Free Republic

Workers World newspaper in the past has supported the candidates of Workers World Party running for national office in the U.S. presidential elections and who have put forward a revolutionary socialist program. This time we are taking the unusual step of endorsing the candidacy of Cynthia McKinney because these are unique times and this is a unique candidate.

Pelosi to lead group to assess storm recovery WASHINGTON -- A U.S. House delegation, led by its three top Democratic leaders, plans to view levees and tour communities in the 9th Ward, Lakeview and St. Bernard Parish as part of a fact-finding visit this weekend to evaluate progress as the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina nears. The delegation, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, is expected to arrive Saturday in New Orleans and participate in a bus tour. Afterward, the representatives will travel to Baton Rouge for a meeting with some...

Is it really true that the people of Iowa and Wisconsin are morally superior to the residents of New Orleans? That certainly seems to be the attitude of some Wisconsin State Journal readers who send me e-mails on a daily basis crowing about how victims of the floods of Cedar Rapids aren't whining or asking for hand-outs, unlike the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The messages take the same perspective: When floodwaters drowned downtown Cedar Rapids, people got to work filling sandbags and helping one another. When the residents of New Orleans were drowned in the floodwaters unleashed...

NEW ORLEANS — Between acres of aboveground tombs that are this marshy city's way to inter the dead, there is a strip of land that is an empty tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Unknown to most in town, including the relatives of those who died in the storm, it is the chosen site for a memorial to an estimated 1,600 fatalities, and will serve as the resting place for 85 bodies that remain unclaimed nearly three years after the disaster. During a second-anniversary ceremony, Mayor Ray Nagin shed a tear, gave $1 million in taxpayer money to the...

Census Bureau says New Orleans is the fastest-growing large city in the nation, recovering from being wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- After being pummeled by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans is showing signs of recovery - ranking as the fastest-growing large city in the nation, according to a government report released Thursday. The Census Bureau said New Orleans' population rose 13.8%, to 239,124, in the year ended July 1, 2007. That was a faster growth rate than any other city with a population of 100,000 or more.

Hurricane Katrina moved Louisiana's government to suspend the second amendment when it declared a state of emergency. Firearms were confiscated by force of law and military power. When the state of emergency was lifted, the second amendment was not restored, and the people's firearms were not returned. A Federal district court ruled that guns confiscated would not be returned to their rightful owners. We're talking about legal firearm owners here. Common sense dictates that removing firearms from legal owners leaves only the criminals in possession of firearms, emergency or no. The Associated Press reported that some police officers asked if...

Here is video of police seizing guns from citizens of New Orleans after Katrina. While looters ran wild, cops were seizing guns from law abiding citizens. This video is unbelievable and really must be seen.

Your America I exchanged pleasantries with the owner of my neighborhood produce stand while purchasing her fresh tomatoes, onions and world's sweetest watermelon. Feeling the folks in line behind me getting annoyed at the post office, I politely cut off the postmaster telling me about the latest piece of furniture he built in his wood shop. It occurred to me, this is the wonderful world I've created for myself. Be good to people and they're usually good to you. Agenda driven politicians and media have created a negative world view of America. To them, America's glass is forever half empty....

During the week after Father’s Day, I received a number of interesting emails from readers asking me to write about the dearth of looting after the recent floods in Iowa. Specifically, they wanted me to write about the reason there was so much more looting in New Orleans after Katrina hit the “Chocolate City” in 2005. Of course, the problem involves so much more than race – a factor most people are thinking about, even if they won’t admit it...

"Where are all of the Hollywood celebrities holding telethons asking for help in restoring Iowa and helping the folks affected by the floods? Where is all the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hasn't solved the problem? Asking where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) are? Why isn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago? When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines? Where are Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks? Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen...

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Here is a gallery of aerial phtographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen. The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their...

The streets in Cedar Rapids, Iowa - all 400 blocks of them - were filled with floodwaters and other strange sights: floating Dumpsters and utility poles and sandbags piled in vain. The cresting Cedar River wreaked widespread havoc Friday on Iowa's second-largest city, forcing the evacuation of 3,000 homes and a downtown hospital while collapsing a railroad bridge.

FEMA gave away about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, a CNN investigation has found. The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year. James McIntyre, FEMA's acting press secretary, said that FEMA was spending more than $1 million a year to store the material and that another agency wanted the warehouses torn down, so "we needed to vacate them." "Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that...

