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"New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin speaks during the City-Wide Remembrance, Renewal, Rebirth Service commemorating the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2006."

CBS) Confronted by accusations that he’s taking too long to clean up his city after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin defended himself by remarking on New York City’s failure to rebuild Ground Zero. Nagin made the remarks in an interview conducted by CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts which will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. EDT. On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned...

In the first months after Hurricane Katrina, when subsiding floodwaters gave way to an eerie calm, residents returning to New Orleans were treated to a virtually crime-free landscape, a strange but welcome change in an era of over-amped violence. Police officers would go entire shifts without a hot call, spending most of their time filling out paperwork for looting complaints. National Guard troops grew bored manning checkpoints in empty neighborhoods. If there was a reminder of homegrown violence, it was a distant one, seen mostly in headlines from evacuee-swollen cities like Houston. Newly elevated Police Superintendent Warren Riley, even as...

Blanco To Send State Police, National Guard into New Orleans June 19, 2006 04:20 PM In the wake of a shooting that left five people dead this weekend, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco pledged Monday afternoon to send additional law enforcement resources into the city of New Orleans, WAFB 9 NEWS Capitol Correspondent Marie Centanni reported. Blanco said the additional law enforcement presence, to be made up of Louisiana State Police and National Guard troops, will be in place for an initial commitment of two-and-a-half months, Centanni reported. The governor did not disclose an exact number of personnel she will deploy....

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has asked for National Guard troops and state police to patrol the city and help quell violence after five teenagers were killed over the weekend, local media said on Monday. Five teens were shot to death before dawn on Saturday in one of the most deadly attacks in the history of the city, which left residents reeling. Nagin responded at a special city council meeting by saying he would ask Gov. Kathleen Blanco for the troops, local television stations WWL-TV and WVUE said on their Web sites. The weekend shooting raised...

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin asked the governor Monday to send National Guard troops to patrol his city after a violent weekend in which five teenagers were shot to death. City leaders convened a special meeting to voice outrage after the killings Saturday in an area near the central business district. "If we don't have wind knocking us down, we have shooters knocking us down, and that's unacceptable," said City Council President Oliver Thomas. The shootings brought this year's murder toll to 52, raising fears that violence was back on the rise in a city that had been plagued...

NEW ORLEANS - Five people ranging in age from 16 to 19 were killed in a street shooting early Saturday, the most violent crime reported in this slowly repopulating city since Hurricane Katrina hit last August. All were believed to have been gunned down while inside a sport utility vehicle that was found rammed against a utility pole in the Central City neighborhood just outside the central business district. Authorities said they were looking for one or more suspects but did not elaborate. Capt. John Bryson said police think the shootings were either drug-related or some type of retaliation attack....

Nine months after Hurricane Katrina swamped his city and transformed him from virtual shoo-in to ripe target, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin surged to a second term Saturday, besting Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu to maintain leadership of a city still languishing in ruin. Nagin, a former cable television executive who ran as a political outsider four years ago, overcame withering criticism of his performance in the months since the Aug. 29 storm. Acknowledging that the effort to restore basic municipal services has been painfully slow, Nagin blamed the lack of progress on a failure of state and federal government to...

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin, whose shoot-from-the-hip style was both praised and scorned after Hurricane Katrina, narrowly won re-election over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on Saturday in the race to oversee one of the biggest rebuilding projects in U.S. history. "We are ready to take off. We have citizens around the country who want to come back to the city of New Orleans, and we're going to get them all back," Nagin said in a joyful victory speech that took on the tone of Sunday sermon. "If we are unified there is nothing we cannot do," he said. "It's...

Mayor Ray Nagin, ridiculed nationally and derided some locally following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, has been re-elected to office in a fairly tight race against Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu. Nagin took over 80 percent of the African-American vote and just over 20 percent of the white vote in defeating Landrieu. The totals are in contrast to four years ago when Nagin got 84 percent of the white vote in his race against Richard Pennington. Nagin received national attention as the mayor of a devastated city, especially with calls for the federal government to "get off their ass" and help...

TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) - May 11, 2006 - Chocolate was more than a treat for the Continental Army – it was their MRE's. Rodney Snyder, a historian for candy maker Mars, Incorporated, says the soldiers in the Continental Army would have a couple of cups of hot chocolate in the morning and be good until lunch. He says chocolate was a staple of Revolutionary War rations. Mars is out with a new line of products based on old recipes. American Heritage Chocolate was introduced at a historic fort in upstate New York yesterday. The products will be sold at just...

