Posted on 08/25/2007 3:30:36 PM PDT by yorkie
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Two years after Hurricane Katrina, much of the ``city that care forgot'' still lies in ruins. But Otis Biggs' task as he shuffles his Tarot deck this moist August day is to peer into the future to 2015, the storm's 10th anniversary.
Rings of silver and turquoise flash as one card, then another flops onto a zodiac-patterned table in the incense-perfumed Bottom of the Cup Tea Room in the French Quarter, where the diminutive Biggs has been telling fortunes for 32 years.
An upside down tower - violent storms will hold off until levees are repaired.
The ace of cauldrons - money will flow.
The empress - stability, fruitful things.
Downtown, near the riverfront, Biggs sees a gleaming glass and steel tower rising, the tallest in the state. Elections will bring new blood and vision. Companies will feel safe to invest in the city, and most of those who fled will return.
[Snip]``For every positive that's going on in New Orleans right now, there's a negative, there's a concern,'' says Reed Kroloff, who until recently was dean of the school of architecture at Tulane University.
The failure of federally funded, state-administered recovery programs to quickly take hold, and the city's struggle to define and fund plans for neighborhood redevelopment, have shaken confidence about New Orleans' short-term future. Mayor Ray Nagin favors a ``market-driven'' recovery of the city. Critics say he has not made the tough decisions necessary to get planning for the city's future moving into high gear.
New Orleans still struggles with corruption. A congressman is under indictment, a senator has been implicated in a sex scandal and a city councilman thought to be a favorite as New Orleans' next mayor pleaded guilty in August to federal bribery charges and resigned.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Maybe if you put down the frickin Tarot cards and got to work on YOUR city instead of bitching about how "we" (everyone else in the US) failed you, I'd have some pity.
It's not Bush's fault, it's fortune-teller Biggs' fault!
It is like building your house upon the sand and that was warned against several thousands of years ago.
Too bad it hasn't shaken confidence about the same type of leftist programs for healthcare and the economy being put forth by the RAT marxists candidates like Her Heinous, Osama Obama and the Breck Girl.
Agreed. We (the rest of America) didn’t fail New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, they failed themselves. The next time an election rolls around, vote for somebody with a clue about actual leadership instead of a bunch of idiot DemonRats who promise to shower you with gifts for doing nothing but sitting around crying victim. After election day, they’re the ones who sit in their ivory tower sipping champagne, talk the issues to death, and accomplish nothing.
It seems like many of the folks in New Orleans follow these foolish superstitutions - tarot, voodoo, santeria, whatever. Is it some pervasive cultural thing there or what?
The Fool-Ray Nagin’s still the mayor.
The “Big Easy”, a clusterfook closer to home than Baghdad, but very much comparable, same old barbarian problems!
I'm sorry if I don't seem very compassionate, but when I read a newspaper story that opens with a ring-wearing tarot dealer making predictions in yet another Bush's Fault story, I get a little cranky. The Empire State Building was put together in less than a couple of years, I think, but the American people seem to think that the work ethic is some silly, passe thing, and the way to achieve in this country now is to whine, and bitch, and play the victim till someone feels so guilty that they toss money at you to get you to shut up already.
Funny how if you offered that advice to them you'd be waved off as an "outsider" or a "carpetbagger."
But the folks in N.O. don't seem to have any trouble taking our money to rebuild their city which was devastated because of the short-sightedness and corruption of the LOCALS. THEN, all of a sudden, it's OUR responsibility as fellow Americans.
How is Mississippi and Alabama doing? We don’t hear much from them.
It was the federally built (Army Corps of Engineers) levees that broke in myriad spots that caused the devastation of the city.
The Orleans Levee Board was inept and awash in patronage and incompetence, but the levees were structurally unsound in many places below the surface because of the use of peaty soil, not driving metal sheets deeper than the canal water, and other reasons.
I don't think it's all the Feds' fault, but they do deserve the majority of the blame for the levees breaking. I'd say the Army Corps gets 2/3 of the blame, the Levee Board 1/3.
As for your ridiculous statements about voodoo, that's as much hogwash as a good part of this article that is replete with inaccuracies and errors. You've obviously never been here.
Give me a minute to consult the cards and I’ll let you know......
[LOL!]
It only seems like that to people who buy into liberal puke reporter's use of local color that might have been accurate a century ago, and even then for a small percentage of the population.
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