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Tag: Katrina

Drinking Liberally on The Daily Show

The fabulous organization Drinking Liberally was noted on The Daily show yesterday — and my all-time favorite Drinking Liberally lady Katrina* is the first interviewee. My head is in the background (white sweater, brown ponytail, dumb faces). It’s a pretty good segment; check it out:

*I’m just glad we have a category called “Katrina” to file this under.

Let Me Explain Something About Connecticut Politics

Pam is surprised, disgusted even, that Holy Joe Lieberman has backed off criticism of the Bush Administration for its handling of Katrina and its aftermath.

I’m not. Surprised, that is (disgusted is another matter).

One thing: despite having lost some HQs, Hartford is still the center of the insurance industry. As I know from when my father lost his job at Travelers during one of the first waves of insurance-company layoffs in the late 80s, as goes the insurance industry, so goes Hartford. And since Connecticut’s a small state and the defense industry has pretty well dried up (it was dying even when I was there 15 years ago), the insurance industry is more or less it.

Actually, the surprise is that he remembered that he has constituents at all.

Thank God They Saved The Embryos So More White Babies Could Be Born

Attaturk had this little tidbit from the news:

Their embryos, along with those belonging to hundreds of other couples, were kept at the Fertility Institute’s laboratory at the hospital. Two days before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, the clinic took steps to protect the embryos by topping off all its tanks with liquid nitrogen and moving them to the third floor.

But Katrina’s eight feet of water knocked out the electricity, and the temperature climbed. A freshly topped-off tank is safe for three to four weeks in an air-conditioned room, but “I’m sure the temperature was over 100 degrees in that hospital,” Dr. Belinda “Sissy” Sartor, a fertility expert for the institute.

Fearing the embryos would be ruined, she contacted a state lawmaker, who called Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and on Sept. 11, Illinois officers on loan to Louisiana set out in National Guard trucks, towing flat-bottomed boats.

A flat surface was essential: The 35- and 40-liter nitrogen tanks, which weigh 75 and 90 pounds, had to stay upright. If one tipped over, the nitrogen would spill.

In the hospital parking lot, the boats puttered past cars still flooded almost up to their windows. The boats were taken through the flooded halls, and the embryos were floated out. They were taken across town to a hospital that had not flooded.

The embryos, which are kept in separate labeled vials inside the tanks, were undamaged, doctors said.

Well, isn’t that interesting.

I posted recently about an episode of Dirty Jobs involving house gutters in St. Bernard Parish, where I did my volunteer stint. The host asked the house gutters about the mark that appears on nearly every house in the area, a spray-painted X with certain information in each quadrant. The top quadrant is the date the house was searched, and the left quadrant contains the ID of the search unit. I don’t have the episode saved on my TiFaux anymore, but I do remember that the mark on the house indicated that the house had been searched on Sept. 12 or so by the Illinois National Guard. So before the Illinois Guard units were searching houses in badly-flood-damaged St. Bernard Parish for survivors — you know, actual, existing people — or bodies, they were rescuing frozen embryos from a private fertility clinic at the behest of the governor so that couples who can afford to throw down $12 grand for an attempted pregnancy wouldn’t have to start over again:

But if the embryos had thawed, each woman who wanted another baby would have had to undergo another expensive round of fertility drugs, egg harvesting, and in vitro fertilization. Markham estimated her first pregnancy cost $12,000; the second $2,000. Her husband’s insurance covered that, but had a lifetime cap of $15,000.


When I visited the Lower Ninth Ward, I noticed that the dates in the top quadrant were from the end of September. The dates in St. Bernard — a much more affluent community — were from the week of 9/12 – 9/17. So if the Guard units were dispatched to affluent communities sooner than to poor communities, what does it say that embryos trumped the affluent communities?

UPDATE: The episode is on now, and the date was indeed 9/12. Beth has a point in comments that the dates had something to do with accessibility of neighborhoods rather than affluence; still, the very idea that military units would be dispatched to save frozen embryos before searching homes for bodies and/or survivors (who, after all, could have used the fresh water at that point) is just horrifying.

Posted in Uncategorized

Housegutting in New Orleans

This week’s Dirty Jobs focuses on jobs in the New Orleans area, cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina. The first segment is housegutters in St. Bernard Parish.

Ever wonder what I was doing down there earlier this year? Check it out on Discovery. It repeats throughout the week.

Posted in Uncategorized

Other than bungling the capture of Bin Laden, wrecking the economy, breaking the Army in Iraq, and fucking up the Katrina recovery, he’s doing a GREAT job!

There’s a reason Jonah Goldberg is called the Pantload. Take a gander at the latest LA Times column he’s fished from his adult diaper:

LORD KNOWS I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

Translation: I need to establish my contrarian cred prior to giving Bush a rimjob, and others have already broken ranks on these two issues, so I can be “contrarian” without actually sticking my neck out.

But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.

Translation: Commence rimjob!

Read More…Read More…

Posted in War

New Orleans, Through Artists’ Eyes

The Times has a wonderful Op-Art feature (scroll down to “Op-Art: A Flood of Images”) commemorating the anniversary of Katrina. The Times asked artists who either lived in New Orleans or spent considerable time there to draw and write about places of particular importance to them in the city.

