RIP Ted Kennedy

I grew up in the era of the Kennedys. I remember JFK's assasination, Bobby's too. Now Ted has passed. He was a champion of the little guy in my eyes. May he rest in peace.



Eli has a clip of Joe Biden talking about Teddy here

Rebirth is a slow process

This slide show details our vision of the rebirth from Katrina in ground zero, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, including our two favorite places for great burgers AND Serious Bread: The Mockingbird Cafe and the Buttercup. Also include in this slide show are pictures of Lake St. Catherine, which just recently is realizing the rebuilding boom from the storm. I've also tried to show that recovery is "one step forward, two steps backwards" process sometimes; with the one two punch of hurricanes Gustav and Ike last year set recovery back for some. But it seems that despite these drawbacks, the area is still moving forward with recovery. Please excuse my typo's. Trying to get this done. :). I have done a blog post on everything featured in this slide show if you want to find out more. Just use the search feature at the top left of this site.

Please note: the big beautiful houses in Waveland in no way depict what's happening in that city. Still very, very far from being where they were in '05, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula, Ocean Springs, Gulfport and other points are still undergoing major infrastructure rebuilding as well as other recovery efforts.

August 29th Planned Events

-- New Orleans, 8 a.m. Tulane students, faculty, alumni fan out across the city to perform volunteer work. Volunteers should meet at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at 8 a.m., where they will be bused to the volunteer sites. Visit http://outreach.tulane.edu/ for information.

-- Shell Beach, 8:30 a.m. St. Bernard Parish honors the parish's 163 victims who died in the hurricane. Katrina Monument at Shell Beach.

-- Buras, 9 a.m., Roger Halphen Playground. Plaquemines Parish government will hold a prayer breakfast to mark the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Free food and drinks.

-- New Orleans, 9 a.m. Loyola University Academic Quad Sculpture Garden. Dedication of a bench as part of Hurricane Katrina Remembrance.

-- New Orleans, 11 a.m.- 3 p.m. The New Orleans Museum of Art will host several events, including an 11 a.m. reading of the names of people who died during the hurricane and a screening of the Spike Lee documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." Free admission for Louisiana residents, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.

-- New Orleans, 2-6 p.m., 1826 Tennessee St. The L9 Center for the Arts honors the Lower 9th Ward's first responders to Katrina.

-- Chalmette, 3 p.m. A Rosary will be recited at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church in Chalmette, followed by Mass.

-- New Orleans, 3-5 p.m., Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp St. Panel discussion on lessons learned from Katrina rebuilding.

-- New Orleans, 4 p.m. Rosa Keller Library, 4300 S. Broad St., New Orleans. Broadmoor Community celebrates its post-Katrina revival.

-- Chalmette, 5:30- 8 p.m. Community celebration at Torres Park, W. Judge Perez Drive at Jean Lafitte, in Chalmette. The band Harvey Jesus performs from 6 to 8 p.m.

-- Metairie, 7 p.m. St. Catherine of Siena Church, 105 Bonnabel Blvd., will hold a holy hour in remembrance of those who died and those who are still suffering from the tragedies of Katrina, Rita and the storms of last year.

Sunday, Aug. 30

-- New Orleans, 3 p.m. St. Louis Cathedral. Marine Forces Reserve Band presents "New Orleans: The Spirit of Rebirth" concert. Free.

-- Metairie, 4:30 p.m. Congregation Gates of Prayer and Congregation Beth Israel will hold a program to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. 4000 West Esplanade Ave.,

Orphaned Boats

Due to her track, Katrina swamped hundreds, may thousands of boats in her wake. In 2007 we combed areas of south and east Slidell as well as Highway 90 in New Orleans East to capture the images of these orphaned boats. Four years later, the boats are all but gone (I still see a few in Lake Catherine). Here is my slide show of Katrina's Orphaned Boats.



Sorry for any duplicates. When building the slide show, I can only see teeny tiny thumbnails and sometimes am not sure of what I'm picking out!

17th Street Canal Breach

Click on photo for larger version


From WWL TV, a story about the dedication - if you will - of a marker to commemorate

the site of the initial breach in the 17th Street Canal four years ago this Saturday. Not a hint of this story shows up at the Nola dot com website.

From the WWL website:


With the help of Levees.org, Roy Arrigo, a former Lakeview resident, put up the marker, which includes a scathing rebuke of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"Especially around the rest of the country, there's a lot of misinformation about the cause of what happened in New Orleans,” he said. “There's a lot of tour buses and sightseers pass here, and I hope to get the right message to them of what really happened."


