Posts from — September 2005

[™ Kevin Drum]

Hanging with Sox

Does she have be there?

[Editor: Ringo has decided that annoying Sox is a worthy goal.]

Friday Ark

The Gretna Police would not have let Oprah Winfrey or Bill Cosby walk over that bridge.

How many of the talking heads couldn’t understand that some people just didn’t have the money to evacuate. There were people who thought they needed money to be rescued. The working poor get bills for ambulance rides and emergency room visits. If the poor fit the stereotype of the talking heads they would have called limos for a ride.

The old get to lie down and die from dehydration while the people who are supposed to be in charge argue about who should be bringing in clean water.

The sick or disabled lay in nursing homes while the owners dither about evacuation. As the floodwaters rise, unable to escape, they drown.

If you voted for Bush/Cheney, this is your fault. This is what you voted for.

If you claim to be a Christian you know the moral answer to: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Locally we are gathering supplies and shipping them West while providing refuge to many displaced people from the coast and New Orleans. We are working full out because they helped us after Ivan. The road is open now and we can ship things to them without having to go through the Federal or state government for distribution. Our county treasurer is a leader in the effort, spurred on, no doubt, by the lack of response he has seen from FEMA since Ivan. He is a local elected official, so it would be redundant to say he was a Republican or conservative. He knows what the local governments in Mississippi can expect so he has turned to raising funds and goods to help.

I whipped by Sam’s Club to get some towels for the last load because everyone knows the importance of a towel.

This is the area that the Australian reporter went to from Mobile, and there aren’t enough local government resources left to do people much good.

When comes to the fuel pipeline that runs from Texas to New Jersey, Dick Cheney manages to pop-up from his hole in the ground to harass the local power company to restore power to the pipeline before hospitals, claiming that it’s a matter of “National Security” that the Northeast not suffer from an inconvenience while poor people in Mississippi are suffering.

If Dick knew to call on August 30^th, what happened to the rest of his administration.

Utility companies have detailed plans for restoring power after a hurricane. Those plans are given to other companies who will come in to help. They have been created using computer modeling to get power to shelters, hospitals, and nursing homes first, then restoring lines in a predetermined order based on where there are outages and where power is available. When the plan is altered and the sequence changed, that has a ripple effect on the entire plan.

There is some good news in Mississippi: State to sue insurers over flood damage

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood plans to sue insurance companies to force them to pay for flood damage to homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a source familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The Democrat[sic] attorney general believes that Katrina’s horrific winds caused the flooding, said the source, who declined to be named.

[I notice that CNN/Money is also unaware of the adjectival form: Democratic.]

Global warming affects the surface temperature of the oceans, and while a single degree of increase may not seem like much, it has been sufficient to turn more of those waves into depressions, more depressions into storms, more storms into hurricanes, and more hurricanes are becoming major hurricanes. There is more energy available. It is the intensity of the storms that has increased.

Four of the eight most expensive storms in US records hit Florida last year.

Andrew, in 1992, was the first named storm of the season when it hit in August. There were only six named storms that year. Katrina was the 11 named storm in August of this year, and we have had four named storms since.

The Day of His Noodly Appendage

The holiest of holidays for Pastafarrians, is of course the birthday of His Most Holy Prophet, Marco Polo (b. Sept 15, 1254), who brought the word of his Noodly Appendage back from the East. As Talk Like A Pirate Day falls on September 19th, this five-day period constitutes Holy Pasta Week, during which spaghetti is consumed liberally. With a nice Chianti, of course.

[…and people think librarians lack a sense of humor.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jillian came to the article via a different route.

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

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.

That portfolio, under the current rules of the Supreme Court, will sideline him during many of the cases coming before the Court according to this CNN article.

Since the rules say he must recuse himself when his private interests are affected by the case before the court, what’s the rush to appoint him? Many of the cases on tap are going to be before an 8 Justice panel whether he’s confirmed or not.

CNN reports that: New Orleans hospitals need patients, money to stay open.