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One hour into the State of the Union address, 3 minutes before it ended, the President spoke about New Orleans and Louisiana.

For 20 seconds.

Mainly to mention that New Orleans was a shithole before the storm.

Thanks.

The Krewe of Zulu is opening up its membership for 2006, since so many of their riders cannot ride this year.

Here’s a link to post on the metroblog for New Orleans where I first saw this:
http://neworleans.metblogs.com/archives/2006/01/zulu_krewe_suff.phtml

I can think of no better way to drop $1500. I wish I had that kind of cash lying around.

Not surprisngly, Michael Brown made The BEAST’s list of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America. Here’s his entry:

35. Michael Brown

Charges: Second fiddle to Bush’s Nero—except that while New Orleans sank, Michael Brown just fiddled with himself. A man of geological indolence, Brown makes lichens seem dynamic. Despite being woefully unqualified for his job as FEMA director, it was Brown’s lethal callousness that really astounded (and killed) so many Americans. When one of only two FEMA employees Brown had vouchsafed New Orleans wrote two days after Katrina that “the situation is past critical,” Brown responded, “Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?” When he finally arrived in Louisiana, Brown was preoccupied with demanding more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant, instead of sucking down an MRE and getting to work doing his incredibly important job, like a fucking man. Brown reacted to the most important moment in his life like an immature college student who realizes he’s fucking up the semester and stops going to class without telling anyone. No human being can possibly be this ineffective unless he simply doesn’t give a shit if people die.

Exhibit A: In subsequent communications, Brown asked, “Can I quit now? Can I come home?” and complained about trouble finding a dog sitter. With almost comical indifference to those actually suffering, he wrote: “I’m trapped now, please rescue me.”

Sentence: What else? Dehydrated, starved, and slowly baked to death on a Ninth Ward rooftop while repeatedly buzzed by news helicopters. Body secretly recovered and incinerated by Blackwater operatives as part of a Cheney-initiated campaign to keep casualty figures artificially low.

Concering the Ray Nagin T-Shirts, this post over at the New Orleans blog People Get Ready sums up my thoughts pretty well.

Here’s the link:
http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/2006/01/willie-wonka-ray-nagin-chocolate-city.html

(the repeated Willie Wonka Ray Nagin Chocolate City T-Shirt links are designed to move the Eracism site further up Google’s rankings when people search for Willie Wonka and Ray Nagin. By repeating the link here, elbuzzard.com is also contributing to what’s known as a googlebomb.)

Here’s a bit from Roger Wilson’s editorial for the Gambit. Read the full article at
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2006-01-17/news_feat.php

It speaks to the “New Orleans isn’t worth rebuilding” argument. Ironically, he draws his inspiration from a recent speech by our previous beloved mayor, Marc Morial.

Beneath a phalanx of camera lights being powered by generators some five months after the fact, Morial spoke in eloquent terms about the previous fates of places such as San Francisco, Chicago and New York City, and how each had been “reborn, rebuilt and revitalized” following events (earthquake, fire and kamikaze terrorists, respectively) that threatened their very existence. In each case, ashes somehow gave way to opportunity. Perhaps because in each case these cities and their traumatized populace were given the time, the money and the chance to rebuild; without compromise, without exclusion, and without explaining their need to do so. Sitting there listening to Morial, one question kept bouncing across my mind, “Why not New Orleans?”

To me, this question is the question in our city’s most uncertain hour. Its utterance has been made necessary by the fact that many Americans, and far too many officials in high office, have unabashedly, almost cockily, debated the merits of making this city whole again. And by that, I mean putting it back exactly as it was before being consumed by the world’s first man-made tsunami. The optimist in me would like to think such a thoughtless and casual attitude towards the future of nearly a half-million Americans, never mind the memory of a thousand more who died only God knows how horribly, owes more to an ignorance of New Orleans’ place in American history than to some undeserved animosity towards its beleaguered people.

Yet this suggestion of a “smaller New Orleans,” what some have called a “better” New Orleans, has for these last five months maintained a remarkable legitimacy around the globe, making my optimism seem about as sound as the walls along the 17th Street Canal. Inside the corridors of our own national government, rather than being excoriated for the blasphemous dialogue it truly represents, this talk of “not wasting money on New Orleans” has assumed the personage of a genuine political discourse. A point wholly laughable in the face of what we spend monthly in Iraq, and one in which our state’s national representatives are asked to grovel for assistance, while the government and private sector are allowed to demure. What makes this even more difficult to accept is the culpability this same government bears in the very unfolding of New Orleans’ present crisis. You know you’re in trouble when the assessment of your worth lies at the very feet of those in great part responsible for its annihilation.

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