Obama to New Orleans: Drop Dead?
CLEVELAND -- Regular readers know I've been critical of the Obama administration for its do-nothing approach to redeeming the president's promise to redeem the promises Bush made in Jackson Square two weeks after the city was flooded by the failure of the federal levees. Now, it's not just me and my little opinion.
Politifact, run by the St. Petersburg Times (a reputable and non-profit newspaper), has made a handy checklist of the president's statements on the city's needs and his promises to help meet those needs, measured against what he's actually proposed and/or done. It's not surprising, at least to me, that the scoreboard contains almost all goose-eggs. Yes, we all know he's got a lot on his plate, yet he managed to find time to sign an executive order last week reorganizing the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay, so not all local needs are going unmet. And the Washington Post reports the stimulus bill, while containing nothing for New Orleans, did make a nice stash available for the contractors who've been taking their time, and making some mistakes, trying to clean up our nuclear weapons sites.
The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes that New Orleans is now enjoying its second consecutive federal administration which, far from offering to fix what it broke, far from offering a hand of support, is merely offering one finger. (Hat tip: LSD)
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Why didn't Mary Laundrieu advocate for additional funding in the stimulus bill or in the new budget?
See Harry Shearer's Profile
How do you know she didn't? She's one vote.
Harry,
In this amount of time, what would Nader have accomplished? Or {insert YOUR favorite pol here}?
If NO had been first, the ant-war crowd would have complained...or the Environmentalists...or the Unions....or those suffering under the economy......
Now that I mention it, should we be complaining that he hasn't really closed Gitmo or ended any wars yet?
Maybe none of those problems lend themselves to simple solutions
hey harry ask your gov and your mayor first don't you think
See Harry Shearer's Profile
Under the law, they have no power or control over the hurricane protection system, that's the exclusive preserve of the feds.
The protection system pales when compared to the suffering of the people. Local and state are directly responsible for the citizens.
Are you familiar with the V-zone issue, Harry? If you want to identify a villain in all of this, I'd say you might want to take a look at David Vitter. Oh, and Congress. There are three branches of government. The executive is one of them. But since GWB, we no longer have an Emperor.
You're tragically correct about Obama's actions re New Orleans. So many of his supporters are having a very difficult time accepting that Mr. Obama is not who he appeared to be in the campaign.
Harry, I'm with you. This situation in New Orleans is a national tragedy; at age 61 it is the most heneious natural catastrophie I have ever witnessed. I say witnessed, because I observed from the internet, a safer place than you. I am very distraught that Obama has given New Orleans low priority. Common sense dictates that leaving this city in pestilence is not good for environment.
I invite you to come to one of my favorite websites: http://www.rfkjrnews.com. I pray our President is able to improve & make progress on the job; but there are some Liberals/Progressives/Greenies who have somebody else in mind. Like you, I am not happy with what is going down. It's going to take charisma, great charisma plus effectiveness for us to survive.
Keep up your good work, New Orleans was a great, beautiful city and deserves better treatement than this!
I hope that any further funds are directly administered for Washington, and focused on rebuilding homes in the less fortunate areas of city. To date, the poorer and mostly minority areas of the city have been completely ignored by the politicians elected post Katrina. In fact, the majority of the work done in thses areas has been by non-profilt organizations. This, while the more affulent areas have received amble funds for not only rebuilding, but improvement.
Harry Shearer
Actor, author, director, satirist, musician, radio host, playwright, multi-media artist...
Did you forget anything?
Oh yeah... self-aggrandizing nitpicker and whining kvetch.
*:o) Political day-trader.
LMAO!
When it is all said and done Harry will be on the very short list of those who saved New Orleans. The question is; will Obama be on that list too.
Thanks Harry.
Excellent post!
Maybe you are right. I hope you are right. If you are he can put "Saviour, New Orleans" after his name and I won't rag him over it.... well, not much anyway. But it has been my experience that when someone has really done something admirable he or she doesn't have to be the one who tells you about it.
Checked out your profile there David. Not alot of accomplishments following your name I see.
None unless somebody hacked my file.
I applaud harry shearer but if you thing that obama doesnt care about new orleans and wants it to drop dead then I say tou say what you feel. But know who is on your side if obama is the problem then start a national dialogue about how obama is making things worse for new orleans but know that if you shoot yourself in the foot you still gotta walk around on it
He has had a bit going on, don't you think? What good does it do NOLA if the country enters another depression?
What good does it do America if New Orleans drowns again.
I am wondering how long, perhaps two days before people will be saying, "why hasn't Obama stopped global warming?" , "cured cancer", and "fed all the hungry in the world". And ultimately say 6 months out, I have had enough I am going to vote Republican in 2012 or not vote at all.
And I thought Rush, Hannity, Ann Coulter, Beck and all of them were strange.
Maybe it's time for NO and LA to take care of themselves and stop looking for everyone else to bail them out. I would never live in a rat hole that was below the level of the largest river in North America, and if I did, I would make sure those levees were bombproof.
Another great American. This is what America has become. We are all on our own. Country mean NOTHING. Taxes are paid for NOTHING.
Call me cautious, but living below the waterline sounds a bit risky for me. Why bother, maybe it would be better if they relocated somewhere else. Towns have moved before for lesser reasons.
The children I saw when I volunteered in the gulf after Katrina (we were on the ground before Rita hit) really didn't have a lot of say so about the "rat hole" where they lived. This may shock you, but not everyone has the resources to up and move from family, jobs, etc.
