insurance companies who made it clear and IN WRITING that they would not pay engineering companies for damage reports that showed damge caused by wind (which was insured) but ONLY flood damage (which is not covered).

Do you have a link for this? Which companies involved?

-Ian

This “first hundred hours” initiative better be damned productive.

What boggles my mind is how Americans can take the loss of their freedoms and Constitutional guarantees with hardly a whimper. Our freedoms have been lost to us in a location of less enduring qualities, and the assurances that they will come back are not as certain.

I am no lawyer, but there seems to be racketeering issues when 2 companies insurance and engineering conspire to make false assessments of damage. Ir’s wonderful that the deep pockets of the ACLU will protect illegal aliens, but couldn’t care less about Americans.

As the “heck of a job Brownie” phase of the post Katrina catastrophe unfolded, it was clear to me that the reconstruction of the city would take a New Deal type program. The National Forest leases to the lumber concerns would need to be suspended, and the houses would need to be constructed elsewhere while the ruins were removed.

This of course would follow the large bladders of potable water hanging from the chinook helicopters chopping their way in from Baton Rouge, and the long lines of Greyhound buses that Mayor Nagin was begging for. But alas the city just looked damp from Air Force One flying over, and the people were of color.

New Orleans was a city where life was led on your front porch, a place where you knew your neighbors. It was also where I learned about life and culture that had little to do with European origins. It was hot. It was poor. It was so alive with sounds of music, the river, and trains. And though bayou muck was racid, the smell from the stove vent of eateries made me hungrier than I’ve even been.

So the parallel of Rummy’s little rant that Baghdad isn’t burning from 30,000 feet struck that same dischordant note in my heart, one that reminds us all that none of the bubble dwellers are going to ever get it.

It is important to revive the tourist economy, convention business etc., to Heimlich the flood waters from the cities throat. But getting people back in and living again is a much bigger problem. Most of the structures that failed were not in fact levies, but rather flood walls. If we are serious about having a this city live again, especially in the face of “inconvenient truth” water levels, billions are going to need to be spent to emulate a Dutch flood control system.

In the meantime, it is still beyond my comprehension that the largest class action law suit in the history of the republic has not yet begun.

(answer to rhetorical question: because a lottery ticket wouldn’t shuffle money to Betchtel or Halliburton.)

I certainly agree with the need for all of us, right now, to shine an intense spotlight on the charlatans and snake oil salesmen who hyped us into this mess. However, will it get anywhere? After all, these media outlets own us. I gave up listening to any of the MSM outlets a long time ago, with the exception of CNN. How many people would it take, doing the same, to make the MSM wake up? Or, perhaps more pertinent, how many people would it take to contact our newly elected Democratic Congress and get them to break up the media conglomerates? I try to “never say never” but I just don’t see it happening and I think its what really does need to happen - the breaking up of the big conglomerate media outlets. Oh - and why does Rupert Murdoch get to have such a big say in what America should and should hear? I don’t like ‘foreigners’ being in charge of our media. I think its treasonous to have allowed it in the first place.