While “disastrous” was among the more charitable descriptions of Bobby Jindal’s performance Tuesday night, we would like to thank him for mounting so ineffectual a response to President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. (The joke in the White House press room is that Jindal has gone from being a rising star to a black hole.) We take no pleasure in the derision—laughter at a governor who has made a fool of himself on national television only makes our state look bad—but we’re glad that he put up no serious resistance to the persuasiveness of Obama’s progressive agenda. Jindal has done us the favor of leaving his party even more leaderless and dispirited. His faux-optimistic speech, titled “Americans Can Do Anything,” was clearly written before the G.O.P. knew what Obama would say; they were expecting a gloomy assessment of the economy without an equal measure of confidence that the nation can rebuild and come back stronger than before.
hurricane katrina
Further Thoughts on Obama and New Orleans
A few days ago, prompted by an article by Naomi Klein in The Nation (“New Orleans: The City That Won’t Be Ignored”), we were asking, “Where was Obama while McCain was exploiting Gustav?” On further reflection, we should acknowledge that as the hurricane was approaching and two million were evacuating, fearing Katrina II, Obama said he did not want to get in the way of the emergency preparations. Also, it was easier for McCain to join his fellow Republicans, governors Barbour and Jindal, and with help from President Bush, all of whom had an interest in the GOP’s being seen as handling the emergency effectively.
Approaching Five Years in Iraq, 4,000th U.S. Fatality
We don’t know how this will play out, but we can be sure that while the Clinton and Obama campaigns sharpen their knives against each other, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will keep on killing and being killed—for what?—and the U.S. will still be borrowing billions monthly for those insatiable wars. And New Orleanians once able to afford rent or mortgage payments before the federal levees broke will still be homeless, encamped near City Hall and under the Claiborne Street overpass, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will still be late with its plan for Category 5–strength hurricane protection for New Orleans and vicinity.
An Open Letter to President Bush: Don’t Come Back Till WRDA Passes
The following letter has been faxed to the White House (202-456-2461). Please see below for a letter faxed to leaders in the House and Senate urging an override of the president’s veto. (The House has done it! 361 to 54—ninety votes more than needed to override.) Please see our ‘Political Action’ page for fax and phone numbers of the White House and Senate. Help us press for a Congressional override of the president’s veto—it would be a first. We’re halfway there. Thank you.
Interview with Mark Schleifstein
Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of
‘Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans
and the Coming Age of Superstorms’
Mark Schleifstein joined the Times-Picayune in 1984 as an environmental reporter after five years at the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1996 he and his Times-Picayune colleague John McQuaid have written numerous major environmental series for the paper, most recently in January 2006. Schleifstein and McQuaid won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?”—a comprehensive eight-day series about the threats to the world’s fish supply, including the effects of coastal wetlands erosion on fish in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the Picayune published their series “Home Wreckers: How the Formosan Termite Is Devastating New Orleans,” a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer.
Lessons Learned: FEMA Staff Ask the Questions at FEMA “Press Briefing”
Deputy administrator Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson praised his “very smoothly, very efficiently performing team.” (For the sake of the Californians, we hope he’s right.) “And so I think what you’re seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership, none of which were present in Katrina.” (Thanks for reminding us.)
“The mission here is not accomplished”: N.O. City Council Member Shelley Midura’s Stern, Bracing Letter to President Bush
Here is an eloquent and hard-hitting letter from New Orleans City Council Member Shelley Midura-first seen on Your Right Hand Thief (thanks, Oyster). Please join us in pressing the White House (202-456-1111; comments@whitehouse.gov) to “second” Midura’s motions.
[Note: Midura is now blogging on DailyKos. She writes: “I hope you can take the time to click on the link to my open letter to President Bush, Press Release and Fact Sheet . . . New Orleans will not allow the discussion of our recovery to be anything but factual and done via the reality based community and not through spin and talking points.”]
Interview with Christopher Cooper and Robert Block:
Authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security is a superb, authoritative work that focuses on the federal response to the disaster-a catastrophe within a catastrophe-but also gives an excellent background on the history of FEMA and of the levee system around New Orleans. Cooper and Block know New Orleans (Cooper lived there 10+ years as a Times-Picayune reporter) and they know FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a book of reportage that readers of any (or no) political persuasion can appreciate: Cooper and Block keep their opinions to themselves and let the facts do the talking. They show that the 80-percent evacuation of metro New Orleans was a resounding, unprecedented success; that the Bush administration severely and repeatedly cut federal funding for ongoing reinforcements of the city’s flood protection system; and that the U.S. government through the Army Corps of Engineers failed to protect the city, whose citizens never imagined the canals’ floodwalls would ever collapse.