On rebuilding New Orleans

"There’s no reason to go back now. Back to what? Back as a tourist? The new New Orleans is going to be like Six Flags Bourbon Street, you know what I mean?"
-- Former New Orleans resident Chester Pye, quoted in The New Yorker

Excellent if predictably depressing article, which also includes a theory I hadn't heard before about why the evacuations were slow to get started:

“Friday before the storm, we were feeling good,” [the news director of radio WWL] said. “The National Hurricane Center said that this would really hit the Florida panhandle, not us. We were barely in the ‘cone of error’ in New Orleans. So I kicked off for the day on Friday at one o’clock and went to the gym. But at around four my pager started going haywire. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, had changed his prediction. There was a hundred-and-fifty-mile shift to the west.” It was going to be a problem to get people in the city to adjust. “In New Orleans, people go home at lunch on Fridays,” Cohen said. “All year round. And Friday night was a football night. The Ravens were in town to play a preseason game against the Saints at the Superdome. It was also a big high-school football night, the jamboree games, which kick off the season. People were out drinking, having a good time. They were consuming very little media. But by Saturday morning we were told there was mandatory evacuation for Plaquemines Parish, to the southeast, and some coastal areas, though not yet New Orleans. On Saturday, Ray Nagin was still saying that we have time to watch this. A lot of people were clueless. They had no idea there were evacuations.

I remember that Friday-afternoon jog to the left of the map, so that explanation does make a certain amount of sense.


I was googling Harriet Miers and I found this little gem on a random White House page:

One of President Bush's top priorities is to select men and women of the greatest ability and highest ethical and professional integrity to serve in policymaking and key administrative positions in his administration.

Ha.

(I have no opinion on Harriet Miers yet, except that if she works for the Bush administration she's bound to be appalling.)

Which reminds me, I am way too amused by the image of George Bush in Hell. (Really interesting piece, too!)