The temporary marker may not look like much at first glance, but it packs plenty of punch, with sharp language designed to raise eyebrows.


One section reads, "This breach and others -- part of the metropolitan New Orleans Hurricane Protection System -- together are considered the worst civil engineering disaster in our nation's history. It is the worst in the world since the Chernobyl meltdown."


Too strong?


Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal says, 'No'.


"I'm disturbed at how little progress we've made in helping the nation understand, that what happened in New Orleans was not a natural disaster. To say that New Orleans was wiped out by a natural disaster, would be like saying the Minneapolis bridge was wiped out by traffic."


And while they work to create a more permanent landmark, the group hopes, through a few short paragraphs, they can keep the story going.


It's one they say, the nation needs to understand.


"We look at this as one more opportunity to explain to the people, that what happened in New Orleans was a civil engineering failure, and can happen anywhere."

Bayou Liberty area

Here are some photos taken in the Bayou Liberty area where I live.
The St. Genevieve church photo's were taken two years ago when the church was
demolished. I believe that construction of the new church will take place once
the new ($6.8M) bridge is completed. Also sprinkled in this set are a few places of
Irish Bayou that are no longer standing.

the scars remain

video from the times picayune

Video: The Scars Remain

Slide Show Post Katrina

I "met" a very sweet woman online a few months ago who survived Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis. Yes, she survived being at ground zero. She now lives in Texas and would be very happy to come back home to the gulf coast. She may do that someday, but for now she's rebuilding her life. I can't imagine what it was like for her and all of the other survivors of the storm in those horrific weeks and months following the storm. She sent me some pictures that she took in the aftermath of the storm and I put them together in a slide show format I found in photobucket. During this week leading up to the fourth anniversary of Katrina, I may create other slideshows showing the storms aftermath and our recovery. I've also included some pictures hubby and I took in Lake St. Catherine during the last four years. This is for you, Janice.

American Zombie

My personal congrats to Ashe' Dambala over at the American Zombie blog for being the 2009 recipient of the Ashley Morris award.



From the Rising Tide blog, the award is named in honor of the late Ashley Morris,. It is awarded to a NOLA blogger who passionately works to defend and improve New Orleans through their actions and blogging.


Ashley Morris passed away at a young age in 2008. As a New Orleans blogger Ashley represented the true spirit of someone who loved the city of New Orleans with such a fierce spirit untouched by anyone else. The American Zombie blog is constantly digging into the politics in and around New Orleans to bring all of the scuzzbucketry to the light of day.

Thanks for all you do, Dambala. You deserve this honor.

Another blow for the scuzzbucket dynasty

The long time kingdom of Jefferson scuzzbucketry took another blow today as Mose Jefferson was found guilty by a federal jury on four charges that he bribed an Orleans Parish School Board member (and former squeeze)Ellenese Brooks-Simms.

The bribery involved payments made to Brooks-Simms while she was a member of the Orleans Parish School Board. The jury acquitted Jefferson of the third bribery count, which involved a payment made after Brooks-Simms was off the School Board.



Two of the seven felony counts faced by Mose Jefferson, 65, stem from what federal prosecutors describe as two attempts to cover up the bribes by meeting with Brooks-Simms and trying to persuade her to give the feds a bogus explanation for the $140,000 she accepted from him.

Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Brooks-Simms had already cut a deal with the government. At both meetings, she wore a wire to record her conversations with Jefferson, according to a source close to the case.

Mose's brother, theformer U.S. Rep. William Jefferson who was convicted two weeks ago of abusing his congressional office to enrich himself and his family.

Yes indeed.

Come on, participate, NOLA-ians

Levees dot org is requesting that concerned citizens contact AP reporter Becky Bohrer and ask that she become a responsible reporter and stops using good old shorthand when describing the federal levee failures in metro New Orleans that devastated the city.

The shorthand refers to reporters' usage of terms to slide thru the facts that New Orleans was flooded due to the failure of the USACE levees during Katrina. This lack of details could lead the reader to believe that the storm surge from the Katrina overtopped the levees in the city when in fact the levees gave way due to poor structural integrity.

Can't find a direct email address to Becky, but I am told via their website that you can contact AP at "info@ap.org".

Thanks

BTW, if you want to see more discussion on this and other subjects regarding NOLA, be sure to visit the Rising Tide website and maybe sign up to attend this Saturday.

