How Karl Dean chooses to spend federal flood money has an impact our neighborhoods

Dean's bauble: the real reason for a ballpark announcement

The reason that a possible deal between Metro, the Sounds, and the state for a new Sulphur Dell ballpark was announced was to clear the way for this week's announcement of a new amphitheater and park at the former thermal site (effectively bumping the ballpark). I cannot prove that claim is true. But I would bet six ways to Sunday that it is.

Whether the Sounds were willing to make the move to North Capitol or whether Hizzoner simply played his hand out until the Sounds felt forced to acquiesce, we may never know. We do know that a lot of old Nashville wealth is behind flipping the thermal site to open space for outdoor orchestra concerts.

The Mayor will pay for this high-society playground in part by flipping flood relief funds to pay for a wall and a "promenade":

The mayor put the estimated cost of the project at between $30 and $40 million, but stressed that his administration is not seeking new funds. The Metro Council has approved about $35 million for riverfront redevelopment on the west bank as part of three previous capital spending plans. And last month, the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency approved the reallocation of $7.1 million in federal flood relief. The former flood aid will be put toward the construction of the flood wall along the promenade.

So, the rest of Nashville is no longer in need of federal flood damage relief? We cannot find any other projects around Nashville that might help the everyday lives of average people? What about these folks in Madison or Bordeaux? Or how about this guy?

"I've been battling this for two years at least. I feel like their (the city's) negligence caused this whole thing to happen," explained John Watts of Value Vet in Nashville.

The problem is a drainage ditch along the side of Watt's property along Gallatin Road. Every time it rains, he said the water isn't draining properly and causing the edge of his parking lot to slowly erode. Recently the problem got so bad his retaining wall collapsed.

"We would like to make improvements on this property and actually do some construction with the building. We're in a holding pattern, we can't get permits because of this issue, we can't expand because of this issue," he said.

In an effort to get the city to pay attention to the issue John had a sign made at a local print shop that reads "Mayor Dean, This is your mess!" with a black and white photo of Mayor Karl Dean in the center of the sign.

"I get lots of support from it, people come by and honk and are like ‘yay' they know the problem," John added.

The Mayor refuses to acknowledge the problem. He's got a promenade to erect.

However, there might be a problem for North Nashville neighborhoods if all of the federal flood funds are going to suit a stylish amphitheater. Sulphur Dell is an area historically prone to catastrophic floods. Even with the Army Corps of Engineers taking measures to mitigate flood damage in Nashville during the 2010 flood, the Sulphur Dell area flooded again. Has the Mayor figured any flood mitigation costs into a new ballpark? He failed in 2010 to consider the damage that could be caused by Richland Creek on the planned west police precinct and had to add expensive damage mitigation, which still looked flawed afterward. One would think that he learned a lesson and has committed money to flood mitigation for all capital projects that need it. But I have heard nothing to that effect.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Mayor Dean has taken care of flood mitigation at Sulphur Dell. All of that displaced Cumberland River water will have to go somewhere. Sulphur Dell is now essentially floodplain that kept many of us from flood damage in 2010. Flood waters at that time crested within a block of our house. If we have a future flood with a new ballpark and there are plans to push waters away from Sulphur Dell, whose homes will be inundated in Germantown, Salemtown, Buena Vista and Hope Gardens where they were not in 2010? Given that there is a daisy chain of flood events that results from displacing water in flood mitigation, has Karl Dean any secondary plans to protect our neighborhoods, businesses and homes from damage if a ballpark is built near us?

On this the 8th anniversary of Katrina flooding in New Orleans (which captured our attention at the time), I wonder whether the millions of dollars in federal flood aid in Nashville might be spent to help many more people beyond the patrons of an amphitheater.

Middle Tennessee's own Jim Cooper votes with Republicans, against hurricane victims

Nashville's Jim Cooper turns away from Rockaway (NYC)

So, Congress's response to the disaster along the east coast caused by Hurricane Sandy has been late and limping, very much unlike their response to Middle Tennessee in 2010 after our "1,000 year" flood. I fully expected most of the Republicans and maybe a few lunkhead Democrats to kick some recovering northeasterners while they are down.

