Now that I've been up to PJ's and gotten wired, it occurs to me that the last few posts would have made more sense as one big one. Oh well, I can at least do a meta post.
Links to my brief Sunday morning adventures searching for Democratic candidate Katrina recovery plans, in rough order of worthiness:
1. Obama
2. Edwards
3. Clinton
4. Richardson
5. Dodd
6. Biden
7. Kucinich
8. Gravel
If you're only interested in substance, don't bother looking past #3 or so.
Dennis Kucinich is short. Short on any recovery plans or even any mention of the word Katrina. Unlike any other candidates, he does have a link to his local Louisiana campaign team's page, where you can learn how to register to vote in Louisiana and can be excited by the news that Sean Penn and Melissa Etheridge are supporters. Fuck Sean Penn, where's Uncle Lionel's support?
Apparently Kucinich's Louisiana team doesn't think Katrina recovery is a big election issue.
There is a link off the main page that says "Meet Elizabeth" which really got my juices flowing, but alas, it only lets you read about her.
You can't find Katrina very easily by going to Chris Dodd's campaign site, but if you google "katrina site:chrisdodd.com" you will at least turn up his two-paragraph statement on the 2-year anniversary, with a blog link to the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Bill of 2007 which he authored.
Kudos to him for not waiting until becoming president to start working on this issue. Anti-kudos for apparently thinking that he's all done and can move on to other more important work. I can't find his plan forward.
On the first anniversary of the storm, he had two short paragraphs to offer.
On the second anniversary of the storm, he was silent.
If there is a plan, or even a shred of passing interest, it is buried deep.
Seriously. The word Katrina has only shown up in passing four times in his entire web site archives, most recently on May 6. The only announcement from him around the time of the 2-year anniversary of the storm is this one: "YouTube Videos Get High Remarks from Blogger"
No plan. Not even a mention. We don't exist.
Can be found in this press release from the 2 year anniversary of the storm.
Some weak-ass shit quickly cobbled together since some kind of statement was clearly required on that day.
Like the other candidates I've looked at, Edwards doesn't have Gulf Coast recovery listed in his main list of "Issues", but at least you can go to the Issues page, enter "katrina" into the search field, and find his plan right there.
A quick read gives the impression that he's more thorough on the Katrina issues he does address, but he doesn't even mention the word insurance and he's the only one to not call for Category 5 hurricane protection (although he agrees 100-year protection is inadequate).
I couldn't find Hillary's plan at all by navigating her site. I had to google "katrina site:hillaryclinton.com" to locate it.
It's currently here.
Shorter and much vaguer than Obama's, although she at least mentions insurance reform.
It took forever to find it buried in his campaign site, but here is Barack Obama's 5-page plan for Katrina recovery:
Obama's Katrina Fact Sheet (pdf)
It hits a lot of the main points. Short on details on all of them. I'd like to see more details on schools, on insurance reform, on economic recovery.
I started my second half-sleeve tattoo back around Mardi Gras, and so far I've got about 18 hours of ink invested over two weekend trips to Austin. These are the first pics I've posted.
The theme of this one is an homage to my maternal grandmother, with cardinals flying around the existing Celtic cross tattoo I got from Freddie Corbin back in 1990, and the same lilies in the background as in my other sleeve.
Designed and executed by Horimana, Chris Trevino of Perfection Tattoo in Austin.
Don't tell my mom or my wife, but Chris and I are already talking a little bit about what kind of back piece would work with this. Maybe in a few years.
I also haven't done a Half-Nekkid Thursday in a coons age, but I guess this qualifies.
Happy HNT!
...and we're very very hungry.
Guy's Po Boys on Magazine was gutted by fire months ago. There have been slow signs of progress, but never a sign as joyous as this one.
The church a block away from here always plays a lovely tune on their church bell speakers at noon. You can hear it all over the neighborhood; it reminds me of when I was a kid, living only a block away from St. Andrews in Algiers, hearing their church bells every day. It's so cute and quaint and comforting..
Except for today.
They're playing goddamn "Kumbayah".
I only DVRed the last half of K-Ville. Now I wish I'd watched the whole thing and skipped the Saints game completely. Scenes from next week? New Orleans brothel politics. Fucking bad-ass.
