So the “mayor” of this dump still thinks the US Taxpayer should do everything! NOLA is still a mess-abandoned houses, junk cars , trash everywhere. Dispite 12 months since Katrina, no preparation for a future storm-so where did the 2$ billion go? How does this excuse for a leader keep a straight face? OK, they had a major disaster…but how about maybe PLANNING a little for the next one? And all of those abandoned cars-Nagin got an offer from a TExas junk dealer last year-they would remove all of the cars and pay the city $100 each-Nagin said no, we’ll have the city handle it! Such great results! NO A NEW STORM APPROACHEDS-LET’S SEE WHAT nAGIN WINDS UP DONG. 
This is what ticked me off. The guy is an ass. And the people of New Orleans are asses too if they voted to return him to office.
:eek:
And phooey on CBS for not spelling All Right correctly.
I think very high of Nagin and I’m glad he got re-elected. Of all the politicos involved in Katrina, he came off by far the best. If you think Nagin is bad, what is your opinion of the others? Sheesh.
The guy was routinely lied to by people making a lot of false promises. Blame the those people.
The buck stops with Nagin, and by all appearances he is a total fuck-up. Time to abandon NO to the swamps and start anew someplace better suited for a city.
There’s a “doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground” joke lurking in there somewhere…
And I thought there were legal procedures that cities could use to clean up private property, if the property constituted a health or safety hazard?
Apparently any and all efforts to remove debris in NOLA were stymied for many months by the feds, who said that all property had to be inspected for things like asbestos before so much as one bulldozer could be brought in. (Considering the age of the homes, that’s not surprising…but it is truly idiotic!) And then contracts could only go to approved contractors, who of course couldn’t do anything without the feds’ permission. Whereas in Mississippi, apparently a lot of property owners just ignored the feds and hired guys themselves to come get the crap up.
Yeah, Nagin puts his foot in his mouth, but in this case the buck does not stop with him. It stops in Washington, which has allotted many billions for rebuilding efforts – but has barely sent one single dollar to actually do it yet. I saw a rundown report card of all the promised aid the other day; at least 95% of it has yet to even begin to work its way towards the people who need it. The vast majority of the money supposed to help rebuild the Gulf Coast is in no way, shape, or form accessible to Nagin; he’s reduced to begging for handouts like everyone else. And those handouts have been painfully slow in coming.
To put it on a more personal example, I’ll give you the example of a close friend of a friend, whose home was flooded to the eaves for several weeks and is sitting in an area with zero power to this day. FEMA wouldn’t help him because he had insurance, and his insurance company told him basically to fuck off, and just won a court case supporting their decision. So he can’t afford to tear down his house himself, and the government won’t do it for him. What’s he supposed to do?
That may be, Mama Tiger, but the fact remains New Orleans was ill-prepared to deal with the storm, and their hurricane preparedness sucked.
Florida came through with flying colors in 2004, when four hurricanes hit the state. Granted, no levies broke, but Nagin and Landrieu could have done more before the storm hit and they didn’t.
Like on a fault line?
Contrast that with five days with no food, water, ice, evacuation assistance, or anything else in NOLA. And while a certain amount of disaster planning should be done locally, at least the Jefferson Parish disaster manager, Maestri, was on his job; no amount of screaming could get help from anyone up the chain, unfortunately. To wit, from one news account:
Yeah, FEMA really helped a whole bunch. Especially when they got swallowed up by Department of Homeland Security; now they don’t have the authority to sneeze without approval from way up the chain, let alone actually do something sensible like preposition supplies. Unless, of course, your the governor of a state that can deliver enough votes to your brother the prez, apparently.
I’m not saying I like everything Nagin has done or said, but honestly, blaming him for things utterly and totally beyond his control really doesn’t seem fair to me.
The fact remains that he is so appallingly egocentric, ill-equipped and racist that , as this is at last check 2006 and not 1882, he has absolutely no right to be the mayor of the city.
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" This city WILL be chocolate again".
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“That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”
I kind of rest my case. His re-election was an insult to the system of fairly elected government in this country.
YMMV.
Cartooniverse
Which taxpayers do you think should be paying, then? French? Australian? Nigerian?
New Orleans survived the storm just fine. The levees, which have turned out to be arguably the most massive engineering failure in the history of this country, failed. They weren’t just overtopped… they FAILED. Spectacularly. From what amounted to a weak category three storm. We should never lose sight of the fact that the fault for that lies with the US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. The levees aren’t the jurisdiction of the city and state… what *exactly *were they supposed to do?