But take a look at the identity of the only Democrat to vote against relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy:

A very big thing happened last night in the House of Representatives. For the second time this month, Boehner broke the Hastert Rule. The issue was Hurricane Sandy relief, a follow-up vote to a smaller package approved earlier this month. It passed, but the important thing is how it passed:

Yeas: 241 (192 Democrats, 49 Republicans)
Nays: 180 (Rep. Jim Cooper + 179 Republicans)

For his part, Congressman Cooper issued a press release:

Congress should make at least some effort to pay for a portion of disaster relief. I voted for federal aid for Nashville flood recovery in 2010, and that bill was partially paid for. So were the Hurricane Katrina bills I supported. And Hurricane Rita, and Hurricane Wilma, and Hurricane Ivan, and Hurricane Isabel. Why can’t we find even partial offsets for Sandy?

Yesterday’s votes came during a national budget crisis while America is officially out of money.

Jim Cooper is so set on "fixing" Congress and the national debt that he is willing to cast a symbolic vote against the welfare of one-time disaster victims. Okay. So, he got to send his message of fiscal responsibility and dealing with deficits one more time. How is that supposed to help someone whose life has been arbitrarily destroyed by a historic hurricane? Seriously. He cannot make any exceptions in extreme cases to his pay-as-you-go rule?

A couple of years ago, Mr. Cooper went ballistic when the Army Corps of Engineers chose not to produce a report on Nashville's 2010 flooding due to budget considerations. In another press release he said:

This is completely unacceptable. I am stunned the Corps doesn't feel it is necessary to investigate their response to a multi-billion dollar disaster.  The people of Middle Tennessee deserve answers.

This shows a serious lack of accountability and leadership at the Corps.

So, when the Corps makes a decision not to spend money on the Nashville flood follow-up due to budget considerations, it is "unacceptable".  However, Mr. Cooper voting not to support federal aid for stricken eastern seaboard communities based on budget considerations is acceptable. Using budget considerations as a strict rule obviously cuts both ways.

The precedent for federal aid to disaster victims, as he points out, has already been set. Using the budget crisis as an excuse for neglect of nature's latest victims looks like he is treating them as a means to serve his own ends in Washington. Heaven forbid Jim Cooper let human suffering stand in the way of his Blue Dog Beltway axioms.

Business logic: to bury, forget and ignore in order to promote growth

Reading this piece from Mississippi on opposition from Bay St. Louis business leaders to commemoration of the town's 2005 Katrina flood tragedy left me considering a couple of things. First, business growth evangelists will stoop to snuff out historical landmarks that people choose to commemorate in the name of a buck. The Gulf coast giants of industry want some simple state highway markers that show the high-water mark removed for fear that they discourage businesses from relocating to undeveloped properties near the markers.

Let's think this logic through for a moment. They are concerned that prospective entrepreneurs are going to make informed decisions to relocate to other areas in Bay St. Louis that would not be under the 2005 high water mark should another Katrina-like hurricane visit Mississippi. They are concerned that relocating companies may not want to take the irrational risk of catastrophic flood damage if they do not have to. They are willing to deny flood survivors the catharsis of pilgrimages to historic landmarks in the name of placing unknowing businesses in jeopardy. So, why aren't these titans of commerce relocating to the flood-prone areas themselves?

When the local news media continues to rewrite catastrophic history to a national audience, hindsight of the Nashville flood is not 20/20

The most frustrating characteristic of the Nashville news media is that they rarely ask critical questions of their interview subjects regarding even the most commonly held fallacies. Last May as local feelings were festering in the wake of our 1,000 year flood that national media attention that was due us was too focused on the Gulf oil spill, a popular meme surfaced comparing Nashville's flood response in rather grandiose ways to the New Orleans response post-Katrina.

Having been focused on New Orleans doggedly during those dark days of Katrina and having witnessed problems in with emergency response in Nashville as they unfolded, I felt compelled to write a minority report rather than join self-congratulations and the revictimization of our wayward neighbors to the south:

Implicit in this preoccupied reaction is a response to the old nemesis, New Orleans. It’s a slam against another American community by placing ours on a higher moral plane ....

What is most striking in the Nashville narrative is that at its base it is a disingenuous re-write of history. It is a judgment call based on a fabricated all-things-were-equal scale ....

