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I have made the snarky comment in a number of places that somehow this mess was going to be fault of the Democrats.

So, I’m checking CNN and on the right in the “Watch Free Video” box is: Dems to Blame for Brown Hire?

I swear there are no more “conspiracy theories”, “tinfoil hats” have no meaning – when the Coke bottle dropped out of the sky it hit me on the head. This is insane and it is presented by a major media outlet.

And people wonder why Jon Stewart is the most trusted source for news.

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The Times Picayune carries an article about one family discovering the truth about their homeowner’s insurance: Debate over wind, flood damage rages.

I’d forgotten about the $250,000 limit on the flood insurance, but I knew that the insurance companies were going to screw policyholders. If any damage can be shown to be caused by flooding, they will claim everything is flood related. The insurance companies are going to claim massive payouts, but many policyholders will get nothing. Remember that the people in the article filed a claim and that will show up on their records, even though the company doesn’t intend to pay them anything.

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Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler was upset in his September 6^th post about Senator Mary Landrieu referring to her family’s waterfront home as a “camp”. Bob feels that she should have talked about a million dollar home on the water.

The problem for Bob, and other people who are not native to the Gulf coast region, is that they think in terms of what is being built by the newcomers, and not what the old-timers build.

Those of us who grew up down here, like Ms. Landrieu, expect that anything built near the water will be wiped out by a hurricane. You built “fish camps” down by the water to go fishing, not to live in permanently, and many were built from the debris after a storm.

When people started moving down, they were amazed at the amount of vacant land by the water, with even fisherman living well back from the water. Locals did not build anything permanent on the barrier islands or on the coast of the Gulf: they knew better.

The increase in deaths and destruction are a result of people building on land that locals knew would flood in a hurricane. When Ramada Inn put a sunken bar in their hotel on the local barrier island, most of the locals thought they were going to have an indoor swimming pool, which it became after the first hurricane.

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You may remember the emotional interview with Mr. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, describing the head of his emergency management team talking to his mother in a nursing home as the waters were rising. The lady was in St. Rita’s Nursing Home in the town of Chalmette, and she drowned.

MSNBC reports that Louisiana nursing home owners charged in 34 deaths. The owners, Salvador A. Mangano and his wife, Mable, were charged with negligent homicide. Each count carries up to five years in prison.

They had been required to have an evacuation plan and demonstrate the ability to implement it. They had repeatedly been asked by authorities if they needed assistance to evacuate, and declined offers of help.

In an audio link on Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, Robert Siegel talks with The Washington Post‘s Doug Struck on the situation in that hospital and its failure to evacuate patients.

The owners of the hospital, Tenet HealthSystem Medical, Inc., acted surprised when Louisiana officials contacted them and asked them how they were going to evacuate their patients.

Over 40 bodies were recovered from Memorial.

Rook offers his riff on St. Rita, Court Costs, with a CNN link.

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An audio link from All Things Considered provides you with A Dream of New Orleans, Interrupted by Andrei Codrescu, a writer/poet from Romania who adopted New Orleans as his home.

New Orleans was a gateway to Faery, neither here nor there, a place between. It was industrial and whimsical. It embraced everything and everyone. Obscene wealth was linked to grinding poverty by a streetcar. There is no good way of explaining New Orleans; it had to be experienced.

Charles at The Fulcrum shared his memories of the “Big Easy” earlier.

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I have been looking for articles on hurricane Opal in 1995 to give people a clearer vision of how FEMA once functioned and stumbled across Another flood, another FEMA, a comparison between New Orleans and the Grand Forks, ND flood of 1997 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Ashley Shelby.

Jillian came to the article via a different route.

Go and read what FEMA was capable of under competent leaders.

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I wrote about the possible loss of hospitals in the New Orleans region because of the diaspora, but another loss may be The Times-Picayune.

A powerful voice for the people of New Orleans during this crisis and a certain contender for multiple awards for their continuing coverage in the face of massive obstacles, the newspaper requires subscribers and advertisers to exist.

I fear that circumstances are working against the paper and another voice of reason may be lost.

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