When beer truck driver Wes McNeal was fighting for his life with an armed robber, he would have loved to have seen a blue and white Memphis Police cruiser turning the corner at Looney and Dunlap. McNeal, a distributor for D. Canale Beverages, was robbed at gunpoint of $603 and about $1,000 in receipts. He was the second vendor victimized at that spot recently. "It's a hot corner," McNeal said as he left the hospital for treatment of shoulder, elbow and face injuries. "I'm there, and I never see cruisers in the area." McNeal was one of 10 people robbed...

A new book about the Katrina catastrophe paints a portrait of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as a clueless, collapsing coward who hid out after the hurricane in a high-rise hotel - and had to be rousted out of Air Force One's bathroom.

Nagin Scores Well With Blacks in Big Easy By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 5 minutes ago In a complete reversal of support from four years ago, Mayor Ray Nagin scored heavily with black voters and was practically abandoned by whites as he and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu won spots in a runoff election for mayor of New Orleans. Slightly more than half of the overall vote was attributed to black voters, who favored the top two candidates, according to a consulting firm analyzing demographic data for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. In predominantly white precincts, Nagin trailed...

Fox News has just reported that Mayor Ray Nagin, the man who has declared that "At the end of the day, New Orleans will be chocolate again", is leading the pack of 22 candidates for Mayor of New Orleans with 37%. He will be in a runoff with his closest competitor, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu who received 20%.

Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is hoping to sell its flooded school buses on eBay. Mayor Ray Nagin admitted that the buses are unsalvageable, but could have nostalgic value. "These were the buses that could've been used to evacuate stranded people, but weren't," said Nagin. "That gives them historic significance. Buyers ought to be willing to pay for that." Funds raised by the sale will be dedicated to the mayor's "city chocolatization" program.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is reaching out to his city's residents still living in Houston with a large billboard on the southeast side at the Gulf Freeway and Wayside. It reads "Re-elect our Mayor Ray Nagin and let's keep New Orleans moving forward." Members of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association have arranged for buses to take people back to the city to vote. Early voting begins Monday.

New Orleans -- A federal judge Monday refused to delay New Orleans' April 22 mayoral election, but told lawyers on both sides of the case to identify any problems that might hinder displaced residents' ability to vote and then solve them.

Sociologist William Falk isn't sure how many people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina will, in time, return to the city to live. But in an article soon to be published in the academic journal Du Bois Review, Falk confidently offers one projection: New Orleans won't be a majority-black city again for some time. A specialist in historical African-American migration patterns who previously taught at Louisiana State University, Falk said Friday at a New Orleans conference that he believes displaced black New Orleanians are far less likely than white residents to come back in coming years, even if they...

DALLAS -- Young Hurricane Katrina refugees living in Texas scored considerably worse on a statewide standardized exam than Texas children, and thousands of them could be held back. Teachers and state officials blame the low scores on New Orleans' poor school system, the trauma of being abruptly uprooted from their homes, and the possibility that some of them were put in the wrong grade after arriving in Texas with no records. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, a test of reading and math ability, was given in February to third- and fifth-graders, who must pass in order to move...

The New Black Panther Party is coming to New Orleans on Friday to represent the black "masses" who have been "displaced, murdered and abandoned" by a negligent government at war with its people, the group said in a press release. The leader of the New Black Panther Party, attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz, said his group will launch a "weekend of mobilization that will give rise to a never-before-seen stage in the Afrikan Liberation Movement." The press release describes the event as a self-help program for black people in the city where "the plot to destroy the Black civilization has continued...

Lawsuit: "I Quit" nickname illegal in electionPosted: March 14, 2006, 05:34 AM PST NEW ORLEANS (AP) - One challenger in each of New Orleans seven assessors districts is running with the nickname "I.Q.", short for, "I Quit." All seven have promised that if they're elected, they would use their 90-thousand dollar salaries to hire a professional appraisal firm. But two lawsuits scheduled for hearings today in Civil District Court contend that the nickname is deceptive, and therefore illegal. The defendants are Chase "I.Q. Jones in the fourth District, and Ron "I.Q." Mazier in the fifth. The suit against Mazier has...

An evacuee of Hurricane Katrina was booked in the Utah County Jail Sunday, Feb. 25, 2006, for allegedly setting fire to the apartment building he was evicted from, leaving many without homes and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Herbert Samuel Landry, 46, had lived off and on in the Shadowood Apartments since September 2005, his rent paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After receiving his second eviction notice and two days out of the Utah County Jail on drug charges, Landry allegedly poured a flammable liquid on the floor of his back room and ignited it....