So I understand that shooting locations aren't always chosen for continuity that makes sense to the locals. That's just the nature of filming. Hell, Saving Private Ryan's Omaha beach landing was filmed in Ireland.
But explain this to me:
"Here's the keys. My truck is parked on Esplanade at Decatur. Head toward Algiers on the 428, there won't be any roadblocks that way."
What the fuck is he talking about? Is there another bridge I don't know about? And what's he gonna do when he gets to Algiers? Lay low in Park Timbers?
The only thing I can think is that he meant 420, making "head" a kinda sorta pun, in which case he could hide out at the Pink Floyd midnight movie at the Abalon. If it was still 1980.
Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley, arrested for disturbing the peace for expressing discontentment with their employers. July 31, 1908, Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky.
Visit Without Sanctuary for more nooses under more white trees.
Greg calls it "The Passion of the Christ". You might as well subtitle it "So THAT's why Ray turned out so fucked up".
Control debuts in the US October 10.
When I fell asleep last night, WVUE meteorologist Bob Breck (who has been around longer than anybody now that Nash is really really retired) was explaining his take on the lastest satellite scans of Invest 93L and poo-pooing the hype that has been bubbling up just because the models show a direct hit on New Orleans.
His latest blog entry (yeah, he has a blog, and he updates every day) provides a voice of reason:
So many people are speculating/scaring people to death. I won't do that. If a storm does form and goes to our west or near us, it will be the first test of our levees since Katrina. Whatever develops is not likely to be much stronger than a Cat. 1 hurricane so the levees should be able to handle a 6-10 foot surge.
To be honest, I kind of want this storm. I want us to get hit by a reasonably weak hurricane, as a test. We need all the new flood gates, the levee repairs, the pumps, the whole system to undergo a real shakedown cruise, and if we do it with a moderate storm and come through it OK, it is going to change things for the better. It will be good for our mental health, it will be good for perceptions nationally, and it will make us more enticing to investors.
I got in a bad bicycle accident a few years ago, and broke some bones, and would have broken my skull if I hadn't been wearing a helmet. And the first few times I got back on my bike after that, I wrecked again. Twice, in fact. Both were minor wrecks, but both were caused almost completely by mistakes I made out of fear and nervousness. I questioned even my most basic abilities, and it made me do stupid things that made me make stupid crashes. The original accident had changed me, had made me a different rider, a tenative rider, a worse rider.
It took me a long while to be able to go down certain kinds of hills, or over certain kinds of obstacles, but once I could prove to myself that I could successfully do the things I used to do before the wreck, but do them safely, without crashing, without going over the handlebars, the fear left.
We need to show that we are a city that knows how to survive hurricanes, and we haven't had that chance yet. We only remember that we are a city that gets its ass kicked, and we're deathly afraid of another ass-kicking, and it makes us crazy.
Less of this, preeze:
and more of this:
Sank you.
OK, so, see, I am what you call powerless over ice cream, but have not hit the proverbial bottom yet, so I can remain mostly in denial while concocting ever-more-elaborate schemes to try to maintain some semblance of moderate ice cream consumption. I rarely eat it at home, I try not to eat it every day, I try to limit myself to one scoop. I tried the old "I'll eat gelato, it's weaker stuff so I can drink eat more" but that didn't really work out.
I'm also a big fan of the "I can be a full-blown ice cream addict in Austin and still maintain moderate sobriety in New Orleans" geographic cure gambit. And it doesn't help that my ice cream sponsor lives in Austin and is ironically as big a crush'n's hound as I am.
So my past couple of trips to Austin, I've been working on a combo concept for Amy's, which is a much better venue for customer creativity than Creole Creamery or Brocato's because you can invent a lot more crazy shit on the fly. I was in the 6th Street Amy's, where Roky Erickson hangs out, and the name "Chasing The Dragon" popped into my head.
The perfect name for an addiction-based ice cream combo, but what to put in it? I enlisted the help of an Amy's scooper named Drew, and we both pondered it over several weeks.
My ice cream sponsor, who is also a noted former pharmaceuticals connoisseur, immediately said, "ooooo, sweet cream with Vicodin and butterscotch". (It's always about the butterscotch with her.) But my inside man at Amy's said the Vicodin wouldn't crush up real well, and besides, DEA and all. Joyless bastards.