I’m not arguing that the city and state aren’t failing massively since the storm, by any means. Lord knows, I’ve got a front row seat. But the fact that you are comparing this to Florida tells me that you really don’t quite comprehend the scope of what’s happened here. Massive deep flooding which stayed for weeks is just not comparable to wind damage. It’s the difference between a new roof and razing a home and rebuilding it. Do a little googling for the many news stories on how private insurance companies are going out of their way to avoid paying claims.
And by the way, our governor’s name is Blanco, not Landrieu.
Maybe he should do a raindance? What exactly do you suggest?
Just a reminder, sweetcheeks… New Orleans is, in fact, part of the United States. Just like everyone had to chip in when Hurricane Andrew took a bite out of Florida a decade or so ago, when wildfires burn down the western states regularly, when the Mississippi flooded a good portion of the midsection of the country during the spring a while back, and oh yeah, when some terrorists shut down the freaking country about five years ago for a couple weeks… the U.S. taxpayer foots the bill. You don’t get to kick out the section of the country that’s costing you the most money this quarter. In any case, I seriously doubt that even a tiny fraction of the money we’ve spent in Iraq in the last three years will be seen in Louisiana when it’s all said and done.
That was the same response he gave Amtrak, when they offered to evacuate the remaining residents, before the storm hit.
Wrong.
The levees fall under the jurisdiction of dozens of local committees who are responsible for maintenance and inprovements out of allocated funds, most of which just evaporate. Not the most massive engineering failure, but one of the best examples of political corruption in the history of this country, and it’s been going on for 300 years.
As a native Louisianan, I can’t take up for Nagin that much except that he is about the most sensible choice that could reasonably be elected by an impoverished, majority minority populace. He is no Marion Barry for example. Still, he is a MAYOR. They don’t have that much power. The governor is the chief executive of the state and the one with the power to get things done. She has failed at every single opportunity since Katrina was 5 days away and those of us on this board were starting to scream what she should be doing. She has blood on her hands from not having the first clue of what her powers are in terms of mobilizing the LA National Guard and starting the disaster relief processes at the federal level. Nagin is a small fish and doesn’t have much to do with anything except fodder for more laughter at the national level.
As is your gloss of the levee design, construction amd maintainence story:
Who’s In Charge of the New Orleans Levees
There were several different failure modes:
Why Did the Levees Fail?
Over and over, design problems are cited. Your ‘political corruption’ story gets scant mention.
Of course, the ASCE might be a front organization for MoveOn.org 
Ray Nagin seems to be a less than effective mayor, more ready to delegate blame than to assume responsibility. But most mayors seem small when confronted with a natural disaster (flood, wildfire, earthquake, drought) that destroys their cities. Many mayors would place blame elsewhere. The thing is, of course, some of them are wrong to do so, and some are right to do so, and some are partly right to do so. The difference in the promptness and magnitude of the federal response to Florida’s hurricanes and to Katrina (and the difference in the quality of FEMA’s assistance as more and more Clinton-era personnel were purged), are evident in the contemporaneous news accounts as well as the historical view. But that’s a lesser issue, one that does little other than recognize, dimly, that government usually gets less professional as it gets smaller, and less effective as more levels of authority get involved.
The big problem here (since few of us are NOLA voters) is not a poor decision or even several of them on the part of a noisy local politician. The big problem here (meaning the SDMB) is the sheer number of posters who don’t notice or don’t care that one of us has decided to vomit up “crackpipe Ray Nagin” as an appellation for a black public official whose history records no personal involvement with any illicit drug use.
So where did our illustrious ralph124c come up with such a clever put-down? Surely not from the mere fact that crack cocaine use is more strongly associated with black Americans than other demographics? That would be just raise-the-CSA-flag-and-then-drop-dead-because-you-forgot-to-breathe stupid. Lord knows, the Marion Berry example isn’t enough to prove that all black men, even politically successful ones, smoke crack. In the absence of evidence, one must look for other reasons for ralph to have chosen this particular method of characterizing a black man he doesn’t like (or know, or even know about, but that’s a problem for another day and a battery of abnormal psychologists). Since I’m assuming our friend isn’t just a brain-dead-unthinking-bigoted-product-of-his-own-sister’s-womb-nine-months-to-the-day-after-the-Christmas-morning-culmination-of-his-father’s-fourteen-year-patience, there has to be another explanation. Otherwise, Nagin may be the worst mayor in the planet’s history, and I’d vote for him for president before I shook hands with the OP.
Do you have a cite for these claims?