I really don’t want to write about crap in Washington when Irma is tearing up Florida. If you’re affected by the weather, please tell us about it in the comments.
Category Archives: Hurricanes
Stay Safe
Katrina Plus Ten
How time flies. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, here are some developments I’m sure we all could have predicted ten years ago.
1. Hundreds of crooks and grifters soaked up Katrina relief money. Not all of it, but a lot of it.
2. Whites got a lot more help from relief money than blacks. Inequality really is built into the system. See also Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina.
3. Since so many schools were damaged in the storm, the for-profit school grifters moved in and took over the school system. Since then there’s been all kinds of happy talk about how well this is going, along with the occasional story about New Orleans kids being taught that cave men lived alongside dinosaurs. A New Orleans mother and educator complains that what New Orleans really got was colonialism, not reform.
Party Tonight!
The virtual debate party begins here tonight at 8:30 eastern time, for the pre-debate warmup. BYOB. I’m taking suggestions for drinking games.
There are a number of articles out now that claim debates make no difference to elections, but Nate Silver’s analysis says that they often help the challenger. However, it could be argued that the post-debate spin was what made the difference, not the debate itself. For example, the numbers show that the Clinton-Dole debates in 1996 helped Dole just a little, and there’s no way. Dole was awful. I was embarrassed for him.
On the other hand, Nate’s numbers say that if the election were held today, Mitt’s chance of winning would be 2.7 percent. heh.
I’m not too worried about the spin. Why? Because righties are so out to lunch they couldn’t spin a dreidel on a turntable on a carousel. Right now they think they have a BOMBSHELL video of President Obama in 2007 telling an audience of black ministers that the federal government did not do enough to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Seriously. That’s their idea of a controversy. I guess we’re supposed to remember that Brownie did a heck of a job.
Righties say Obama’s remarks were racist because he ties the not-rebuilding of New Orleans to racial discrimination. Um, yeah, that was pretty obvious. Although I suppose it could be argued that it wasn’t so much racist as an attempt to finesse Katrina for political gain by making a Democratic governor look bad. And that the federal dollars eventually offered to New Orleans mostly went into the pockets of contractors with ties to the Republican Party and were not spent on, you know, rebuilding. And that was just good old-fashioned corruption. But it’s still not likely the Bushies would have played games like that if the neighborhoods that were destroyed were mostly white. I think anyone but a white racist can see that.
See also “Breaking: Obama Is Black” and “Right-wing Racial Panic.”