I won't be there due to the fact that us northshore people aren't seen in a very nice light to most NOLA bloggers. I'll keep my ass safely here in Slidell and check it out from afar.

Scuzzbucket justice

Last October I posted about a woman who was under the influence of who knows what killing a wheelchair bound man. According to the initial report:

Witnesses told deputies that they saw a white Buick Rendezvous, driven by Kimberlin Edwards, traveling at a high rate of speed along the roadway when the accident occurred. The 53-year-old victim died at the scene.



Today the bee atch was sentenced to 17 years in prison .

She pleaded guilty to the charges after a 12-member, St. Tammany Parish jury had already been impaneled, but before opening arguments had been given in her trial.

State Judge Allison Penzato accepted Edwards' plea and sentenced her to 17 years in prison.

According to records, Edwards has prior convictions in New Orleans for armed robbery and attempted armed robbery in 1993, according to the St. Tammany district attorney's office.

In St. Tammany, she also has possession of cocaine convictions from 2009 and 2005; and misdemeanor convictions for unauthorized use of a movable, possession of drug paraphernalia and open containers from between 1999 and 2006.

Edwards is scheduled for a multiple offender hearing, at which time Assistant District Attorney Scott Gardner likely will attempt to label Edwards a repeat offender under the state's habitual offender statute.

If Edwards is found to be an habitual offender, she would face possible life imprisonment. Wouldn't that be a shame.

The levees FAILED

John McQuaid discusses certain errors made in the
review of the novel Zeitoun, (a nonfiction story of one family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina) by NYT book critic Timothy Eagan. One such mistake is that the levees were overtopped. WRONG.


The responsibility for most of the damage to New Orleans and the awful events immediately following the storm lies with the Corps – that is, the federal government. This is not in dispute; three distinct investigations have laid the blame on the Corps, including the Corps’s own study. In any assessment of what happened – scientific, political, historical – this is crux of what went wrong, a terrible failure American know-how whose broader implications are alarming and remain mostly unexamined. New Orleanians and Louisiana politicians and media types do their best to remind the powers that be of these scandalous facts.

Camille

Hurricane Camille's fury remembered 40 years later
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN (AP)

GULFPORT, Miss. — Scouring an aerial photograph taken three days after Hurricane Camille crashed ashore on Mississippi's Gulf coast, Richard Rose points to the spot where his father's body washed into the chimney of a ruined home.

Rose was only 10 when one of the most powerful hurricanes to batter the U.S. mainland in the 20th century struck on Aug. 17, 1969. But he vividly remembers his older sister wailing, "Daddy's dead" once word reached family members who had sought safety at a relative's home some 100 miles inland.

"I just burst into tears," said Rose, whose father was swept away while trying to wade through Camille's surging waters.

Fred Rose is one of 172 names etched on granite slabs that ring a memorial to Camille's Mississippi victims, including the missing who may not have counted toward the storm's official death toll.



On Monday, Richard Rose plans to visit the beachfront memorial in Biloxi for a ceremony marking Camille's 40th anniversary. A commemoration also is planned Monday at a cemetery in Gulfport where three unidentified Camille victims are buried under the names "Faith," "Hope" and "Charity."

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 eclipsed Camille as the most destructive hurricane ever to strike Mississippi's Gulf coast, but survivors of the earlier storm will never forget its fury.

Camille was a Category 5 hurricane with howling winds of 190 mph when it crashed ashore near Bay St. Louis, Miss., just before midnight that Aug. 17. The storm had strengthened after brushing the western tip of Cuba, and also swiped the boot of southeast Louisiana as it roared ashore, its storm surge peaking at about 24 feet.

The storm claimed 256 lives, including more than 100 in Virginia, where its remnants triggered widespread flooding and landslides. Camille joined the Woodstock music festival and the Apollo moon landing to put the summer of 1969 into the history books.

Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center, was a meteorology student at Texas A&M University when Camille struck. Months later, he drove over from Texas to see the damage for himself.

Katrina and Camille were "very similar stories," he said.

"They were history-changing events for the people who lived along the Mississippi Gulf Coast," said Read, who is to deliver a speech Monday in Biloxi on Camille's impact and advancements in hurricane forecasting since 1969.

In 1969, Read said, hurricane forecasters had to rely on a satellite making one or two passes a day over a storm.

"You weren't getting constant pictures like you are now," he added.

Camille's intensity surprised George Mixon, who was a 21-year-old rookie sheriff's deputy when Camille's rising water chased him, his father and brother onto the roof of their home in Mississippi's Harrison County.

