All Fall Down: New Orleans and Louisiana edition

A few outlets aside from the New York Times and the Times-Picayune have noted the Army Corps of Engineers' admission of appalling failures in its flood "protection" of the New Orleans metro area (Harry Shearer, part-timer of NO, has been doing his bit and challenged [at the bottom of the page] Brian Williams' oh-the-poor-wretches coverage of NO post-Katrina; Arianna Huffington finally threw in her 2 cents; the story has also been featured or semi-buried in other newspapers and blogs). If the Corps were a private corporation that was actually treated as a person in terms of criminal law (if a corporation is a "person" in the "eyes" of the law), they'd be liable for all the property damage, lives lost and an entire region's economy destroyed for the next decade, if not longer.

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Governor Blanco is going to sign a law that will ban all abortions in the state once Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. It amazes me that this state's leaders feel that cockfighting is too sacred to ban and that abortion and homosexuality are the greatest threats to Louisiana. I'm shaking my head so much I’m dizzy.

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Representative William Jefferson appears to be in a world of trouble. It is possible he is completely innocent as he says, but when a former aide is convicted for "funneling" money and assets to the representative and his family and the FBI reveals conversations taped by an informant, that $90,000 in marked bills they pulled out of his freezer looks like a smoking gun. Now the nation can again pretend that the taint of corruption here in Louisiana (as opposed to other places like Texas, Nevada, Alabama, etc. which are taint-free apparently) negates our need for federal aid to repair a city the Corps helped Katrina destroy.

tag: New Orleans, Harry Shearer, Brian Williams, Arianna Huffington, cockfighting, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana, abortion rights, post-Katrina, WIlliam Jefferson