The rub, the difference here between these two cities is precisely evacuation. Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans two days before Katrina’s landfall and the failure of the levees. Consequently, 1 million people fled from the Big Easy in those 2 days. There was no evacuation in Nashville in advance of our 1,000 year storm event. Nobody knew what to do. Metro government was hamstrung because, unlike New Orleans and its recent history of hurricanes, we only had 2 or 3 other years in the last century to compare this event to. And hurricanes are not just big rain events. They are approaching monsters to coastal cities and the risk is certain.

We are here to take care of ourselves. And my suspicion of undue arrogance leads me to believe that had 1 million New Orleanians stuck around the Big Easy, they would probably be more competitive in showing a volunteer spirit. The people of New Orleans, outside of the lower classes who had no choice, would not be waiting on FEMA, which kept failing them so miserably, so spectacularly in spite of federal promises about rebuilding New Orleans to the contrary. Many would have been able to serve their community as enthusiastically as Nashvillians are serving theirs.

Source: National Geographic

Behind the Nashville hand-wringing is a tale of two cities, one moral and self-sufficient, the other unforgivable and incapable.

There were even more spot-on comments to my reflections on these fabrications last May:

This is really a tale of four cities. You are right on target with the implicit comparison of Nashville and New Orleans. But don’t ignore the explicit claim that people are nicer to each other here than in Los Angeles and New York City. This shows a fundamental ignorance of how people interact in those places. NYC is notable not only for people holding doors for each other; but you haven’t seen anything in casual neighborliness and helpfulness to strangers until you’ve seen how automatically passers-b help mothers with strollers up and down the steps to the subway there. But it, too, fits a narrative: the narrative that real human values can’t be found on the coasts.

Nonetheless, some in the local news media mark this anniversary of our disaster by continuing to implicitly transmit the grandiose meme that somehow, when the chips are down, Nashville is a cut above everyone else. The apples-to-oranges comparison with New Orleans continued over the weekend past to a national audience on public radio, and this time local reporter Blake Farmer maintained that Nashville serves as an inspirational "model for Alabama and other states" suffering under brutal weather.

There is a whole field of research out there called "non-profit and voluntary association studies" with social scientists without skin in the game who can be objective about why people feel motivated to volunteer in crisis situations. Volunteers have noble reasons; volunteers have less than noble reasons. The common denominator that they share is not their reasons, but their availability.

Likewise, there is no one reason why 20,000 Nashvillians volunteered to aid in flood relief last year. Some didn't want to wait for government. Some believed it was their moral duty. Some wanted to fight their own depression. Some wanted to feel useful making progress. Some wanted the networking opportunities. Some wanted to positively brand their business. Some were following the crowd. Some had ulterior motives of gaining an advantage over the less fortunate. Some wanted to maintain a favorable status with their employers who partnered with charities. Again, what these thousands shared was not their rationale for joining in the effort, but their availability. The NPR report reduced the reasons down to one and oversimplified local voluntarism to support the grandiosity of Nashville's flood narrative.

Full disclosure: I was among the 20,000 who volunteered. My family worked in two different aid distribution sites. When we heard that a South Nashville Egyptian community was suffering, we went out and bought supplies and nonperishable food, and helped their local leaders allot and distribute our donation door-to-door. I did not blog about this, because it seemed like self-promotion at a time when the attention needed to be focused on them.

But I blog on my own contributions a year later to say that I don't want to be a model for anyone else. As one of the volunteers "celebrated" by Metro government and the non-profit community today, my views ought to weigh in on this remembrance, too.

And in my opinion, it is presumptuous for NPR and self-aggrandizing for Nashville to trot us out nationally as a shining beacon for others who are suffering calamity right now. The last thing that Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Rome, Ringgold and everywhere in between need now is a celebration of Nashville's recent past. They just had a single history-making, beastly supercell tear through each of their communities. Memphis is about to be engulfed by one of the grand rivers of the world, the Mississippi. And yet, today, we're focused on us. It amounts to vacuous, hollow symbolism that draws our gaze away from our beleaguered neighbors.

If anything, our experience of coming out the other side of the hells of destruction that other people are in or just entering ought to give us pause, the humility to figure out what we can do to support them, not promote ourselves. And using New Orleans again as our own personal foil is both ignoble and revolting. We should expect more from ourselves and demand better from local journalists.

