Waiting for Fitzgerald

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
I have heard it said
They now think the levees
Fell from bad construction
Instead of rough seas.

That said, I don't see
How Feds predict for sure
An Act of God
(Or at least Force Majeure).
I'm afraid to say, Spanks,
That is seems it is so -
You find assumed risk and bad luck,
And you throw at it dough.

Guys, Guys, Guys. There is a cold wind blowing through here. The whole city of New Orleans is a flood plain. If you are rich, then OK you should have seen this coming. But what about all the poor people that have lived there for generations. Where they all supposed to move out? They detrimentally relied on the levee. Screw the nice areas but should the poor have some help in rebuilding their homes?

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
My wife told me about this several years ago, in more general terms, as something "she had heard" which should answer your question.

S_A_M

Snopes says not so. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/lightsout.asp

what is wrong with you people that you don't check snopes? Even my ancient mother checks Snopes.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Spanky
Guys, Guys, Guys. There is a cold wind blowing through here. The whole city of New Orleans is a flood plain. If you are rich, then OK you should have seen this coming. But what about all the poor people that have lived there for generations. Where they all supposed to move out? They detrimentally relied on the levee. Screw the nice areas but should the poor have some help in rebuilding their homes?

They should be given a reasonable amount of money and make decisions on their own for going forward. Which is different from having their homes rebuilt in NO.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Bravo

Merci beaucoup -
Guess the effort's well spent.
(Though I think that "Brava"
Is the word that you meant.)

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Merci beaucoup -
Guess the effort's well spent.
(Though I think that "Brava"
Is the word that you meant.)

The rapping Libertarian.

I eagerly await your next album -- "F--k tha GOP."

S_A_M

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by Spanky
Guys, Guys, Guys. There is a cold wind blowing through here. The whole city of New Orleans is a flood plain. If you are rich, then OK you should have seen this coming. But what about all the poor people that have lived there for generations. Where they all supposed to move out? They detrimentally relied on the levee. Screw the nice areas but should the poor have some help in rebuilding their homes?

I don't lack all pity,
Nor charity eschew,
But, alas, the poor
Will be always with you.

(I should pro'bly be careful -
This gets easy fast,
And I'm not sure how long
Y'all's patience will last.)

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
The main purpose of
the New Orleans levee
system is to keep passable
the lower Mississippi,

Not to save private houses
or other properties.
The river wouldn't be navigable
without the levees.

That's more normative that descriptive.

The only purpose
of a new orleans levee
should be to allow ships
to reach the sea.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Spanky
They detrimentally relied on the levee.

You don't know that. Maybe they detrementally relied on a lying broker, or the long-range forecast of global warming.

They assumed the risk; it's their burden to show they didn't.

[Gattigap]

Welcome to your new Trailer Park.

Seriously. From the LA Times:

• WASHINGTON — Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly by covering as much as $10,000 of their rent.
  
  But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. Although emergency vouchers had been successfully used after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid.
  
  A similar struggle has occurred over how to provide healthcare to storm victims. White House officials are quietly working to derail a proposal by leading Republican and Democratic senators to temporarily expand Medicaid. Instead, the administration is pushing a narrower plan that would not commit the government to covering certain groups of evacuees.
  
  As President Bush tackles the monumental task of easing the social problems wrought by Katrina, he is proving deeply reluctant to use some of the big-government tools at his disposal, apparently out of fear of permanently enlarging programs that he opposes or has sought to cut.
  
  Instead of depending on long-running programs for such services as housing and healthcare, the president has generally tried to create new, one-shot efforts that the administration apparently hopes will more easily disappear after the crisis passes. That has meant relying on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has run virtually all of the recovery effort.
  
  "FEMA can help fill some immediate needs after a disaster, like giving grants to help people repair their roofs or pay for temporary housing," said John P. Sucich, a former senior FEMA official who oversaw the recovery from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "But it is not the agency to turn to to ensure the kinds of continuing help that families need to begin putting their lives back together.
  
  "That's what the rest of government is for," Sucich said.
  
  At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president's unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.
  
  "The idea that — in a community where we could place people in the private housing market to reintegrate them into society — we would put them in [trailer] ghettos with no jobs, no community, no future, strikes me as extraordinarily bad public policy, and violates every conservative principle that I'm aware of," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.
  
  "If they do it," Gingrich said of administration officials, "they will look back on it six months from now as the greatest disaster of this administration."

Wow.

Read the rest of the article. It's amazing stuff. Miss. Governor Haley Barbour also agrees with current Senate plans to expand Medicaid, which the Administration is resisting largely because it doesn't like Medicaid in the first place and is wary of expanding it.

When you have Gingrich and Barbour slamming the Administration's plans, it means that this Rove-directed Katrina reconstruction plan has some real doozies. This will be a fun few years to watch.

Gattigap

[Secret_Agent_Man]

http://www.comcast.net/news/national...23/227239.html

Guess they were surprised when the folks showed up for the conference in the principal's office.

I'm sure this is somehow Bush's fault.

S_A_M

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
I don't lack all pity,
Nor charity eschew,
But, alas, the poor
Will be always with you.

(I should pro'bly be careful -
This gets easy fast,
And I'm not sure how long
Y'all's patience will last.)

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Cut that shit out right fucking now
Because I know where you live.

Originally posted by Gattigap
Welcome to your new Trailer Park.

It's much easier to put a 15-foot high barb-wire fence around a trailer park (for the safety and protection of the residents of course) than to let them spread out through the community and get up to god-knows-what-all mischief.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
You come from such an absurd position that it is hard to know what to say. I might have a theory that Bush is really a catholic but he just hides it. There is no way to ever prove or disprove that theory. Same with this theory. Unless someone leaks that this is what happened this theory can never go beyond speculation.

Yet because people have been talking about the possibility that this might have happened you talk about it as if it were a fact. Just because people are suggesting this is a possiblity does not make it true.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. All I'm accusing the White House of is mastering the release of budgetary information for maximum political spin. It's very simple: When they release estimates, they inflate the estimates. Then, when the actual numbers come out, they can say, here is the huge deficit but -- good news! -- it's not as bad as was predicted. As an example of the political arts it's very clever so long as people don't catch on, and that's not the sort of thing that newspaper reporters and TV journalists are likely to do, given the constraints under which they operate. Which the White House, being a bunch of pros, understands.

Instead of just calling this absurd, read The Economist:

• The more cynical observers suggested that the administration was simply releasing a gargantuan number for the pleasure of later telling voters that the budget deficit was closing faster than expected. In support of their argument, figures released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in March projected a deficit of only $365 billion.
  
  When the OMB revised its numbers sharply downward in July, to $333 billion, the doubting Thomases seemed to have a good case.

It's more complicated than that, for reasons explained in what I linked to.

Of course, this is only a sideline to the argument you've been having about who is responsible for which deficits.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Spanky
Guys, Guys, Guys. There is a cold wind blowing through here. The whole city of New Orleans is a flood plain. If you are rich, then OK you should have seen this coming. But what about all the poor people that have lived there for generations. Where they all supposed to move out? They detrimentally relied on the levee. Screw the nice areas but should the poor have some help in rebuilding their homes?

RINO RINO RINO RINO RINO RINO RINO


Won't the market provide? Why should government?

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
http://www.comcast.net/news/national...23/227239.html

Guess they were surprised when the folks showed up for the conference in the principal's office.

I'm sure this is somehow Bush's fault.

S_A_M

The link doesn't link to any story about that.

ETA fuck, but then it did. maybe there's a gremlin in my computer.