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Mayor C. Ray Nagin Conducts the New Orleans Symphony New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin yesterday called on Congress to fulfill President Bush's promise to rebuild his city and to have levees repaired to withstand a Category 3 storm before the next hurricane season. "There's a very strong conservative element in Washington that is basically overly focused on the budget, and they want to maintain their presence in Iraq, and it seems as though New Orleans has been pushed to the background," Mr. Nagin said. "I think that's very unfortunate. I am looking for Congress to honor the president's...

**EXCLUSIVE** New details are surfacing concerning New Orleans' former Superintendent of Police, Eddie "the hat" Compass, sources tell The Dead Pelican. Compass' abrupt resignation from NOPD was, according to sources, brought about by a number of factors that were rapidly approaching critical mass. In other words, the situation had reached a level at which things can no longer be concealed, hushed up or downplayed without calling in too many favors or costing too much money. In other words, Ray Nagin wasn't about to risk his political career to cover up for Compass any more than he already had without implicating...

"Rumors of New Orleans falling into the sea are greatly exaggerated." That's Louisiana Recovery Authority Executive Director Andy Kopplin's response to a segment on Sunday's "60 Minutes" news show that quoted St. Louis University geologist Tim Kusky as saying that within 90 years the city would be an island surrounded by water, and that people and businesses should move away. Kopplin has a lot of company, including several of the scientists whom Kusky, an earth sciences professor, said he relied on in reaching his controversial conclusion. Their collective response? Kusky went overboard.

Mayor Nagin blames racism, class bias for slow Katrina response NAGIN. I'm still shocked that this happened in America MONTEGO BAY, St James - Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin says he believes that the slow pace of activity by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina that devastated the city in August was based on class and racism. "I think that if this (New Orleans) was Orange County, California or South Beach in Miami, I do think the response would have been different," Nagin said. "I think it's a combination of racial issues...

MONTEGO BAY, St James - Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, says as his city rebuilds in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it would be moving to strengthen economic ties with Jamaica. "As we look to rebuild New Orleans, we are also looking to rebuild relationships and the first place that we are looking to rebuild and strengthen relationships is Jamaica," said Nagin. The New Orleans mayor who is vacationing in the island with his wife Seletha and three children, at a private villa owned by Sandals chairman, Gordon 'Butch' Stewart, was speaking to reporters in Montego Bay at a...

City Of New Orleans Mayors Office of Communications 1300 Perdido Street, Suite 2E04 New Orleans, Louisiana 70112 504-658-4940 C. Ray Nagin [Mayor] MAYOR FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 9, 2005 Town Hall Meeting in Atlanta to be Rescheduled (New Orleans, LA) The Town Hall Meeting scheduled in Atlanta on Saturday, November 12, 2005, has been postponed. In an effort to address the concerns of New Orleanians who have been displaced from their homes and relocated to the Atlanta area, the meeting will be rescheduled for a later date in December. For more information, please contact the Mayor’s Press Office at...

Slavery has been a part of man’s history since the beginning of recorded time. The pharaohs of Egypt used hundreds of thousands of African slaves to build the pyramids. The Romans used slaves from all over their empire to build their magnificent structures. The ancient Greeks used slaves to build the Parthenon and other palaces and temples. The Great Wall of China was built by Chinese slaves. When the Americas were discovered, slavery migrated with the people to the new world and was accepted like all the rest of the “old” world traditions. This acceptance lasted even through the drafting...

New Orleans' mayor on Friday proposed building a casino zone near the historic French Quarter to jump start the hurricane-ravaged city's economy, saying a bold move was needed to restore lost tax revenue. "I'd like to have another solution for the citizens ... but I don't know what else we can do at this point," Ray Nagin told a news conference. New Orleans is struggling to rebound from Hurricane Katrina in August which fractured flood walls and flooded 80 percent of the city. Hurricane Rita hit the Gulf Coast on September 24, triggering renewed flooding in parts of the city....