Terrified, the family rode out the storm on that rooftop for what seemed like eight or nine hours, but Mixon wasn't counting.

"I was too busy praying," he said. "All you could hear was the constant roar ... We were getting hit with debris and pine limbs. We kept our faces down and held onto the house and one another."

At dawn, Mixon joined other deputies in collecting the bodies.

Generations of coastal Mississippi residents assumed no storm could top Camille. Then along came Katrina, blamed for more than 1,600 deaths and tens of billions of dollars in damages.

"I would have to say that Katrina was worse than Camille, and that's a hard thing to say," said Mixon, now a county fire marshal who rode out Katrina in an emergency operations center.

Charles Sullivan, the archivist at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, is the author of "Hurricanes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast: Three Centuries of Destruction," a book first published in 1986. He included Katrina in a revised version this year.

"Katrina was so horrible that I didn't see the 40th anniversary of Camille coming," he said. "I didn't think anything could make me forget about Camille."

For Sullivan, the lessons of both storms are the same: "Don't build anything near the beach," he said. "If you build it there, it is going to be taken by the sea."

But some like Rose, a Gulfport resident, have never considered leaving.

"This is where we live. This is where we belong, no matter what dangers are present," Rose said.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Psycho Woman

New York's Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor most remembered here for oddly standing throughout Gov. George Pataki's 1996 State of the State speech - then running against him after he dumped her from his ticket.

McCaughey, 60, is back as a self-styled expert whose writings on Obama's health care plans are increasingly being cited by agitated conservatives at town hall meetings as proof - falsely, other experts and the President himself say - that he wants to "pull the plug on Grandma."

McCaughey got the ball rolling on ex-Sen. Fred Thompson's radio show on July 16, when she called the bill "a vicious assault on elderly people" that will "cut your life short."

She then wrote a column July 24 that claimed Obama advisers don't want to "give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy."



Read more: here

Roadkill

H/T to HumidCity via Twitter , this
find in the TP:



According to the paper,

Some artistic fiend has created a stencil of a black tire tread superimposed on a squashed version of a rather familiar blue dog. This poor puppy was found on St. Claude Avenue.

Crazy times in Boutte

I love this story from the T.P.:


Alligators are a common sight in St. Charles Parish waterways, but they rarely travel by bicycle.

So when sheriff's deputies saw Terron D. Ingram riding his bike down Goodchildren Street in Boutte with a 3-foot-long gator draped over his neck late Friday, they had a few questions.

Ingram dropped the reptile and his bike and ran off, but was apprehended a few blocks away.

"We don't know what his intentions were," said Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Pat Yoes. He said it wasn't clear where Ingram had captured the gator.

Ingram, 38, of 158 Boutte Estates Drive, was booked with a variety of charges, including cruelty to animals by abandonment, resisting arrest and possession of drug paraphernalia.

He was being held on $15,000 bond.

All ended well for the gator, however. Alligator Control Officer Kenny Schmill said he released it into the marsh near Bayou Gauche.

Debunking Lies

So many lies. It seems as if some of the NOLA blogosphere is out there with opinions on these lies, wishing to provide info to prove them as lies. Here are some links:


Greg Peters provides a link to Reasic dot org where the healthcare lies are debunked.

First Draft discusses how all the sensationalism is creating a "blind panic" among the uninformed.

Talking Points Memo article on what Sarah Palin started. She's such white trash.

Here's one about a "protester" that was actually a GOP official

Knowledge is power.

It's unbelievable the rabid pitch that the "Death Panelers" (one of them is Sarah Palin, which is certainly no surprise to me) have stooped to regarding the current health care reform activity taking place across the country. I find it extremely distasteful that this Tea Party group would stoop so low as to scare the elderly. But of course this was done during Kathleen Blanco's run for governor, wasn't it?. So it is a bipartisan dirty politic kind of thing.


I truely wish that all of the people who believe everything that's told to them about the health care reform would do their homework. With access to the internet, it's not too difficult to find the bill itself and read through it. Here's the link to all 1,015 pages:

It's in "pdf" format, so if you don't have it you'll have to download adobe.

There is a very bright young woman named Adriana Maxwell out of Atlanta who is in the process of reading the bill. She's sharing her interpretation of the bill at a neat website I just found today called ireport dot com. Here she is seen discussing the first 150 pages. Of course it is her interpretation, but I would believe her before ever listening to some of these wackos that show up at the town hall meetings taking place this month.