Ending one strange political saga by starting another, the clerk of New Orleans Criminal District Court, Kimberly Williamson Butler, surrendered herself to an irate criminal court judge Friday morning after a week of ignoring court orders and arrest warrants, and then walked outside the courthouse to announce her candidacy for mayor. In comments leading up to the surprise announcement, Butler said she had "grown" over her past week in seclusion, and that her mercurial political career makes her uniquely qualified to relate to common folk, including those who have been fired and accused of breaking the law. "When I got...

As reconstruction and rebuilding move forward in New Orleans and the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast region, it is clear that the lethargic and inept emergency response after Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that overshadowed the deadly storm itself. Yet, there is a "second disaster" in the making - driven by racism, classism, elitism, paternalism and old-fashioned greed. The following "Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans" is based on trends and observations made over the past three months. Hopefully, the good people of New Orleans, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast and the United States will not allow this plan...

Two elected Democrats took the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration on January 16 to give race-baiting speeches before black audiences. One did it because he is stupid. The other did it because she thinks blacks are stupid.

Either version of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s comments not withstanding, the cold inescapable truth about the Crescent City is that it will not return as the Democrat’s ultimate weapon in Louisiana’s state wide elections, anytime soon, if at all. Rosey predictions and progress reports from the State of Louisiana, and even the Bush administration, are all wet, if you’ll pardon a pun. Putting up a few buildings and landing a few planes in and around New Orleans means nothing. The amount of devastation is beyond what most of us can wrap our minds around. While I have not been...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to their damaged neighborhoods, according to an analysis released Thursday by a Brown University sociologist. Blacks and the poor were disproportionately affected by Katrina, according to the study led by Brown Professor John R. Logan. The analysis concludes that the difficulty in moving back to the city could mean a massive loss of population, overwhelmingly among blacks. New Orleans was more than 65 percent black before Katrina hit in August,...

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- Mayor Ray Nagin's Martin Luther King Day remark that New Orleans will once again be a "chocolate city" has spawned a cottage industry of T-shirts. There are the "Chocolate City Police" shirts, which say "I'm not bitter" on the back, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. And then there are T-shirts that feature Nagin as Willy Wonka. Dolph Federico, who peddles the Willy Nagin shirts at imnotchocolate.com, said he has received orders from as far away as Norway and Malaysia. "No hard feelings, Ray," he said. "We're just trying to have fun." The mayor's statement,...

It's impossible to gauge the extent of the damage that Mayor Ray Nagin's "chocolate city" and "God's punishing America for invading Iraq" remarks inflicted on New Orleans last week. Suffice it to say that we survived Katrina, but I'm not sure if we can survive Nagin. His apology the next day notwithstanding, Nagin has become a cancer on the city's fledgling recovery. His political and governmental incompetence was bad enough before his MLK Day rant; now he has become an international embarrassment, another post-Katrina blight on New Orleans' reputation. There are many things wrong with what he said, how he...

Peggy Wilson couldn't believe what she was hearing on the radio. Addressing a crowd on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mayor Ray Nagin was claiming that God wanted New Orleans to remain majority black. "This city will be chocolate at the end of the day," he said. "I don't care what people are saying Uptown," referring to a mostly white area of New Orleans. Nagin also suggested that God unleashed last year's hurricanes because he was "mad at America"—and particularly at the black community, for failing to take better care of itself. "I was shocked," recalls Wilson. A Republican who...

Two elected Democrats took the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration on 16 January to give race-baiting speeches before black audiences. One did it because he is stupid. The other did it because she thinks blacks are stupid. Both dishonored the memory of King, who had a dream that “all God’s children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.” In New Orleans, outside City Hall, Mayor Ray Nagin called for “black people … to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be...

(Being with deep apologies to songmeister Crewe and diverse others as legal requirements may in fact warrant anywhere.) This is the story of how Lady Marmalade, a.k.a. Hillary Clinton, met her Mocha Choco Latta Mayor down in "old New Orleans." That, of course, is exactly the mentality of a slave master.

    Race-baiters betray the King legacy By Tony SnowJan 20, 2006 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Let history record that the race-baiting industry died on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2006 -- courtesy of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's "Chocolate City" oration and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "You know what I'm talkin' about" rant.  The race-baiting industry has been dangling on the precipice of comic irrelevance for some time. Jesse Jackson's embrace of despots -- most recently, Hugo Chavez -- has reduced him to bit-player status, and Louis Farrakhan's "whitey blew up the levee" act after the hurricanes removed all doubt about...

