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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 4 Editor's Choice: 1
The problem with the rebuilding plan, which designates more devastated and lower-elevation portions of the city as candidates for razing and green space, is that it presumes that the flooding was a natural event doomed to be repeated. This is a correct premise in many unprotected floodplains. It is an incorrect premise in New Orleans, however. For many decades, our city has been protected from levees that keep water out and by one of the most technologically advanced pumping systems to get the water out that comes in in the form of rain. What flooded our city was not the natural effects of Hurricane Katrina, but the human ineptitude of those who built "new and improved" levees and floodwalls in the early 1990s. Make no misttake about the identity of those builders, either. It was not local politicians or fragmented levee boards, decried far and wide by those who know no better as the corrupt engineers of our demise. It was the federal government, in the form of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that oversaw the design and building of those levees and floodwalls that failed, pouring devastation into our city. Hence, it is not the footprint of the city that is inherently broken and in need of alteration, but the man-made protections of the city that should be overhauled.
To the extent that there is financial hardship to providing services now to these devastated areas of the city, it is the same actor -- the federal government -- that is culpable and should be liable for making this city whole again. But, as the feds are slow in everything involving response to this man-made disaster, we are absolutely right to take risks and work into our own hands and start rebuilding ourselves.
I'm with seamonkey and tinmanic on this. The first will.i.am video, in turning a speech into song, was shades of Bob Marley's "war," which did a similar trick with a 1963 speech by Haile Selassie to the U.N.
This chanting thing with celebrities sometimes unsurely saying what they want for their country just plays into way too many negative stereotypes of Obama's supporters as pampered cultists, which is actually all very far off the mark. And it lacks any element of the uplifting that was so present in the first effort.
It doesn't dissuade me from my choice to support Obama, any more than the earlier will.i.am video persuaded me to support him in the first place. As mentioned above by others, this campaign, despite the media storyline, is not about style over substance. But from a critical standpoint, this is not so good.
I think her response was right on with what she needed to say and how she needed to say it. And I can only hope, for her sake and for the sake of the Party, that she can muzzle Penn and Wolfson to keep them from saying anything inappropriately snarky or out of line with her own response.
"Assymetric"! Ha! What's that, the system of measuring how big an ass they've made our country out to be? I must have missed the class on assy-metrics while taking statistics.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