Actually I find it quite amusing to see some of thes pompous asses in the congress and senate having to put up with the stresses of a hostile audience. They need a little taste of life in the trenches.

For more myth debunking, go to this link.

Weirdo of the Week

This is a loser extraordinaire




Slidell Police arrested a Picayune, Miss., man who allegedly used a cell phone to take pictures up women's dresses as they shopped at Wal-Mart on Monday, authorities said.


A 39-year-old woman who was shopping at a Slidell Walmart on Natchez Drive told police the man, 36-year-old Shannon House, walked up behind her and tried to take a picture up her dress as she bent over, Slidell Police Capt. Kevin Foltz said. The woman moved as he took a picture and then followed him as he walked away, Foltz said.

House then repeated his actions with another woman in the store, Foltz said.

After House had moved on, the witness approached the woman and asked if she knew him, Folltz said. The other woman told her she didn't, he said.

The 39-year-old woman went to the store's loss prevention officer, and the two of them followed House while waiting for the police to arrive, Foltz said. The two saw House taking a picture up a third woman's dress, he said.

All three women later told police they noticed House following them around the store and found it suspicious, but didn't initially do anything about it, Foltz said.

Slidell Police Officers Clint McCall and Chris Culotta began questioning House, who told them that what he did "was stupid and I should not have done it."

House was booked into St. Tammany Parish Jail in Covington with three counts of video voyeurism. If convicted, House could be forced to register as a sex offender upon release.

Louisiana's Coastline is important to America

Restoring and protecting the Louisiana wetlands and barrier islands is not just about Louisiana.



From the Voice of the Wetlands website:


The Henry Hub is a natural gas pipeline in Erath, Louisiana and is the largest centralized point for natural gas spot and futures in the United States.

The Henry Hub interconnects nine interstate and four intrastate pipe lines, including: Acadian, Columbia Gulf, Dow, Equitable (Jefferson Island), Koch Gateway, LRC, Natural Gas Pipe Line, Sea Robin, Southern Natural, Texas Gas, Transco, Trunkline, and Sabine's mainline.




Collectively, these pipelines provide access to markets in the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and Gulf Coast regions of the United States. Sabine currently has the ability to transport 1.8 billion cubic feet per day across the Henry Hub. Relative to the U.S. lower 48 states average daily gas consumption of 60.6 billion cubic feet per day in 2000, the Henry Hub can handle up to 3% of average daily gas consumption - the largest percentage by one facility in the U.S.

The Henry Hub is owned by Sabine Pipe Line LLC (a wholly owned subsidiary of ChevronTexaco) and is the pricing point for natural gas
futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The NYMEX contract for deliveries at Henry Hub began trading in 1990 and are deliverable 72 months in the future.

The settlement prices at the Henry Hub are used as benchmarks for the entire North America natural gas market. In addition, North America unregulated wellhead (natural gas springs)and burner tip natural gas prices are closely correlated to those set at Henry Hub.

Approximately 49% of U.S. wellhead production either occurs near the Henry Hub or
passes close to the Henry Hub as it moves to downstream consumption markets.

Restoring and protecting the Louisiana wetlands and barrier islands is not just
about Louisiana. Do you get it now..?

C Murder guilty

Cory "C Murder" has been convicted of murder, living up to his name
.


However, the judge thinks the verdict is invalid and has told the jury to go back and deliberate some more. Say What???

From the TP:

The jury went out with instructions from Judge Hans Liljeberg on Monday at 11:20 a.m. and returned almost 24 hours later with the verdict after spending Monday night sequestered in a motel.

Miller, 38, was accused of killing Steve Thomas, 16, inside the now-closed Platinum Club early on the morning of Jan. 12, 2002.

The jury returned to the courtroom just before 11 a.m. Tuesday with its verdict. Judge Hans Liljeberg said the vote was 10-2 in favor of conviction. But he said he believed one juror may have changed his or her vote only for the purposes of ending the deliberations.

Liljeberg said that made the verdict invalid and sent the jurors back for more deliberations.

The jury had four choices: acquittal: second-degree murder, which carries a life sentence; manslaughter, which carries up to 40 years in prison; and negligent homicide, which has a sentence of up to five years in prison.



We shall see.

They went back, deliberated and came back with the same verdict.

Update 8/14/09: Life sentence. Good Riddance, "C".

The First Step to Recovery

EJ has a must read where he discusses how we should learn from history.

JUSTICE

William Jefferson verdict: Guilty on 11 of 16 counts

Bobby Sucks

No links, no tirades. I just want to register my disappointment in the governor of Louisiana. Sorry I voted for him and I hope he loses everything he goes after.