NEW ORLEANS — Even with new floodwaters lapping at the high-water marks set by Katrina less than a month ago, Mayor Ray Nagin pushed a plan to bring people back to storm-ravaged New Orleans soon is possible. Federal officials said Saturday it will take two to three weeks to pump out floodwaters created by Hurricane Rita. The water poured in through levees that were patched after Hurricane Katrina.

The Politics Of Division Destroy Racial Equality By Kevin Fobbs Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated that there are two Americas which Detroiters, metro Detroiters, and many suburban cities bordering on urban centers around the nation share. Each has been bound by an unbreakable bond between racial myths and actual facts. The racially charged rumors that circulated throughout the nation's black communities concerning what many black New Orleans evacuees had been whispering during those first desperate days in the aftermath Hurricane Katrina devastation were clear and convincing to many black Americans. Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson had heard it too: that the...

For the sake of today’s column, we’ll say institutional racism played a very large part in what went wrong in New Orleans. Question: How do we identify this racism? In other words, how will we know it when we see it again? Jim Breslin offers a definition – “If whites were in trouble in New Orleans, I trust that this government would have been there early” – meaning that in any disaster-ridden city where the majority population is black (or Hispanic, or simply un-Caucasian), Republican-lead government will take its sweet time about getting to work. Still, having to explain Breslin’s...

1. Spending trillions on welfare leads to the “Great Society” “What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on...

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says the hurricane-devastated city is bankrupt and is scrambling for loans to pay its employees through the end of the year.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in an obscenity-laced tirade on WWL radio last Thursday that the federal government should have sent “Greyhound buses” to evacuate his city. He said school buses were inadequate because they lack bathrooms. There was an Evacuation Plan, written in 2000 and updated since. It states that New Orleans should be evacuated at the Mayor’s order. He should declare that “48 hours in advance.” It also states he should use “public buses” including transit and school buses. One of the duties of any Mayor of New Orleans is to know his obligations under this Plan,...

While we keep pointing out the faults of Mayor Nagin, and Govenor Blano, there are two others that need to be brought to light. The city of New Orleans, has an office of Emergency Preparedness. The state of Lousiana has it's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. The head of each of these departments should know their emergency plans, and should conjoined with their applicable goverment head, before and during the emergency. I haven't heard a word, a peep, about either of these.

Normally, I don’t comment on the columns of Cynthia Tucker, Editorial Page Editor of the Atlanta Constitution. It isn’t worth it. But she has finally jumped the shark. To prove that the “poor are on [their] own,” she cites this article: “In fact, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune used just those words to describe the hurricane evacuation plan authorities put in place for residents who didn't own cars. Reporter Bruce Nolan wrote in July, ‘City, state and federal authorities are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're...

Paul Simpson, a political blogger who lives in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, La., said he and other locals are puzzled by the governor's refusal to let the federal government temporarily command the state's National Guard. "I thought it was as standard as sunshine in California that the governor would tell the president, 'You have the Guard.' I thought that was a given," Mr. Simpson said. "She absolutely has no clue." Critics have long derided Mrs. Blanco for her tendency to call for studies and special commissions to find solutions for the state's biggest problems. In 2003, the Shreveport...

Via GOPINION: Nagin bails... and not the way everyone else in New Orleans is... In this post we predicted that Nagin would soon face criminal charges as his culpability in the deaths of tens of thousands of New Orleans' citizens came to light. If the rumors we're hearing are correct, (and these are still just runors) he may already be crumbling under the pressure of that too-certain fate. If Nagin really abandons 'his' city in its time of need, is there a place on Earth that will have him? Read the rest here.

What we are witnessing in New Orleans is something we would only expect in a third world country. Not a City in the United States. Hundreds and possibly even thousands have been killed either by the Hurricane or the resulting chaos that has engulfed the city. How could it happen here in the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world? The truth is New Orleans is a city ran like a third world nation. It is rife with corruption, cronyism, and organized crime up to the highest levels. The looting in New Orleans did not begin after the Hurricane....