Wherever you live, I pray it is never washed away or burned down or that you and your family & your community ever suffer a natural disaster. I know, I know, you'll take care of yourself, you don't need help from anyone. After all, if you'd been in NO, you could have made sure the levees were bombproof.
Although I sympathize with those people who lost their homes during Hurricane Katrina, I do agree with you. Then again, I live in Michigan, a state that's been hit by an economic "hurricane" for the last thirty years. You want to see a city in ruin? Visit Detroit. Or even better (worse?), Flint. In other words, we Michiganders have been going through some hard times because of forces beyond our control (globalization), yet we aren't expecting the federal government (i.e., everyone else) to bail us out. Of course, I'm sure the good people of Detroit would appreciate Brad Pitt or other members of the glitterati to take an interest in demolishing all the condemned houses in their neighborhoods.
Please, everyone--familiarize yourselves with the complexity of this issue. Harry Shearer, for all his good intentions, is simply wrong. Obama has acted on this. Politifact, for one reason or another, chose to ignore what the President has done (probably because Politifact has never been a reliable, intelligent, unbiased source). The President has done far more than Mr. Shearer and Polifact will give him credit for. And fixing this will be far more difficult and far more expensive than most people can imagine. Read up:
http://www.asce.org/files/pdf/katrina/testimony.pdf
See Harry Shearer's Profile
Read up yourself. The ILIT report at UC Berkeley, the Team Louisiana Report from LSU, and the Corps' own IPET report all agree. And please cite what Obama has done, we're all waiting.
PS: Totally off-topic, but you'll like this. I used to be a guitar teacher, and one week, one of my bass students brought in a recording of Big Bottom and asked me to teach it to him. Keep in mind this was a southern Minnesota farm kid with a mullet and a minty restored Camaro. I said to him, "Did you see the Spinal Tap movie?" And he said, "Yeah. I thought they were a pretty good band, but they seemed kind of stupid."
Harry, I love your work and think you're a great guy. But I think you're rushing to judgement on the president. It's only the first few months of his term. In that time he's had to handle a plethora of major problems. The whole country is in financial ruin, we're at war, etc etc etc.
Ask Gov Bobby, Mayor Ray and former Gov Blanco to account for their efforts... what Louisianna resources have been exhausted to provide for the victims, as opposed to how much local and federal funds have gone to kickbacks and special interest projects. Does Ray still own that beautiful home in Houston where he fled the storm? For years, the citizens of NO have been ignored by their own leaders.
It reminds me of the bailout. Like the execs who ran the banks into the ground, local LA leaders have squandered, pandered and ignored the people. When disaster strikes they throw up their hands and expect Marvin Q. Taxpayer to foot the bill.
We're all in trouble, Harry. Big trouble. Bailouts are for wool suits in limos and jets, with homes in the Hamptons. The rest of us are on our own. But they underestimate us. When we've worked together we've overcome the worst. We need that spirit now.
Amen to your post. I don't agree with all of Obama's moves, but this is just silly.
What about all of the money that was sent down there? What happened to it? It was reported than funds appropriated for rebuilding homes, etc. was redirected for the harbor & private industry initiatives. What about that, Harry?
See Harry Shearer's Profile
Reported by whom? The vast majority of federal funds sent down post-Katrina went for the gargantuan job of debris removal, made more gargantuan by the contracting practices of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which ran the operation. The Road Home program, about $7 billion to make homeowners whole, was turned over to a private contractor (at $750 million), riddled with hoops and red tape to convince skeptical DC legislators that it wouldn't be corrupt. It's just about to finish with its last few thousand clients (after a change in contractors). No appreciable program to deal with the drastic wipeout of affordable rental housing.
1) First post here EVER
2) Huge fan of Harry
3) Apologies if someone already posted.....
"Obama doesn't care about black people?"
:)
That being said I'd say give Obama a little more time. I suppose we could argue he's wasting valuable time going to soccer games, Easter Egg Hunts and playing basketball too.
The rebuilding of NO may require a massive undertaking rather than a little stimulatin' money. Maybe he's got bigger plans than can be announced via Executive order?
Check this out Mr. Shearer:
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-shows-his-true-katrina-colors
Less money has been allocated to the Congressional district that New Orleans is in than any other district in the nation.
This has been the biggest con-job ever done on the American people. What better way to pull it off but by using a novelty like a bi-racial black man?
stell go back and get racial education. you just said "bi-racial black man" do you see something wrong here?
So rather than focus on the substance of my post you focus on an obvious typo.
I wonder if in 2 years, the Obamabots are going to be saying; 'He's only been president for 2 years, give him a chance'. When is this apologizing going to stop?
This so-called apologizing, Jasper321? Are you kidding? I can't think of one thing to apologize for. What planet might you be viewing current events from? Come on back to earth, why don't you?
Do you actually have a grasp of just how bad the last 40 years have been, behind the scenes before it all came to fruition?? I am willing to give Obama a full 4 years to do most of what he spoke about on the campaign trail or at least chip away at our current mess of a country. And, I am quite sick of people that think that the crap that has taken this long to create can be undone so quickly. I guess waving a magic wand might work in movies but this is real life.
5 months of national and global disasters, and you think we're apologizing that he doesn't gush all over one city immediately while the rest of the nation suffers? Or are you still stewing about your candidate losing?
Surely you jest!!
Holy moly, people. We are hardly half a year into his first term. The man has done a ton of work, already. Give him some time to get everything. Don't stop talking about it, but don't start pointing fingers at Obama and saying he's failed to live up to his promises when he's not even out of his first six months, let alone his first year! We've already gotten more from Obama than we ever did from Bush in all eight of his years.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
