He gets extra points for not saying, "it's so cool that you people have a competent Governor, now! Big help!"

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

This is one of the reasons I had mixed emotions when Jindal was being considered as a Veep possibility for Johnny Mac: he's just doing such amazing things in Louisiana. I think they still need him to continue the growth and weather the next few storms (literal and metaphorical).

Governor Jindal, in the Wall Street Journal, explaining how he and his team turned Louisiana around:

Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans and southeast Louisiana. A few weeks later, Hurricane Rita hit southwest Louisiana, completely demolishing some of our coastal communities. These terrible storms destroyed thousands of small businesses, displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, killed over a thousand people, and caused tens of billions of dollars in property damage.

At the time, many experts predicted Louisiana's economy would never be the same. That's true, though not the way the experts thought: It's getting better.

These storms forced us to rethink our aspirations as a state. We are not just rebuilding the failed institutions of the past -- we are rebuilding smarter.

We streamlined our state recovery processes, cutting red tape, and are pushing federal recovery dollars to local governments to rebuild critical infrastructure, all without forfeiting transparency and accountability. And we continue to focus on helping our hardest-hit communities complete their recovery efforts.

We also moved quickly to increase Louisiana's overall economic competitiveness. Shortly after my inauguration in January, we worked with the state legislature to adopt the strongest governmental ethics laws in the country. Next we eliminated unorthodox business taxes. We also adopted a comprehensive workforce-development reform plan to improve the effectiveness of our community and technical colleges, provide turnkey workforce solutions to expanding and relocating businesses, and ensure that our workforce programs are driven by real business needs.

For the first time in our history, Louisiana has become a hotbed for education innovation. In New Orleans, state and local education leaders are working with national nonprofits and foundations to implement a variety of promising reform efforts, including charter schools and school choice for disadvantaged kids.

While we need to retain and grow our traditional industries, the state also needs to diversify our economy through new, high-growth sectors.

Louisiana is now among the top three states in the country for film productions. We are seeking to match that success in the digital media sector . . .

We are becoming a national leader in the coming global nuclear-energy resurgence, as well. On Tuesday, The Shaw Group and Westinghouse announced that they chose Louisiana for the first manufacturing facility in the U.S. focused on building modular components for new and modified nuclear reactors.

Louisiana is attracting significant investment in mature industry sectors . . . . Edison Chouest Offshore, one of the world's most technologically advanced offshore vessel service companies, recently announced plans to construct a 1,000-job shipyard in Port of Terrebonne, in south Louisiana.

We also have implemented conservative fiscal management practices. For example, a state hiring freeze saved $39 million and led to the elimination of nearly 1,000 state jobs. I vetoed 258 line items in the recently passed state budget, which is more than double the number of vetoes in the past 12 budgets combined. And we ended our state's long-held habit of using one-time revenues to cover recurring expenditures. These efforts helped us to implement the largest personal income tax cut in state history, while freeing up new funds to invest in higher education, transportation, research, health care and coastal restoration.

Thanks in large part to these reforms and our aggressive efforts to attract new business investment, our economy today is strong. Compared to the nation as a whole, Louisiana's economy is growing substantially faster, and our state has considerably lower unemployment levels.

The rest of the country is starting to take notice. Citing strong fiscal management, three major credit-rating agencies -- Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch -- recently upgraded Louisiana's bond ratings. The Center for Public Integrity noted that Louisiana's new governmental ethics laws regarding legislative disclosure will increase our ranking to first in the country, from 44th. For the first time, U.S. News & World Report ranked LSU in the top tier of its list of America's Best Colleges. And Forbes magazine increased its growth-prospects ranking for Louisiana to 17th from 45th.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:44 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 720 words, total size 5 kb.

Zendo D asks some tough questions about New Orleans.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . stereotyping innocent ghosts.

Posted by: Attila at 01:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 14 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . there's a movement afoot to recall Gov. Blanco. I'd love to see that happen.

(h/t: Reynolds, Goldstein)

Posted by: Attila at 09:10 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 28 words, total size 1 kb.

More here. I suspect the Golden State will even more fertile for this blogospheric grass-roots action than it is for lettuce and grapes.

Posted by: Attila at 09:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.

Help us to cut government waste.

Posted by: Attila at 07:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . she's going to collapse from dizziness. Or was that ditziness?

Via Insty.

Posted by: Attila at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 23 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . has a nice little summary on why the FEMA response to Katrina was faster and more efficient than what is usual and customary, and why the local and state authorities are supposed to be able to handle the situation for at least 72 hours.

