the problem with this is that people rarely make this much sense. The emotional attraction of a politics of hate is powerful. Hate is a much more powerful feeling than love, than acceptance and tolerance. It's the emotion that gets people to kill. And a handful of hate-filled people can triumph over a million who aren't motivated to stand against them. Hate is a powerful emotion and as such it is useful in helping people FEEL safe, even when the politics that stem from it actually make people objectively LESS safe.

That is the paradox which we need to address. The policies that will actually increase our national security make a lot of people feel less safe. In order for that to change, we need to encourage people to learn the uncomfortable truth that feelings are not facts. They don't necessarily have anything to do with objective reality. It's a hard lesson to learn.

The jibe thrown at the Athenians in the movie- "boy lovers"-- would as accurately describe the Spartans themselves. Pederastia was a central part of Sparta's martial training.

You can't consider the crime wave here without considering the TOTAL meltdown of criminal justice since the storm.

DA is more concerned with conviction rate than in protecting the community. NOPD crime lab flooded out and destroyed, and the city just now getting it back together. This means that evidence was sent to other parishes for processing and put at the bottom of the pile. Because evidence was lacking, arraignments weren't done and people were released after 60 days (And I'm GLAD that we aren't holding people indefinitely without charging them with a crime. There has to be a limit.) So violent criminals are released into the community. They even call it "misdemeanor murder". And the NOPD is rife with factional infighting. Deptartment politics making it hard to have an effective unified response to the madness.

Helen Hill, the film maker mentioned in the article, was a friend. Her husband Paul was Mom's doctor. We had a jazz funeral for her last weekend. It's bad to be sure, but as I said before, the problems are much more complex than just drugs on the street.

I was just wondering what personal experience all this opinion is coming from. I'm posting from a cafe on the corner of Oak and Carrolton Av. right now. I didn't see any dealers on the way in here, and wasn't afraid for my life. While there are class and race effects in the impact of violence, and certainly a drug connection, it isn't that simple. Most of the violence is NOT random. People go looking for trouble and find it. That's true anywhere, but it is especially true here, with the long term disinvestment in large sections of the city and its population.

It isn't just the drugs, lack of mental health care and the difficulty fo getting ANY health care increase stresses and makes violent outbursts more likely. For instance, an article in today;'s Times Picayune told the story of a baby sitter that dangled her infant charges over an overpass then tried to set their cloths on fire. Shed had been behaving erratically for a number of days, family tried to get her help but couldn't. And Charity Hospital, cleaned out in the weeks after the storm by dedicated staff and national guard, has a 100 bed mental ward sitting vacant, the hospital still closed, because LSU would rather wait to build a new multi-billion dollar research hospital. The issue of violence in New Orleans is indeed much more complicated than just an issue of drugs.

I just wish people would think about the impact of what they say. The portrayal of New Orleans as awash in drugs and violence, not only gives a totally distorted view of what is going on here, it makes the ongoing disaster all the deeper, by scaring people away who might come to visit and help, who might out their vacation dollars into the economy here.

No it's never as simple as the media protrays.....

...could this English guy be called a moderate and a conservative.

According to the article: "He describes himself as a firm supporter of Bush's efforts in the war on terror, which he sees as part of a bigger battle that the United States must win against violent Islamist extremism."

so he supports the trashing of the Constitution and 800 years of legal tradition. He goes along with Bush's analysis "They hate us and attack us because they hate our freedom, so let's do away with our freedom."

So warrantless spying on US citizens is OK, the legal certification of torture is OK, doing away with habeus corpus is OK. We just had a little lapse of judgement in IRaq. What, pray tell, is moderate about this?

the article goes on:

"he opposed cutting funds for the troops. "I don't want to create a bad precedent by trying to micromanage where the president may put 20,000 troops," English said. "Once our troops are in Iraq, it's ultimately the commander in chief who is responsible for implementation. I don't think there is any way of effectively sharing power."

in other words, he doesn't believe in the Constitutionally comprised separation of powers. He doesn't want the responsibility of exercising the budget power of Congress. In what sense is this "conservative"?

Only in the demented landscape of Bush's amerikkka