These cats residing in and around the FEMA Diamond trailer park in Port Sulphur, La., enjoyed a meal in what appears to be a trash can lid last week. Where they are this week is anyone's guess.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town. Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else. While many of the homeless do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from...

BAY ST. LOUIS, MISS. - The anguish of Hurricane Katrina should have ended for Gina Bouffanie and her daughter when they left their FEMA trailer. But with each hospital visit and each labored breath her child takes, the young mother fears it has just begun. "It's just the sickness. I can't get rid of it. It just keeps coming back," said Bouffanie, 27, who was pregnant with her now 15-month-old daughter, Lexi, while living in the trailer. "I'm just like, `Oh God, I wish like this would stop.' If I had known it would get her sick, I wouldn't have...

NEW ORLEANS - Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so...

It’s not often you watch a video where a frail, 98-pound grandmother is slammed into the wall by a burly police officer, handcuffed and dragged from her home — all because she refused to surrender her firearm and leave her home. She was not a felon, drug dealer or other miscreant but was a homeowner in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina. This somewhat brushed-over bit of history is reappearing in discussion on talk radio and other locations as we await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the District of Columbia’s wholesale ban on handgun possession. In following...

NEW ORLEANS — Josue Vega was one of thousands of immigrant workers who flocked to New Orleans in 2005 in hopes of finding a rebuilding job in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He worked seven days a week and earned more than twice his normal earnings. But with work now down to three days a week, the 20-year-old is planning to go home to Honduras. "My goal is to be here until November, and then never come back," he said. "I've had enough." The stops and starts of the post-Katrina rebuilding effort, often due to bureaucratic delays in funding, still...

Apparently, Louisiana legislators have decided that everything wrong in the state has been fixed. The Senate finance committee has passed Senate Bill 672 to the floor of the Senate for debate. This bill sponsored by Senator Ann Duplessis (D, New Orleans) will raise the base pay for Louisiana legislators from $16,800 to a whopping $50,000 per year. This is a 300% increase in the base pay for a part-time legislative position. An additional $12,000 or so would be added on to cover expenses. This can only mean one thing. Louisiana is fully repaired from the damages of hurricanes Katrina and...

GENEVA (AP) — Two human rights experts for the United Nations on Thursday criticized a plan by New Orleans authorities to raze public housing projects, saying it will force the predominantly black residents into homelessness. They charged that demolition would harm thousands of people by denying them a place to live in a city where housing already is scarce since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. The joint statement was not a U.N. finding, but only the individual views of Miloon Kothari, a special investigator on housing matters for the U.N. Human Rights Council, and Gay McDougall, a lawyer who...

BATON ROUGE, La. - A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket he bought at a convenience store where he stopped to buy his wife a gallon of milk. When he turned in the winning ticket, Carl Hunter became the largest Powerball winner in Louisiana's history. He won the jackpot in January, but the 73-year-old small businessman waited nearly four months to claim the prize. An avid lottery player, Hunter said he already had bought a Powerball ticket on Jan. 16 at the gas station...

Don't stop hurricanes, guide them 03 May 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. Would-be hurricane fighters hoping to stop a future Katrina before it makes landfall should aim to wound, not kill. The goal should be to re-route hurricanes and ease their fury, rather than try to stop them forming in the first place. This is the latest advice from weather modification experts. The field has a colourful history. In the 1960s and early 1970s, scientists on "Project Stormfury" tried in vain to disrupt the inner structure of hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide crystals. Various other far-fetched ideas...

New Orleans (AP) -- The Army Corps of Engineers can be held liable for flood damage caused by a "hurricane highway," a navigation channel that is believed to have funneled Hurricane Katrina's storm surge into the city, a federal judge ruled Friday. The Corps of Engineers had argued that it was immune from liability because the channel is part of New Orleans' flood control system. The law says the federal government cannot be sued if something goes wrong with a flood control project such as a levee, reservoir or dam. Judge Stanwood Duval dismissed that argument, saying the Mississippi River-Gulf...

In a speech from New Orleans last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain lashed out at the Bush administration for its response to Hurricane Katrina. McCain's remarks, which appeared calculated to make disaster relief a key campaign issue, revived harsh memories of the savage storm that inundated the Mississippi Delta in late August 2005, leaving more than 1,800 people dead and causing widespread property damage. Although the floodwaters long ago receded, government officials are still counting the disaster's costs. Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disclosed that 489,000 claimants are seeking damages caused by poorly designed levees....

Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared the handling of the disaster “terrible and disgraceful” and pledged that it would never happen again. “I am for doing what is necessary — $4.2 billion, $10.5 billion, $50.5 billion,” Mr. McCain said at the time. “The $4.2 billion is not the end of the requirement.”

Mike Reagan just said he wouldn't campaign for John McCain. Michael is disgusted that he would go to New Orleans and condemn the Federal Government for inaction. He also called the people in NOLA who wouldn't step up and accept responsibility losers. He was referring to Nagin and Co. He said McCain is an idiot.

NEW ORLEANS — Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared that “never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.”

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - John McCain toured still hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed his plane at the nearest Air Force base. The Republican presidential candidate is campaigning this week in what he calls forgotten areas of the country. He offered a pledge Thursday to New Orleans residents that their situation will not be forgotten and that such a botched disaster response will never happen again. McCain was unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration. He said Congress must share some of the blame,...

The ruling by U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. applied to the federal lawsuit filed by Thomas and Pamela McIntosh... The case was a key lawsuit filed by embattled tort attorney Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, who sued on behalf of dozens of storm victims claiming that State Farm routinely denied claims based on bad faith and fraud. Scruggs has since pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in an unrelated case and no longer represents storm victims. Scruggs and his partners in the Scruggs Katrina Group claimed fraud after E.A. Renfroe & Co., an Alabama firm that provided damage assessments for State...

If Gregory Christopher Decay is convicted of capital murder this week, his attorneys plan to argue that the former New Orleans resident pulled the trigger on a Fayetteville couple while traumatized from Hurricane Katrina. The capital murder trial for Decay, 24, begins today in Washington County. He is accused in the April 2007 slayings of Kevin Barkley Jones and Kendall Rachell Rice, both 24. Jones and Rice were shot in the head in a drug dispute, court records show. Their bodies were found in their Fayetteville apartment. Deputy public defender Julie Tolleson said that if Decay is convicted, she will...

GULFPORT, Miss. — After the federal government announced in February that it would no longer use travel trailers to house the victims of future disasters, there was an initial sense of relief along the hurricane-scarred Gulf Coast. The flimsy little white boxes are unpleasant to live in and tainted with toxic formaldehyde fumes. And they cost the federal government billions of dollars. But that relief quickly turned to exasperation when it became clear that the government did not have an immediate backup plan. Without the trailers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has no reliable way to rush immediate shelter to...

NEW ORLEANS — Calling it a “pivotal moment’’ in the 215-year history of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Archbishop Alfred Hughes said Wednesday that 25 church parishes — 19 of them shuttered since Hurricane Katrina — will close and merge with neighboring congregations by year’s end.The majority of those Catholic parishes are in New Orleans, while a handful are in St. Bernard Parish and one each are in Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes.Hughes also announced that two other church parishes, both in the Jefferson suburb of Kenner, will close and merge by the middle of next year. Four other church parishes...

Hurricane season is just around the corner, so Americans should know where to turn to if disaster strikes. It's not the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A new study suggests Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Lowe's would be a lot more helpful. **** The study, by Steven Horwitz, a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., **** "Profit-seeking firms beat most of the government to the scene and provided more effectively the supplies needed for the immediate survival of a population cut off from life's most basic necessities," Horwitz wrote in the study, which was published by the Mercatus...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant. Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars. Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat. A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid...

Who did the most to help victims of Hurricane Katrina? According to a new study, it was the company everyone loves to hate.

I’m grateful to an article in the National Post on Friday, 28 March, by Colby Cost for bringing this item to my attention. It is about Wal-Mart, but has nothing to do with the legendary business model of that company. Or, does it? As the article recites, shortly before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on 29 August 2005, Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart, send a memorandum to all the regional and store managers in the region about to be hit. His message said: “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best...

(NEW ORLEANS) - A group of Gulf Coast hurricane victims sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday for sheltering them in trailers that allegedly exposed them to dangerous fumes. The complaint filed in federal court adds FEMA as a defendant in a batch of consolidated cases against several manufacturers that provided the agency with tens of thousands of trailers and mobile homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The cases against trailer makers were consolidated in November 2007 and transferred to U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt in New Orleans. However, FEMA couldn't be named as a defendant in...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - This hurricane-ravaged city and neighboring St. Bernard Parish top a U.S. Census Bureau list of fast-growing counties released Thursday, but some local officials aren't happy that the agency estimated New Orleans' population to be less than 240,000. The number, an estimate for July 2007, falls more than 30,000 short of at least one other estimate, and efforts based on more recent data had New Orleans topping 300,000 people. The city's population was nearly 454,000 in July 2005, the month before Hurricane Katrina hit and scattered hundreds of thousands of people along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. City...