Posted by: Attila at 11:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . compares Federal failures on 9/11 to local/state failures during Katrina, and asks which level of bureaucracy would you rather be let down by?

Certainly events in NO haven't shown us our favorite side of human nature: not for the most part.

Posted by: Attila at 01:29 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . Goldstein takes Newsweek to task, ever-so-gently, for an article that appears to ask the eternal question "who's your Daddy?"

And to answer itself, "The Federal Government, of course."

Posted by: Attila at 11:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . has a roundup on the Gretna bridge incident, wherein people from New Orleans were being cut off and not allowed out of the city. This roadblock may be the single worst scandal to emerge from Katrina.

One of the debates going on about this roadblock of the only dry route out of New Orleans has to do with whether Gretna police locked their city down out of racial motivations, or out of real fear that their town would be overwhelmed, or that criminals would cross the bridge and cause problems in their neighborhoods. All that aside, it still looks heartless: had I lived in Gretna, I would have been happy to take some of those people in, and I'll bet the town's residents feel that way too.

And, of course, the other question has to do with where the fucking Governor of Louisiana was at the time. You know: the chick who's trying to blame this all on the Feds, but wouldn't give them the authority to come in—nor use the National Guard to restore order so it would be legal for regular troops to take up positions to help.

UPDATE: Video here.

Posted by: Attila at 11:47 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 198 words, total size 1 kb.

Let's just Federalize all disaster preparations, and then get a dirty martini with three olives, made with Tanqueray Ten.

Goldstein attempts to point out the problems therewith, including that Constitution thingie.

Posted by: Attila at 08:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

An amazing eyewitness account from NOLA. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to verify it. But it's dramatic, for sure.

I'll snoop around over the weekend to see if I can authenticate it. Or, if you know its origins, leave the source in the comments.

UPDATE: The concensus appears to be that this narrative was strung together from a series of rumors. Unfortunately, we don't know which ones are true and which aren't. Like the Titanic disaster, this situation will be argued about for years. If there are hearings, perhaps historians will be able to figure out the main strands of responsibility—beyond Mother Nature's fury.

I did see the leftist bias in this narrative, but there are some factual problems: C-rations haven't been used in years (they are all MREs now), and National Guard units are deployed as units, rather than one guy from this one, two guys from that one, and the like. A lot of people have expressed skepticism about the notion that any authorities would actually physically confiscate food from citizens.

I do suspect there are elements of truth in this, but which aspects one tends to believe will probably depend upon one's political leanings.

That's why I'd like to see hearings: it would be nice to have someone other than Snopes trying to separate fact from fiction.

Posted by: Attila at 01:29 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 222 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . which was apparently higher in that state under Bush vs. Clinton.

Posted by: Attila at 03:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . tell us it's time to re-think politics in Louisiana and in New Orleans. Too late, for sure—but perhaps not too little.

Posted by: Attila at 03:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Behold the Nagin "Black Magic" Water Park. Isn't it spooky?

Posted by: Attila at 12:02 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

Authorities were . . . castigated by British bus driver Ged Scott, from Wallasey, Merseyside, who was on holiday in the New Orleans area.

He stayed in the Ramada Hotel during and after the devastation with his wife, Sandra, and seven-year-old son Ronan. At one stage, Mr Scott, 36, had to wade through filthy water to barricade the hotel doors against looters.

He told the Liverpool Daily Post: "I couldn't describe how bad the authorities were. Just little things like taking photographs of us, as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own little snapshot albums.

"At one point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the hotel saying 'Can you help us?' and the policemen said 'Show us what you've got' and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts. When the girls refused, they said 'Fine' and motored off down the road in their boat."

Via Lair.

Posted by: Attila at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 162 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . is Goldstein a little tense?

Posted by: Attila at 04:00 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

I still have a lot of entries from my stay in Scottsdale to bring up out of "draft" format and get onto the main page.

In the meantime, I've been listening to a lot of criticism of New Orleans officials—and some in Louisiana—who just did not appear to take this impending crisis seriously until it was too late. Some people chalk this up to the corruption that's rampant in the Big Easy, but I'm not so sure.

I called my husband yesterday morning from the desert to ask if this kind of negligent response would have occurred in Chicago under the first Mayor Daley.

"No, no," he tells me. "They were crooks, but they were competent crooks. That's why the people of Chicago went back to the Daley dynasty: ultimately, the matter of honesty mattered less than having a well-run city."

Posted by: Attila at 11:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 157 words, total size 1 kb.