I just couldn’t understand why Nagin would make such a comment about New Orleans. I mean the statement is not only racist, it’s also stupid and while Nagin is not a genius, he is not that stupid. Therefore, the statement has to have some meaning behind it. From my perspective, it’s simply desperation from elite well-connected blacks who, as typical Democrats, have prospered by taking their suffering inner city black constituency for granted. As more and more people of Mexican decent enter into the city, they feel they’re losing control. In short, the “chocolate” comment was made by hungry wolves...

The sage adage reminds us, "It is better to be thought of as a fool, than to open your mouth, and remove all doubt." New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, who, when caught with his pants down during Hurricane Katrina because of his lack of preparation, abandoned the city for higher ground, leaving many of New Orleans poor, and most of them as black as Nagin, to fend for themselves or drown, while hundreds of buses that could have evacuated them remained idle and flooded. This was the very same foul-mouthed, inarticulate, hysterical so-called leader, Mayor Ray Nagin, who cursed so...

WASHINGTON -- Pity the poor Democrats. Five years of George W. Bush in office have driven them to distraction. Their most audible advocates have developed "Mad Mule Malady." The symptoms are identical to "Foot-in-Mouth Disease," and those running for office under the Democrat Party banner this year are likely to find their colleagues' increasingly vicious verbal gaffes to be both memorable and damaging. The onset of their illness could not be more instructive. As leading Democrats are attacking Republicans, al Qaeda is planning to attack America. That is what we are told by Osama bin Laden, who, in an audio...

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin continued to address the fierce backlash stemming from a speech he gave on Martin Luther King Day, in which he referred to New Orleans as a “chocolate city” and said God wanted the city to be predominantly African-American. Appearing on the Eyewitness Morning News on Thursday, Nagin said he did not anticipate the frenzied response to his remarks. “…Martin Luther King is a pretty significant hero for me and I got emotional,” Nagin said. “I’ve been walking around with…all this stuff I’ve been getting from these town hall meetings—lots of frustration, anger, feelings of hopelessness—and...

So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about." First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys. As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view...

So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about." First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys. As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view...

GONE WITH THE WIND(miss hillary's 'plantation' blunder) by Mia T, 01.18.06           "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talkin' about. [Note the gratuitous gerundial g-dropping.] ... We have a culture of corruption. We have cronyism. We have incompetence. I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." (Miss hillary also apologized to a group of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the audience "on...

I wake up in the Chocolate City mad as hell. It's like this: I'm supposed to be on vacation this week, cooling my heels, and then our mayor, Willy Wonka, loses his grip in public again and that's hardly headline news in and of itself, but this time he really lets one go. I mean, he really gasses the place up, if you know what I mean. Now, how am I supposed to sit this one out? First thing I do, I follow the mayor's lead and call Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, it takes a while to get...

Does anybody happen to have an Everlasting Gobstopper handy? Mayor Wonka and the Chocolate City Wednesday, January 18, 2006 Chris Rose I wake up in the Chocolate City mad as hell. It's like this: I'm supposed to be on vacation this week, cooling my heels, and then our mayor, Willy Wonka, loses his grip in public again and that's hardly headline news in and of itself, but this time he really lets one go. I mean, he really gasses the place up, if you know what I mean. Now, how am I supposed to sit this one out? First thing...

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Louisiana survived Earl Long's trip to the nuthouse, so maybe New Orleans can survive Mayor Ray Nagin's apparent descent into lunacy. But Long managed to put his eccentric episodes behind him and remained a political force, going on to win a congressional election just before he died. Nagin may not be so lucky. It will be hard to recover from his Martin Luther King Day tirade, because it was not just insane. It was stupid. The mayoralty is there for any credible candidate who wants it, because Nagin just threw away the white vote that got him into office in...

This is a great photo chop! Hit the link because I don't know how to put an image in Freerepublic! Publius' Forum

The freaks come out at night. The demagogues came out on Martin Luther King Day. Democrat N.Y. Sen. Hillary Clinton, perhaps looking to distract attention from those pesky Code Pink protesters who've been dogging her over the Iraq war, commemorated the holiday by pulling a reverse Sister Souljah at race hustler Al Sharpton's pulpit in Harlem. The Canaan Baptist Church welcomed her pandering with what the Associated Press described as "thunderous applause." When a Democrat politician stumps at a church, you see, it's "minority outreach." When a Republican politician stumps at a church, it's a theocratic outrage. Asked to explain...

So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about." First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys. As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view...