Mardi Gras has come and gone, and Ash Wednesday too, and now it is Lent: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Speaking of dust and repentance . . . Two years ago we endorsed John Edwards for president. That was before we realized how far...
NOLA, Gulf Coast
Department of Corrections:
Mardi Gras, Lombardi Gras
This is a Carnival where you don’t have to say “Happy Mardi Gras” (tho’ we do, anyway)—it simply is a happy Mardi Gras, and everyone’s been in a crazy happy zone for weeks. People are changing their middle names to WhoDat. Maybe it’s ’cause “Breesus Saves,” and the...
New Orleans’s Super Weekend
We prayed for a one-two punch of good news, and the Saints and the voters delivered (helped no doubt by the prayers of the nuns and priests in Saints owner Tom Benson’s posse). It is a delicious feeling of rejuvenation only four short years after the storm left us...
Mitch Landrieu for Mayor of New Orleans
Mitch Is the Man New Orleanians, the best way to make the Saints lucky on Sunday in the Super Bowl is by casting your ballot early and often (encore, repetez!) for Mitchell J. Landrieu as mayor of the great City of New Orleans. This is also the best way to boost the...
Krewe du Vieux’s “All Fired Up,” Baby!
Postively Flamin’ Of all New Orleans’s wonderful (and some rather sedate) Carnival krewes, Krewe du Vieux is the sassiest, fiestiest, and wittiest, and it pains us to miss even one parade. Led by the great Dr. John as King, this year’s parade’s theme was “All Fired...
Army Corps Found Negligent by Federal Judge
The failure of the Corps to recognize the destruction that the MRGO [Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet navigation canal] had caused and the potential hazard that it created is clearly negligent on the part of the Corps. Furthermore, the Corps not only knew, but admitted...
Coastal Conservation Corps:
A New CCC for Coastal Restoration—and Jobs
Levees Not War is pleased to direct your attention to LaCoastPost, where you can read a guest post titled “Why Not Institute a ‘Green’ Corps for the Coast?”, or, “Reinventing the CCC and WPA.” In collaboration with LaCoastPost editor Len Bahr, a coastal science and...
Levees Not War Meets LaCoastPost
We regretted missing the annual Katrina bloggerfest and live social networking known as Rising Tide 4 in New Orleans this past August—an omission we hope not to repeat. By way of making up for some of that fellow blogger community spirit, last week we took a long...
What Is New Orleans?
Resilient, a Moveable Feast, and Growing, Slowly
Loyola panel discussion well attended, thought-provoking, encouraging The moderator and panelists presented some very thoughtful and deeply felt responses to the question “What Is New Orleans” at Loyola’s Nunemaker Auditorium Wednesday night. In his introduction, the...
What Is New Orleans? Come Find Out.
How Do You Define a City? Anybody who is within driving, walking, or biking distance of Loyola University in New Orleans on Wednesday night should think positively about coming to the discussion titled “What Is New Orleans” to hear the thoughts of panelists Richard...
Obama Welcomed, and Challenged, in New Orleans
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL7aldiQLS0 Maybe he wished he’d planned to stay longer, though there may have been a point when he began to wish he hadn’t come at all. President Obama’s visit was criticized days in advance even by supporters for being too short. The...
Obama Visits New Orleans (Too Briefly)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od2bOkQ4Kf0 President Obama visits New Orleans for about four hours today. He will visit the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in the Lower Ninth Ward from about noon till 1:00 p.m., and then will hold a town hall meeting at UNO...
A Word About Our Focus on Health Care Reform
Levee-lovin’, tree-huggin’ as ever As our regular readers will have noticed, we’ve lately been focusing most of our energies on helping the campaign for health care reform. This is part of our mission: since Katrina we’ve been pushing Congress and the White House for...
Scenes from a Health Reform Phone Bank
The setting: The living room of a volunteer’s apartment in Manhattan. The action: A night of phoning voters, mostly Obama supporters, in Florida, Indiana, and Virginia. Many wrong or disconnected numbers, or no one home (so we leave messages). “Hello, my name is —....
Viva Burlesque!
Will you pardon us while we take a break from being all-serious all the time? This weekend, Sept. 11-13, The City That Care Forgot hosts the first annual New Orleans Burlesque Festival, which we hope will be the first of many to come. Featuring Foxy Flambeaux, Praline...
Does Believing in Social Contract Make Us Socialists? Then So Be It.
Learning What We’re Up Against, and How to Carry On If we’re learning anything from the messy struggles for health care reform and the passage of the stimulus bill back in February (how long ago that feels!)—and it’s far from clear whether anyone is learning...
RT4: Sinking to New Heights
Just a quick word to say hello to our friends gathering in New Orleans this weekend for the fourth annual Rising Tide bloggers’ conference on the recovery and future of the Sunken City. Can’t be there this time—profound regrets—but we’ll be there in spirit and hope to...
When Ivor Talks, We Listen (Hear That, LSU?)
The following excerpts are highlights from our interview with Dr. van Heerden just before his book THE STORM was published in 2006. The interview can be read in full here.
Fugate for FEMA: “Semper Gumby”—In an Emergency, “The Calmest Man in the Room”
Some of our readers are too young to remember a time when the much-derided FEMA actually functioned well. That would be 1993 to 2001: Under President Clinton, former Arkansas emergency services director James Lee Witt directed FEMA with direct, cabinet-level access to the president and earned wide, bipartisan respect for his competence and flexibility.
Happy days—or at least competent days—are soon to be here again. President Obama has nominated W. Craig Fugate, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, to be the next head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This is good news indeed.
Happy Mardi Gras 2009
To everyone in New Orleans—and wherever Carnival is celebrated—we send warm greetings and best wishes for abundant fun and pleasures on Fat Tuesday, for joyful forgetting and release from heavy cares, and hopes that you may come back to your daily life refreshed and reinvigorated, with not too grinding a hangover.