While former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco is making the most of her time out of office delivering speeches and writing a book, there's more trouble brewing for her back in the capital. From today's New Orleans Times-Picayune: In the final weeks of Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration, state officials quietly increased the size of the Road Home management contract from $756 million to $912 million, rewarding a contractor the Legislature wanted to fire, auditors questioned and thousands of homeowner applicants cursed. The Blanco administration never told the public about the 25 percent compensation increase for ICF International that was added to...

U.N. Criticizes U.S. For Violating Human Rights Of Internally Displaced Hurricane Katrina VictimsUnited Nations Headquarters (AHN) - Long an advocate for poor internally displaced persons in third world countries, the United Nations on Thursday called on the United States government to halt demolition of low-income housing in New Orleans saying it violated the human rights of Hurricane Katrina victims and was driving them into "destitution." In a strongly worded statement posted on its news center website, U.N. experts on housing and minority rights called the Bush administration to task for its treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans and...

HOUSTON -- In a cramped guard booth on the edge of a community of luxury townhouses, the sense of helplessness that has become so familiar to Gregory Sam since Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from his home town of New Orleans can become all-consuming. "I'm struggling," said Sam, 29, a college graduate who took an $8-an-hour post as a security guard after more than 20 job interviews led to nothing. "I feel like I'm isolated in the country somewhere . . . in a time warp." For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the...

A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina, August 28, 2005. + High Resolution (Credit NOAA) “We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time,” said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations...

BAINS — West Feliciana Middle School sixth-graders left school last Tuesday with laptop computers and words of encouragement and caution. The students are participating in “Turn on to Learning,” a $5 million initiative to put Apple MacBook computers into the hands of more that 3,500 sixth-graders and their teachers across the state. West Feliciana’s students received their computers last fall, and Tuesday was their first opportunity to use them at home. “I think the kids are so excited about it, that they’ll take care of them,” Principal Darryl Powell said. “The parents are excited, too. They’re so proud their kids...

Two weeks after federal officials allowed Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to divert $600 million in post-Katrina housing funds to a massive expansion of the state’s port, the governor is seeking to shift another $25 million in hurricane recovery money to a highway improvement project far from the storm zone, which would chiefly benefit a new Toyota plant being built in the area. Barbour’s money-moving efforts, which have been criticized by Democrats in Congress and the state Legislature, come as other officials seek additional funding for what they say are unmet needs left by the devastating August 2005 hurricane.

(CNN) — The more likely a Louisiana Democratic presidential primary voter was to have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, the more likely they were to support Democrat Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Associated Press CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The memory of Louisiana police confiscating guns from waterlogged citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago has some Wyoming legislators anxious to make sure nothing similar ever happens here. A proposed Wyoming bill would change the state's Homeland Security laws. It would spell out that the governor and other officials don't have authority to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens in the event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. The National Rifle Association has pushed similar legislation around the country following Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the surrounding area...

Aerial photo of the disappearing wetlands of south Louisiana. Credit: Roy Dokka, Louisiana State University A study by NASA and Louisiana State University scientists finds that sediments deposited into the Mississippi River Delta thousands of years ago when North America's glaciers retreated are contributing to the ongoing sinking of Louisiana's coastline. The weight of these sediments is causing a large section of Earth's crust to sag at a rate of 0.1 to 0.8 centimeters (0.04 to 0.3 inches) a year. The sediments pose a particular challenge for New Orleans, causing it to sink irreversibly at a rate of about...

New Orleans (AP) -- A federal judge threw out a key class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over flooding from a levee breach after Hurricane Katrina. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled that the Corps should be held immune over the failure of a wall on the 17th Street Canal that caused much of the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005. The suit led to 350,000 separate claims by businesses, government entities and residents, totaling billions of dollars in damages against the agency. The fate of many of those claims was pinned to that lawsuit...

NEW ORLEANS — Thousands of people are looking for a place to live in this city. Many thousands of houses are vacant or for sale, and acres of land sit empty. But turning potential housing into inhabited homes is proving to be a major challenge, even for a city that survived the fury of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees. For those who need shelter the most, these houses are out of reach. More than 8,800 houses are for sale in the New Orleans metropolitan area — almost as many as were sold in the last 12 months,...