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to make a newspaper realize its value to a community

Poynter Online describes how New Orleans' major newspaper used its website, Nola.com, to help its readers through Hurricane Katrina and to foster a sense of daily reliability that expanded its readership:

The site also has one of the highest market penetrations of any local news Web site in the country. Two recent studies show that Nola.com reached 85.8 percent of the metropolitan area in 2009 and 87.3 percent in 2007. The Times-Picayune's print weekday circulation, meanwhile, has dropped 9.04 percent in the past year. Sunday sales have dropped 8.54 percent.

The market penetration and print circulation figures make sense when you consider the Times-Picayune's online audience and how it grew as a result of a hurricane that flooded more than 80 percent of the city.

The Times-Picayune's coverage of this disaster helped it develop a heightened sense of connectedness with New Orleanians. "I think that the storm was transformative for the Web site and its relevance to readers," said [the paper's content director]. "Certainly during Katrina we were moment by moment and learned the power of a constantly updated, dynamically updated Web site throughout the day."

HT: Jay Rosen

Has Change Come to New Orleans?

Chris Kromm argues that Barack Obama's follow-through on campaign promises about New Orleans is yet to be seen:

Many in the Gulf had big hopes when President Obama came into office; as Obama said during a February 2008 campaign stop at Tulane University, "I promise you that when I'm in the White House I will commit myself every day to keeping up Washington's end of this trust [to rebuild the Gulf]. This will be a priority of my presidency." Obama's team has taken important steps, like helping create an arbitration panel to resolve legal disputes holding up projects, and most recently launching a cross-agency panel to tackle coastal land loss. But critics point to the economic stimulus bill, where -- despite well-crafted proposals for a Gulf jobs program and other initiatives -- the Louisiana Congressional district including New Orleans ended up getting the least stimulus money of any district in the country. Media accounts like this AP report -- based largely on interviews with people who either have or hope to get money from Washington -- claim Obama is getting "high praise" in the Gulf. But in an Institute survey of 50 Gulf community leaders working on the ground, Obama and Congress received no better than "D" grades for their Gulf recovery efforts.

Neighborhoods Hardest Hit by Katrina Not Having the Happier Anniversary the Rest of New Orleans Is

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

With other hard-hit but more affluent New Orleans neighborhoods staging remarkable comebacks, the traditionally poor and predominantly African American Lower Ninth Ward remains in limbo. Nobody knows whether it is headed toward revival or ultimate collapse.

New Orleans has regained roughly 75 percent of its pre-Katrina population. For the Lower Ninth Ward, 20 percent of its former 14,000 inhabitants would be a generous estimate ....

In the Lower Ninth Ward, chest-high weeds separate the foundations of houses smashed by the waters or demolished afterward. Street numbers of long-gone houses are spray-painted on curbs. The few still standing bear the fading tattoos left by rescue teams after the great deluge ....

toward the Mississippi River, a cluster of functional, built-to-last brick-and-wood houses with solar panels nurtures the hope of a full recovery. The Make It Right Foundation, headed by actor Brad Pitt, is at work there.

Such charitable efforts, the constant presence of volunteers from all over the country, and the tireless work of neighborhood associations are the best source of hope

"What Actions Were Possible?" Was a Better Question than "Why Did They Stay?" in Katrina-Ravaged New Orleans

Some psychologists conduct a scientific study of the motivations of Katrina victims who did not evacuate and suggest that middle class observers may approach the problem from an incorrect premise:

Most stayers were lacking in resources, not resourcefulness. Thus, “they needed to adjust to the constraints of their contexts by enacting a different model of agency – one that involved connecting to others, being strong, and maintaining faith in God. …What is clear is that stayers’ agency diverged markedly from the … model of agency that is pervasive in middle-class white contexts.”

Shoot-First Usually Takes Out Innocents

If local blogger Nathan Moore called me "pro-looter" in the immediate wake of Katrina for challenging the shoot-first-let-God-sort-them-out that he and other right-wing bloggers promoted, can I accuse him in hindsight of being pro-malice-aforethought? It seems that guns used generated as much anarchy as order and the callousness of police failed to protect at least one father of four.

Critics of DoD Response to Katrina Vindicated

Why were military personnel stationed on the Gulf Coast playing basketball while Katina victims were suffering and dying in September 2005? Because Rummy refused to deploy troops to deal with the disaster for a week.

Arbitrary and Capricious Insurance

What sets millionaires apart from slumdogs:  insurance companies respond to some catastrophes by embracing legal obligations to contracts with the former; they respond to other catastrophes by shunning their legal obligations to contracts with the latter. 

