere and the infrastructure decays to unsalvagable. To really hurricane-proof the place would cost some billions (but a fraction of the number noted above) and require that local officials really prepare to re-plan their city from scratch. But not doing those things means accepting the erasure of both a city and a unique culture (or, just as bad, reducing both to Disney-esque tourist versions of their former selves)...

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Not a pretty option, but we can't pretend that both action and inaction aren't choices . . .

(via This Modern World)

Update: in related musings, see this new term/concept.

Update 2: jeez! a Bush advisor says that "Katrina has fallen so far off the radar screen that you can't find it." I'm sure that the nation finds that very reassuring.
(via Body & Soul)

Yeowch!

A group of victims from hurricane Katrina testify in Congress about what went down, and they are unstinting in their anger and blame. In essence, they charge the government with ethnic cleansing.

One chagrinned Repuke said "Could you please refrain from calling it a Concentration Camp", to which eveacuee Leah Hodges exclaimed "No I will not! They separated children from families, did not feed us or give us water, they let people die, a woman lost her baby. And all the while trucks are going past--with no supplies--just full of soldiers with M-16s. It was like Hitler."

The link also includes some verification of some of the (new to me) claims, as that the southern parishes may have been knowingly sacrificed (their levees blown up) in an attempt to save the rest of the city. Um, wow.