Posted on 01/28/2006 9:25:23 AM PST by ncountylee
BATON ROUGE, La. -- While the rest of the country wakes up in the morning to read about the latest round of Washington scandals, the misery in Louisiana continues unabated. Except for a few older, historical neighborhoods on "high ground," New Orleans is uninhabitable, and Cameron Parish, in the southwest corner of the state, basically no longer exists, having been wiped out by Hurricane Rita.
Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf Coast region, it's being split between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps because, even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the number of affected households Louisiana does, its governor, Haley Barbour, an ex-Republican National Committee chairman, is a pal of the president. But with all the problems Louisiana is facing -- including a new round of budget-slashing -- no one seems to be talking about the looming human crisis: Where will the tens of thousands of evacuees living in hotels go when the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying the bills in February?
Here in Baton Rouge, housing experts fear a new storm surge -- this one of people with no jobs, no insurance, no one to take them in and, as of next month, no roof over their heads. In the meantime, the local low-income housing market has never been tighter, as both FEMA and HUD have bid up housing and rental prices, leaving longtime working-class residents of Baton Rouge scrambling to find even minimally decent housing. As soon as their leases expire, rents for apartment dwellers, most of whom are on year-to-year leases, are being jacked up.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Well..Blanco did make the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame. LOL
Shreveport is a thriving mfg center..Houston always has jobs, and the price of oil is high. Maybe those without jobs should have figured out where those were, say, 3 months ago and moved there.
And not much of one.
HOW does the Washington Post continue to find reporters to write this kind of ****? Mississippi also had a far larger geographical area devastated than Louisiana, and lost a far greater number of businesses and infrastucture than New Orleans.
I'm thinking about building my new house on an active earthquake fault line, below an active volcano, below a leaking dam. I can only hope for years and years of sob stories after the predicted earthquake and/or predicted volcanic eruption and/or dam break wipes out my house. I'd like to start a Rebuild-My-House fund-raiser today.
True. American Liberalism is in its 74th year. Time for it to die.
Note to WaPo:
Did you think that you didn't screw up the coverage of the facts about Katrina enough the first half-dozen times you tried?
Do you still think that nobody in the country can sit at their computer, type in "nola.com" or "thedeadpelican.com" and get accurate, timely and relatively unbiased information from the people who are actually on the scene and are being affected?
WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ALL ARE, A BUNCH OF MORONS?
Jenny sounds as though she might be a Bush-hating/America-hating, DemocRAT racebaiter. Just my opinion.
What? Not in a tornado zone? Sissy.
I have an idea lets take the palenstine aid and then fill in the rest
....no one to feed them, educate them, and put band-aids on their scraped knees; no one to raise their self-esteem and read them bedtime stories. Oh, the humanity....!
So this is being split 50/50? LA only gets $14.5 billion? That is what the article suggests.
Why Baton Rouge Is Still Bush Country
dirtboy warning label - this is pretty harsh bile even by modern liberal standards
The question is: Why now? Why, after five years of extraordinary ineptitude, culminating in the shameful spectacle of Americans dying from lack of emergency resources, does Bush continue to inspire any loyalty at all, let alone the loyalty of what strikes me as a large swath of the population of the city that, more than any other place, has absorbed Katrina's secondary shock waves? And the answer isn't that the folks in Baton Rouge are a bunch of racist ignoramuses. Rather, it lies in cultural and social identification, overlaid with a patina of Christianity and fueled by raw, largely social, fear. In short, even before the hurricane rendered hundreds of thousands homeless, the feeling in white, middle-class Baton Rouge was already one of displacement.
An example is my neighbor Becky, or, as we on the block call her, "Saint Becky." So kind is Becky that, some years ago, she stopped on her way home from doing errands to help a homeless mother and her two daughters who were walking and appeared to be lost. Becky ended up taking them in for a full month. But Becky also has eyes, and what she sees when she takes her kids to school or to the dentist is a whole neighborhood, just a few blocks from our own, where every third household exists on welfare, parents routinely abuse their kids, young men deal drugs, prostitutes ply their trade and rap music extolling the joys of gang rape and murder blasts out of every other car.
I suspect that when Becky, who isn't exactly rolling in dough herself, looks at the sorry spectacle of America's intransigent underclass, she simply wonders what happened to good-old-American, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. What Becky sees when she sees George Bush is a man who may not be a genius but who at least talks the talk, drawing a clear line between right and wrong. She looks at his face and sees her own staring back.
I heard an interview (on NPR, of all places - know your enemy) with some civil admin official outside of new orleans whose town got beat-up, and he was quietly and clearly stating his town's needs and comparing them to the demands of new orleans.
His most memorable comment was a comparison of the 'wants' of NO versus the 'needs' of his area - paraphrased: "we're asking the gov't to help us design/build storm-resistant structures and utilities, and they expect the government to build something to eliminate hurricanes".
That's well-put. It will never be enough. The "gimme" mentality of liberals will never end because it's good to be the victim.
Did FEMA promise free everything to people living in Renaissance Village, the FEMA trailer park just outside of Baker? That's what some residents there are saying... So on Friday, some angry residents staged a "walk-out" to protest.
"All we're doing is asking FEMA to do is stand up to their word," said resident Wilbert Ross. "Let us have everything free for 18 months."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1566614/posts
HURRICANE KATRINA- archive of links
various FR links & stories | 09-02-05 | the heavy equipment guy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1475443/posts
Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf Coast region, it's being split between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps because, even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the number of affected households Louisiana does, its governor, Haley Barbour, an ex-Republican National Committee chairman, is a pal of the president. But with all the problems Louisiana is facing
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