Gun-Toting Algiers Point Vigilantes Play the Race Card after Katrina

Remember in September 2005 when bloggers (locally, like Bill Hobbs, Nathan Moore, and Steve Gill) were calling upon New Orleaneans to haul out guns, shoot people indiscriminately, and let God sort the dead for the innocent and the guilty? Time to reap the whirlwind:

One Thing You Can Say about Jim Cooper Is That Crises Really Don't Effect How He Votes

So, Jim Cooper voted against tax relief for a Gulf Coast that has been suffering for much longer than the banking and finance industry because he thinks those cuts should be matched by cuts elsewhere. That's typical Blue Dog logic. Now if he opposes it because somehow it only really helps big business and does little to help displaced and burdened ordinary people, then he would be acting remarkably. A little populism once and a while might loosen Cooper up.

But my guess is that the Tennessee Democrat would much rather see the bail out work for the principle good of bankers and only the trickle-down good of ordinary people. And so, his seeming unconventional vote looks more like empty symbolism and callous indifference to the victims of not just one natural disaster, but multiple natural disasters. There's nothing really progressive about his taxation logic.

Worse than Coulter: Gingrich's New Katrina Blame Game

Chris Kromm has the details on Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's hurricane victim-blaming at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ecclipsed Ann Coulter's "faggot" remarks in its lack of civility to people whose lives were destroyed by post-Katrina flooding. Kromm also provides the complete run-down on the facts concerning why the Lower Ninth Ward residents did not evacuate, which had very little to do with them being bad citizens or generally just stupid.

When Offered Slice of Broadband Pie, Telecom Corporations Take the Pie

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's destuction of New Orleans, telecom lobbyists had the nerve to try to force closure of the loophole that allowed the city's public Wi-Fi system to run during such natural disasters. Last September New Orleans officials fired up the city's Wi-Fi network as the primary conduit for information in the Big Easy and to the outside world.

God forbid that Nashville ever face a disaster of even a fraction of the magnitude of the worst natural disaster in American history. God forbid it for our welfare. God forbid it because corporate telecom and local civic leaders have shut the possibility of public Wi-Fi down here before it could ever get started.

Can you even imagine how the suits are drooling at the prospect of making money off of broadband in times of relative ease, and then making even more money in disasterous times when consumers' backs are against the wall? These guys never miss a turn. And the rest of us are left with a prospect that is more grave in an emergency situation: to be beholden to private money-making interests who care little about the public good.

Spike Lee and Al Gore

I cannot think of a more important documentary I've seen in the last ten years than either Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke or Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, both of which I have seen this week. I refuse to choose which one is more important. If you ask me to recommend just one, I would still say you have to see both. It would be a proverbial Sophie's Choice: you cannot make me choose. You need to see both if you have not already.

Lee's documentary is long, but it packed with wrenching personal narratives and contextual knowledge that explains so much about New Orleans and the government's injustices to her citizens. You'll find out that the rumors that levees had been blown up are based on factual events that occurred in past hurricanes and that those events were carried forward in oral histories after explosions were heard during Katrina. You'll learn that President Lyndon Johnson not only immediately responded to New Orleans' last catastrophic hurricane in 1965, but he stood in flooded neighborhoods with nothing else but a flashlight shouting to let people know he was right there with them. You'll cry, if you have a heart, as jazz musician Terence Blanchard walks through his old neighborhood dolefully playing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on his horn and as he helps his mother tearfully cope with the tragedy of facing her destroyed home for the first time. Lee does a masterful job of conveying the complex dynamics of the levee breach, its aftermath, and the peoples' lives that flood waters--with some help from FEMA--destroyed.

Gore's documentary sets the record straight on global warming and is just as personal as When the Levee's Broke, but its focus is more on how Gore's own life has been intertwined with the growing environmental crisis we all face. We are troubled enough to learn that the CO2 levels, polar ice melts, and heat waves surpass anything we've seen since records were kept; and, in fact, the data from those who study glacier core samples indicate that life on earth has not faced such a dire CO2 and temperature situation in 600,000 years. But to learn that there are practically no objections in scientific journals on global warming while the agreement in the mainstream media hovers around 50% is unnerving. The scenes of progressive melt of glaciers around the world are just as problematic to me as the pictures of devastation in New Orleans (and Gore makes the connection between the events himself). Where I wept during Lee's film for the innocent children of others who needlessly died in New Orleans, I wept for my own children after watching Gore's film; and I left resolved to do my part to make this a better world for them.

