Compared to before Katrina, only 29% of city schools are open, but 85% of the hotels are. 60% of homes have electricity, and 33% of grocery stores, convenience stores and restaurants are open.

Lets cut the bullshit and tell it like it is.

If Katrina had plowed through the gold coast of Miami-Fort Lauderdale, does anyone doubt that the wreckage would have been repaired by now?

When I see the people still living in squalor (or still displaced as a Katrina diaspora around the country) I'm struck by the simple fact that the vast majority of these people were black and poor whites. Race and class are the prime, nay ONLY reasons that large parts of the Gulf Coast still lie in ruins.

Why waste precious Federal warfighting funds on these folks? That's the cold calculus made in Washington. These people, plainly, DO NOT COUNT. They are expendable. This is the cold hard truth and I dare anyone to make the case otherwise. Its a sad and sick commentary on what has become of the USA that the people unaffected by this shrug their shoulders and do nothing.

Of course, the money producing French quarter and the business district are back on their feet. The wealthy lived on the high ground (interesting how that always seems to work, eh?) and they're doing just fine. The people who count always do in our system, amazing isn't it.

I'm mad. In fact I'm furious. We've lost any sense of human decency in this country if we ever had one at all. Katrina now beomes a TV show and the violence and neglect now done to these people are nothing but entertainment and something for government PR flacks to spin.

BTW, does anyone know if Louisiana is Blue or Red?

Worth repeating:

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Why waste precious Federal warfighting funds on these folks? That's the cold calculus made in Washington. These people, plainly, DO NOT COUNT. They are expendable. This is the cold hard truth and I dare anyone to make the case otherwise. Its a sad and sick commentary on what has become of the USA that the people unaffected by this shrug their shoulders and do nothing.

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One year ago, George Bush belatedly left his extended vacation to come, finally, to devastated New Orleans to address the nation about the catastrophe. His administration had already failed in the rescue of the survivors and was in the process of failing in the resettlement of the displaced. But in a White House-orchestrated stage setting, the president dramatically promised not only to do whatever it took to rebuild New Orleans, but to ''confront . . . with bold action'' the ''deep persistent poverty'' that had been revealed.

Now, one year later, the results are in. Half of New Orleans' population is still displaced. Almost a third of the debris left by the hurricane has yet to be removed. Approximately half of all bus and streetcar routes are up and running, but only 17 percent of buses are in use. An estimated 278,000 workers have been displaced, 23 percent of whom remain unemployed.

Half of the major hospitals have reopened, but Charity Hospital, the primary hospital for the indigent and uninsured, has not. A hundred thousand households still live in FEMA trailers. The poorest citizens are once more the most burdened. The administration has utterly failed in the construction of affordable housing, even while destroying public housing that was barely touched by the storm. Just as Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson predicted, New Orleans has gone from a majority black to a majority white city, with the poor scattered across 50 states with no program designed to help them come home.

The administration likes to brag about the money allocated to the region, but little of it has been spent on actual reconstruction, and the catastrophic incompetence, corruption and cronyism of this conservative administration have resulted in the squandering much of this money

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New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Friday blamed racism and government bureaucracy for hamstringing his city's ability to weather Hurricane Katrina and recover from the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast nearly a year ago.

In remarks to the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Nagin said the hurricane "exposed the soft underbelly of America as it relates to dealing with race and class."

"And I, to this day, believe that if that would have happened in Orange County, California, if that would have happened in South Beach, Miami, it would have been a different response," the mayor said.

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This is especially telling. I fail to understand why Nagin should have to apologize for his remarks made below:

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Nagin, who earlier this year apologized after declaring New Orleans would again become a "chocolate" city, condemned federal regulations that discourage rebuilding in the largely black and low-lying Ninth Ward.

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People cannot admit that they lived in a predominately black/Creole/Arcadian (Cajun)land. Apologizing because Nagin speaks the truth (rebuilding New Orleans means rebuilding for the poor and disenfranchised, whom are left in the dust under Bush and their failed efforts to help) is a very blatant implication that the media, the larger population and officials are trying to ensure NO is built for rich whites as their own little island away from th 'undesirables.

If anyone has noticed, how many MSM Katrina stories are filled with the evils of druggies taking over the city, the undesirables reclaiming what was theirs to begin with? Shameful.

I implore you all to find a copy of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. It's a wonderfully told picture, but deals with such horrendous sad situations that you're left with a cocked smiled and droopy eyes the entire movie.

If the democrats had any brains in their collective skulls, and would take the time away from degrading each other, they could say, "We have been the party of the poor and minorities for the last century, maybe we should do something about this issue." If only the democrats would just raise the issue. Just say outloud in front of one of those ever present camera's "What the hell is happening in New Orleans? Just because they're black doesn't mean they aren't americans."

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New Orleans is a city that suffers in silence. These days, it feels like a city being strangled in slow motion, a city whose current condition makes a lie of every political platitude preached over the past year. Yet ESPN spent four hours Monday trying to make us believe that the Crescent City--through the magic of sports and the return of the New Orleans Saints--is on the verge of resurrection.

The symbol of deliverance, we were told repeatedly during the broadcast, was the $185 million renovation of the Louisiana Superdome, $94 million of which came from FEMA. Never mind that the Dome's adjoining mall and hotel are still shuttered or that the city hasn't seen that kind of money spent on low-income housing destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The road back for the Big Easy begins in the Dome. As one ESPN talking head solemnly told us, "The most daunting task is to scrub away memories of the Superdome as a cesspool of human misery." That recalled the time when the football stadium became the homeless shelter from hell for 30,000 of New Orleans's poorest residents, huddled together in conditions Jesse Jackson likened to "the hull of a slave ship."

Now we are asked to believe the memories are being "scrubbed away." But the reality of refugee apartheid is hardly a memory. The game was held hostage to the awkward fact that the folks starring in ESPN's video montages of last year's "cesspool" were almost entirely black and the football fans in the stands were overwhelmingly white.

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