New Homes for New Orleans
Habitat for Humanity is beginning a home in a box program to quickly assemble, ship, and build new housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina:Habitat's plan is to assemble the materials needed to build a house -- either purchased or donated -- and then, working with affiliates, churches, corporations and others in communities all over the country, volunteers, working with building specialists, will "pre-build" the frame of a home over a few days. The house will be tacked together to ensure a rock-solid fit, then the frame will be taken apart and the components placed, along with other necessary construction materials, in a container and shipped to an area along the Gulf Coast or New Orleans where families, volunteers and builders will rebuild the home.
These 1,100- to 1,300-square-foot homes will meet local housing codes at a cost to the charity of around $67,000 per home, if the 1,500-home, $100 million figure in the announcement is correct. You can donate online to support the effort.
More on charity efforts: The Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief campaign passed $150,000 this afternoon towards a goal of $1 million, and author John Grisham gave $5 million to help Mississippi residents rebuild.
'Abandoned By Our Own Country'
The president of Jefferson Parish in Louisiana, Aaron Broussard, appeared on Meet the Press this morning in an interview you can watch on Crooks and Liars.Broussard reported FEMA officials who refused entry to shipments of water, turned back diesel fuel, and cut emergency phone lines:
We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.
In disconsolate grief, Broussard broke down at the end of the interview while telling Russert a personal story about the head of emergency management for his parish. Watch it and you'll be crying too.
In the same show, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that the federal government didn't realize the situation was bad Tuesday because newspapers said New Orleans had "dodged a bullet."
We're now witnessing our second mass evacuation in a week, as government officials try desperately to escape blame.
The man-made disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina rises from the local officials in New Orleans to the parish officials in southeast Louisiana to the state officials in Baton Rouge to the Louisiana Congressional delegation to FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security to Chertoff to President Bush, who now has the distinction of being the first president to lose a major American city on his watch since Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.
And if we don't demand real accountability from our leaders when all the rescue efforts are over and rebuilding has begun, the blame lies with us.
Broadcasting live from the New Orleans Convention Center on Hannity and Colmes last night, Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera cried, holding a 10-month-old child as he discussed the extremely inhumane conditions 15,000 evacuees have been forced to live under.Outside, a visibly despondent Shepard Smith pointed out locked exit doors on the center and road checkpoints that prevented the exit of people housed for six days without food, shelter, sanitation, and medicine.
"Let them go," Rivera begged.
View the 8-minute clip on Crooks and Liars.
When did the road to New Orleans go through the rabbit hole?
Pastor: God Destroyed New Orleans
Agape Press, the publishing division of the American Family Association, issued a press release Friday quoting a New Orleans pastor who celebrates the devastation in New Orleans for wiping out "much of the rampant sin common to the city."Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans in Metairie, said that he warned for years God would pass judgment on the city:
New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again. ...
It's time for us to stand up against wickedness so that God won't have to deal with that wickedness.
More than 10,000 people are feared dead in Louisiana after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and six days of severe privation in the flooded city of New Orleans.
Southern Decadence, a yearly gay pride event expected to bring 100,000 people to the French Quarter this year, had been scheduled to occur from Aug. 30 through Sept. 5.
Shanks, who has protested at abortion clinics, the ACLU, and Southern Decadence, told Associated Press in 2004 that legalization of same-sex marriage would doom the city:
One Category 5 hurricane coming up the river will take care of all Sodomite marriages ... I believe this will open the floodgate for God to bring judgment on our land.
He also prophesied an end to murder in New Orleans during a 2004 gathering of Operation Rescue if abortion clinics shut down.
Shanks and some members of his church evacuated to the High Place Campsite in Florence, Miss., according to an Operation Rescue web site affiliated with the pastor.
Kaye Trammell, an assistant professor of communication at LSU, began a Hurricane Katrina weblog as she rode out the approaching storm last weekend in Baton Rouge.She writes in this morning's Washington Post about the experience:
We on-the-scene citizens don't mean to replace journalism. We don't have the resources. But we can provide first-person accounts in our own voices of what is happening.
Because blogs are so easy to create, they will only grow in number, and many will be covering crises in this personal way. Now that bloggers have figured out how to use the medium, it's time for government officials to do the same.
Dying of Thirst in New Orleans
As thousands of evacuees languished in the New Orleans Convention Center for four days, only one authority came to reassure them, according to NBC photographer Tony Zumbado:I went back with Harry Connick Jr. He spoke to them and told them he would do anything he can to help them. They seemed to appreciate that. He's the only person of authority -- believe it or not, a musician -- to go in there and tell them that things are going to be ok.
Connick's upholding a fine tradition of entertainers keeping their heads in disaster, following the legendary Titanic Band and Robin Boltman, the magician who stayed on the sinking cruise ship Oceanos after the captain and crew left for the lifeboats.
Zumbado told NBC Nightly News he saw things so horrific inside the center he wouldn't film them, knowing the network wouldn't broadcast the footage. They found unbelievable stench from human waste and numerous dead bodies, including two babies who had died of dehydration and a teen dead in a freezer, her throat slashed after a rape.
Harry Connick and a journalist were able to get from Baton Rouge to these 15,000 desperate people, as he described on the Today Show. Until late night Thursday, when food and water was brought for the first time since the storm, no one else could manage it.
Connick:
It's easy to get to the convention center, we got there with no problem ... how hard is it to take a truck with water or food for these people? I don't understand. They told these people to go to the convention center for help and it's been five days. It's unbearable
There's a backlash against anyone who expresses anger about this disaster, as if it's just political gamesmanship to angle for the congressional mid-term elections next year. If anger isn't the proper response to babies dying for lack of water in the U.S., I don't know what is.
I'm getting hammered by some people for my proposal that liberals and conservatives stage comparable relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims.One of the conservative bloggers I approached with this idea sent an e-mail that's still cooling off:
You're sick ... trying to make a competition out of other's suffering. You should be ashamed of yourself.
As I told him, competing to outraise another group is a routine charity practice. Look at all the weblogs in competition on TLB's Blog for Relief page. A big reason to rank blogs publicly like that is to spur people to dig deeper into their pockets and help the home team.
Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief has raised $127,000 in 36 hours. That's not bad, but I think we could raise a lot more by having conservatives to challenge us. Besides, any reason to help these people is a good reason. I was glad to discover TLB's efforts this afternoon and see the reported donations of $500,000 from a largely conservative roster of weblogs.
In the interest of balance, I did receive a nice e-mail from Hugh Hewitt, the conservative author whose next book is titled Demoncraps: How to Get Around God's Prohibition Against Abortion When Liberalism is Detected in the Womb.
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