So, if you asked me which film I would recommend if you could only see one of them, I would tell you not to present me with a false choice and you should make every effort to see both. For those who've seen them, what do you think?

If you had to recommend 1 of these 2 documentaries to someone else, which would you choose?

• Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" (HBO)
• Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (Paramount Film)

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Gassed Off: Back in New Orleans

Lest we forget about the Bush administrations on-going marginal care of the Big Easy and its environs since Hurricane Katrina a year ago, now comes word that even though displaced New Orleaneans finally got the FEMA trailers, the wheeled abodes contain hazardous levels of formaldehyde gas, based on indoor tests. Because of a loophole, travel trailers are exempt from HUD regulations of formaldehyde levels in prefabricated dwellings, so FEMA did not bother to test. The chemical, which causes various respiratory ailments, is used as an adhesive for the pressed wood that is used in these travel trailers. I know that the Katrina disaster represents a financial windfall for the trailer industry, but the feds need to attend to detail, rather than just feeding the market.

Private Enterprise Is Stealing Our Money in New Orleans Recovery

In an episode that seems to confirm William Jennings Bryan's aphorism, "No one can earn a million dollars honestly," private contractors are reportedly overbilling the U.S. government for post-Katrina recovery work. The entrepreneurial graft in New Orleans may help drive the price of recovery from $63 billion to $200 billion. Contractors with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers are alleged to be allowing "fraud, waste, and abuse" by subcontractors cleaning up the debris.

My question is, allowed or not, why do subcontractors choose to resort to fraud, waste, and abuse? Could it be that the private sector and the market are not the best tools for disaster relief?

Conservative Blogs: It All Depends on Whose Looter It Is and We Reap What We Sew But We Steal What We Don't Sew from Those Who Do

I've been waiting to see if the conservative bloggers would start promoting shooting local looters on the heels of last week's tornadoes as they did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year, but the silence on the right with regard to "shoot first and let God sort 'em out" has been deafening in this case. Last year we could not get them to shut up their calls for mowing kids down over a pair of Nikes. But now the logic does not seem to be applicable when looters are stealing chunks of houses. But wouldn't shooting looters rather than arresting them send a much more powerful message to other potential looters (many of whom were no doubt snarling the traffic southward down Gallatin Road all the way to Briley Parkway this past weekend)? So, what's with the silence? I won't say that the difference in conservative outcry has anything to do with the difference in the race of the looters we are seeing on television from those we saw in New Orleans, but the rightwing seems a lot less frenzied at these white-boy looters.

What I am seeing on some of the conservative blogs is the promotion of the recently released report that Tennessee ranks 45th in taxes per capita by state. On those blogs where level-headed comments are allowed, rational people are setting the record straight on that ranking. Some of my favorite retorts to the rightwing love affair with low-tax rankings:

1. "Tennesseans have extra bucks in their pockets to put toward a nice boat to run around on those federally subsidized lakes and what not."
2. "[Conservatives] also ignore how much drain various states are on the federal government. Many low tax states don't pay their own way, getting more money in fed. dollars than they pay in." [BTW, this is similar to a point I made about the town of Spring Hill last July when the conservatives were drooling over the town's cut of property taxes to zero: state money collected from all Tennesseans allowed them to stop paying their own way. So, what conservatives call "tax reform" is basically Spring Hill leeching and draining tax dollars off the rest of Tennesseans.]
3. "If you think of Red America as stubbornly self-reliant and Blue America as a drain on the Treasury, you've got it exactly backward."
4. "I just buy stuff from Massachusetts online so I can avoid paying Tennessee's unconscionable 9.25% sales tax."
5. "[M]aybe higher taxes [are] related to education. The states with higher taxes have a higher rate of high school graduates then states with lower taxes."

Common sense cuts through the hooey, yet again.

In the Absence of Federal Leadership to Redevelop New Orleans Neighborhoods

Criminal masterminds rush in to fill the vacuum. All of those vulnerable, empty houses are becoming a new breeding ground for drug trade. Crime levels are not as high as before Katrina, so there is still a chance to protect neighborhoods aggressively from crime and to rehabilitate at the same time. However, the window of opportunity seems to be quickly closing.