Fort Pike's Rebirth

After being ravaged by Katrina and being damaged by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, Fort Pike is on its way back to life. We visited recently and were very happy to see the results.

click on photo for larger version



The Fort is fully open to visitors, although it is not completely renovated. Apparently a good deal of the historical pieces related to the Fort were shipped up to Shreveport before Katrina and many are still there pending completion of the resurrection of this historic site.





For two dollars you can enter the Fort and explore all it has to offer. I'd say it was money well spent on our part. I'm not much of a history buff, but I found the Fort fascinating.



Right inside the entry way is an oar that shows the flood levels from previous hurricanes.



As you can see, the oar is as tall as the doorway.



The line for Katrina's floodline is higher than the oar.

The first room to the right of the entryway holds all sorts of ammunition.












A little archway brings you to the interior of the Fort.





There are doors along the walls of the Fort that lead to different functional areas. I enjoyed looking at the details in the brickwork.



We entered one of the arched doors and were presented with this awe-inspiring picture



(at least I found it awe inspiring!)

In this photo, the area down the middle of the floor was used to bring the cannons in to place them in the windows looking over the Pass.



Back out into the main area, we found the citadel



This looks like where the current refurbishing effort is taking place. The walls are all painted white to provide the visitor with a "pleasing" view of how life used to be at the Fort.



Across from the citadel is the blacksmith's shop. This room was most interesting, as what appears to be the actual tools are in this area. Decide for yourself from these picutres.



















Nearby the Blacksmith's Shop is the Commissary







This plaque, hanging outside the Blacksmith Shop, is a dedication to those Indians that were brought to Fort Pike during the Seminole War.



My thinking is that they were put in the bricked in "jail" section in the middle of the Fort.



This photo depicts the old world versus the present. Touring Fort Pike does bring one back in history. As I said before, this is definitely worth the $2.00 entry fee, even for non history buffs.

Well, imagine that.....

From Save Charity Hospital dot com: information that our sorry excuse for an ex governor - Kathleen Blanco - had a hand in stopping the reopening of Charity Hospital shortly after it was cleaned up following Katrina.

Here's an excerpt from an AP story regarding this travesy


Weeks after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans and worsened the medical plight of the city's poor, then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the publicly run Charity Hospital would not reopen, even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards, the retired Army general who oversaw the work said.



In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said Blanco told him in late September 2005 the 20-story building that served the region's poor residents would not reopen.

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

Talking Points Memo discusses "Culture and Race in New Orleans" following Katrina. One snippet I find especially interesting is this:


Clearly, no New Orleans media--not the Times-Picayune, not WWL or WDSU television, not Gambit Weekly--characterized the disaster as a racial event. That was a template stamped on the flooding by New York-based media which preferred to do its coverage from sites within a quarter-mile of an interstate offramp. The Convention Center and Superdome filled that bill. Lakeview and St. Bernard Parish did not. And the national media did not choose to be concerned with the question of why the city flooded. It covered the disaster under the template of "natural disaster" and, as with all such, quickly moved on.


HT New Orleans Ladder

Scuzzbucket of the Week

A woman has been booked with theft for allegedly stealing money from a woman with Lou Gehrig's Disease that she helped take care of, Kenner police said.

Cherri A. Desporte, 43, lived in the victim's house in Kenner between July 2007 and May 2009, according to a police report.

The victim entrusted Desporte with a power of attorney to pay her home mortgage and medical expenses with medical disability benefits that were directly deposited into an account she shared with Desporte, according to police.

The disability benefits were more than enough to cover her expenses, said Lt. Wayne McInnis, Kenner Police Department spokesman.

The victim learned about the alleged theft when her mortgage was in foreclosure because of 23 failed payments, the police report said. An investigation revealed $9,093.63 in unpaid bills and a negative balance in the shared account, the report said.

The report did not list the total amount allegedly stolen.

Desporte referred calls to her attorney, Robert Levenstein, who could not be reached Tuesday.

ALS is a debilitating neuromuscular disease that causes muscle weakness and atrophy, according to ALS Association Web site. With ALS, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. Patients in the later stages of the disease may become paralyzed.

The victim used a computerized eye response system to indicate to police that she wanted to pursue charges against Desporte, the police report said.

Desporte was booked Wednesday and released Thursday on a $10,000 bond, according to court records.

I hope she rots in hell

My morning laugh

Thanks to EJ for the laugh.