Posted in Uncategorized

A Year After Katrina

The New York Times has a good piece on the damage that Katrina did to George Bush’s carefully stage-managed post-9/11 image of the strong, resolute war preznit.

Katrina gave even those who were supportive of the president and thought he could do no wrong a much-needed dose of reality: with the horribly bungled response to Katrina, they had to admit that there is no there in this presidency. There was a veneer of resolute strength that was blown away for good by Katrina. Sure, we got glimpses from time to time of the man behind the curtain, such as with his bizarre performance during the debates with John Kerry, when he angrily told nobody in particular to let him finish and had some weird lump on his back that apparently held a transmitter of some kind. But that wasn’t enough. We were at war. You don’t change horses mid-stream, and all that.

But Katrina exposed just how unprepared the government was to respond to large-scale disaster. If the federal government can’t get buses to the Superdome, the thinking went, how can they protect us from terrorists?

Now, I personally think that the threat from terrorists has been vastly overstated — and I say this as someone who lives in New York and went through 9/11. No terrorist operation can cause the kind of destruction and disruption and loss of life that a large-scale natural disaster can. And has. But the Administration so hyped the threat from terrorists and so broadened the term so that anything and everything could be tied into terrorism somehow that the threat from natural disasters seemed, somehow, less terrifying than some rich guy getting dialysis in a cave in Pakistan.

And then we had Katrina, and the country had to acknowledge that the federal government fucked up. And if they fucked this up, there’s no way they can be trusted to keep us safe from terrorists. And if they can’t keep us safe from terrorists, then what in the blue blazes are we doing in Iraq, creating MORE terrorists?

And suddenly, Bush wasn’t such a popular president anymore. People forget that he wasn’t very popular at all on Sept. 10, 2001, and it was only because he said some things on a rubble pile and then clamped down on the press, calling anyone disloyal or unpatriotic who disagreed with him or questioned him, that he remained as popular as he did for so long.

And now, a year later, Bush plans to go to New Orleans to commemorate the anniversary of the storm that did in his popularity and exposed just how little substance there is in his Administration. He will probably not allow himself to be photographed where there are still piles of debris or unstable levees or wrecked houses. But the images of all those things, and the reality of the region, which is nervously eyeing Hurricane Ernesto as it moves into the Gulf, will haunt him nonetheless.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

New Orleans’ Women Being Left Behind

The Times-Picayune has a story about a study (pdf) from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research which shows that, as bad as everybody has it in New Orleans, women have it that much worse:

When it comes to economic opportunity in post-Katrina New Orleans, women, particularly African-American women, have been largely ignored, according to a report on the local labor market released Friday.

Because of the acute shortage of affordable housing across the flood-ravaged Gulf Coast, the study also found that few single-mother families have been able to return.

According to Avis Jones-DeWeever, the institute’s director of poverty, education and social justice, the storm made an already-bad situation worse for the women of New Orleans.

“Research suggests that long before Katrina, women were living at the bottom,” she said, “earning significantly less than men in the city at the same level of education, and earning significantly less than their female counterparts nationwide.”

And since the storm, data collected by the institute shows that men are benefiting more from the rebuilding effort than women, Jones-DeWeever said.

Consider some statistics:

  • Before Katrina, women made up 56% of the local workforce; now they make up 46%.
  • The number of families headed by single mothers in the metropolitan area has dropped from 51,000 to less than 17,000.
  • Food stamp usage by those single mothers who have returned has quadrupled.
  • Black women are not being employed in professional and managerial positions in New Orleans.
  • The median earnings for men in their lowest-paid occupations range from $15,150 to $23,500 annually, compared with women’s earnings of $11,400 to $20,000 in their lowest-paid occupations.
  • At the high end of the scale, men’s median earnings range from $38,700 to $130,000, compared with a high range of $30,000 to $63,000 for women.

    • The statistics in the study are disheartening, said state Rep. Karen Carter, who took part in the institute’s midday news conference.

    “This report is quite tragic,” said Carter, D-New Orleans. “It’s unacceptable. Women vote. Women pay taxes. And women deserve better. The city will suffer if immediate action is not taken. It’s a crisis within the crisis that people are dealing with in their everyday lives as they try to rebuild.”

    And that rebuilding is projected to take 10 to 15 years. One common theme of the report is that women must be given opportunities to participate in the rebuilding and trained and encouraged to take those opportunities, particularly in the high-paying construction trades.

    H/T: Broadsheet.

    Faaaabulous.

    Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — a woman and a Democrat — signs into law a South Dakota-style abortion ban.

    NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Louisiana Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law a ban on most abortions, which would be triggered if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 ruling legalizing the procedure, a spokesman said on Saturday.

    The ban would apply to all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, except when the mother’s life is threatened. It is similar to a South Dakota law that has become the latest focus of the abortion battle.

    But, see, it’s okay, because it will only go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned, and it will allow abortions for rape and incest for Medicaid recipients just as long as Medicaid rules require it.

    So, let’s review. The South Dakota ban is turning into a political disaster even among conservatives, Louisiana already *has* a trigger law, there are large swaths of coastal Louisiana that are depopulated and destroyed and have no functioning economy, the levees in New Orleans are barely patched together, tens of thousands of people are living in tin cans with hurricane season upon us . . . . and it’s vitally necessary to pass an abortion ban that won’t even take effect until some future event happens?