Anyway, last visit, it came to me. I told Drew: "espresso ice cream, chocolate chips, and cinnamon, with whipped cream". He thought a minute, grinned, said "I'll allow it!" and made one for me on the spot. He recommended lots of cinnamon, I thought he should go easy at first, but he was right, so while I was eating he brought me more cinnamon in a cup to sprinkle on top. It ended up as a light dusting on top of the whipped cream. Which was perfect. They make their own whipped cream at Amy's, not that stuff in the can.
Go to the 6th Street Amy's, ask for it by name. If Drew is there, he knows how to make it. And if it shows up on the specials board, tell them I want my royalties paid in product.
According to the T-P, a rape occurred Sunday night at the corner of Milan and Magazine.
Which is practically on the front steps of the NOPD 2nd District station.
[snagged from Anti Em's blogroll.]
A coworker sent me this William Raspberry editorial published a couple of weeks after the storm. It seems even more relevant today.
Discuss.
Our Rules vs. the Poor
William Raspberry, The Washington Post
September 12, 2005The Duke University class I teach on family and community had no trouble with the New Orleans "looters" who smashed store windows for food and clothing. They had done their reading, so they understood that an important element of what makes a community work is the willingness of people to abide by agreed-upon rules.
But the floods and impending starvation on the Gulf Coast, they agreed, suspended the rules. Survival was an overriding "virtue," they said -- so long as the necessities weren't taken directly from another person in similar desperate straits.
And maybe even then, some of them thought. While a few would choose to die rather than wrest food from the gnarled hands of a starving old woman, several thought that the biological imperative to survive might trump even such uncivilized behavior as that.
No senseless looting for material goods (even if the purloined laptop might become the price of a ride to Baton Rouge?). No firing on rescue workers. No carjackings. But if the waters were rising swiftly enough, and the helicopter lifts were working slowly enough, one could perhaps justify elbowing one's way nearer to the front of the rescue line. After all, though one might defer to a weaker blood relative or spouse, survival is the most basic urge there is.
Then I reminded them of what they all knew: that sometime in the next few weeks, when things have returned to normal and Hurricane Katrina has been replaced by Supreme Court confirmation hearings or escalating slaughter in Iraq as Topic A, they will see on the 6 o'clock news some teenager accused of shooting a shopkeeper or robbing a convenience store or selling crack. And the youngster's explanation for his dreadful behavior? "You got to survive."
The point of this small exercise was neither to justify lawlessness nor to raise looting to a level of particular importance in the catastrophe that befell the Gulf Coast. It was, rather, to observe that the rules -- legislated and otherwise -- that make our communities work don't exist as moral abstractions. We uphold them because they work for us -- at least until we find ourselves under water.
What we forget is that some people in some communities see themselves as under water pretty much all the time.
Our rules -- deal fairly with one another, avoid violence, obey the law -- don't always make sense to them because the rules don't always make their lives more livable. And yet we think they should go on following our rules because it makes our lives more livable.
I'm talking about poor people, of course, but not all poor people. Some poor people are among the most law-abiding people I know. But some see themselves as outcasts reduced to basic survival.
They see themselves this way in part because many Americans don't see them at all. Erstwhile visitors to New Orleans still remark how surprised they were to see the masses of the very poor holed up in the Superdome or on freeway overpasses. They had no idea!
And most of us have no idea of the desperately poor in our own towns. They don't exist for us except when crime or social cost or catastrophe puts them on our screen.
And even then we are likely to miss the point of their existence. They wouldn't be poor, we tell ourselves, if they lived by our rules. A number of e-mails of the past few days make the point: Poor people are often the cause of their own poverty.
It's mostly true. There are people who, like many of those pitiful souls we saw waiting to be rescued from the floodwaters last week, are in dire straits because they ignored our well-meant advice. But some, like those ride-less New Orleans residents who couldn't get out, simply haven't been able to translate our advice into action: Stop having babies, save enough to move away, get married.
I'm not saying it's all society's fault that our rules don't work for them. But I am saying that it is in society's interest to make sure they do, rather than sit blithely while the growing gap between them and us produces a community destroying economic disequilibrium.
What can we do? At the very least, we should see to it that no one who works hard all week has to live in poverty and without access to good health care.
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