Katrina, poverty and America's Big Lie

What's the difference between the United States and a lot of banana republics where the rich get richer and the meek inherit not the land, but troubles and sorrows instead?

Pretension and self-delusion. Most banana republics, I would wager, have no real illusions about who -- and what -- they are.

America, on the other hand, has a grand national myth to uphold. Liberty and justice for all . . . Horatio Alger . . . rags to riches . . . the glory of the free market, and all the rest of that convenient rot allowing our hearts and our consciences to remain relatively unmolested.

AND TO THOSE Americans who hold fast to our national delusions -- to those who believe the Big Lie for the sake of an untroubled life of relative ease and conspicuous consumption -- I say let them come to New Orleans.

Or, at a minimum, read this story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Mickey Palmer, who traveled the world for 20 years as a merchant seaman shipping out of the Port of New Orleans, welcomed international visitors on Monday morning to his home, an abandoned building scattered with Katrina-era debris.

As a cool wind blew through a large open window, Palmer, 57, puffed on a cigarette and tried to stay positive.

"This is a good place to squat, as we call it, " he told international housing expert Leilani Farha, who led a small entourage to New Orleans this week to interview people who have lost affordable housing and others who may lose their homes.

Farha, who leads a low-income-housing advocacy group in Ontario, Canada, is part of an advisory group that reports to UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency charged with monitoring poverty and housing. The group spent Monday morning with outreach workers from UNITY of Greater New Orleans who tromp through blighted buildings searching for disabled people who need help. The group will publish a report online after their visit.

Representatives of the United Nations have shown special interest in New Orleans since Katrina, with some U.N. officials using the storm as an opportunity to critique the U.S. government's policies toward poor and minority groups.

The group's forays haven't been without controversy. Last year, two U.N. specialists attracted international attention when they said the federal government's response violated an international treaty on racism. But the authors of the resolution also acknowledged they hadn't visited New Orleans since the storm.

On Monday, UNITY officials told the latest U.N. visitors that they believe 6,000 squatters may live in the city's more than 65,000 abandoned structures.

(snip)

In a nearby decrepit house, two other homeless women cited similar medical woes. Peaches Jackson, 42, suffers seizures because she lost 20 percent of her brain in an accident 10 years ago, she said. Charlene Stewart, 35, is scheduled for abdominal surgery next week for a bacterial infection.

Bailey walked back to the room she sleeps in. She keeps the window there closed at night or else mosquitoes devour her, she said. When it rains, the roof leaks generously onto the rotting floorboards.

She didn't always live like this, she said quietly, talking about her work in the service industry and the low rent she'd paid nearly all her adult life.

TO THE EXTENT the average citizen can look at this and spout platitudes about free markets, bootstraps and "U.N. socialists out to get the United States," God will -- and should -- damn America. That human beings live like this in the richest country on earth -- live much as the biblical Lazarus did right under the nose of the rich man, begging for crumbs off a table of plenty -- should be as much a scandal to us as it was to Jesus Christ two millennia ago.

19
"There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day.
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And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores,
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who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man's table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.
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When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried,
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and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
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And he cried out, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.'
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Abraham replied, 'My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.
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Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.'
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He said, 'Then I beg you, father, send him to my father's house,
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for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.'
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But Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.'
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He said, 'Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'
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Then Abraham said, 'If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.'"

IN THE WORST economic times since the Great Depression, there has been much talk about "stimulus packages."

The bottom line is that people need work. People need decent places to live. People need dignity and a sense of their basic worth. That's the "stimulus" we need.

President Obama, I have a "stimulus" package for you. The trial for this new stimulus program can be conducted in New Orleans, where many American citizens are living in Third World conditions in the wake of Katrina. (In fact, many were living in Third World conditions before Katrina.)

HERE'S THE STIMULUS: Put New Orleanians to work providing decent housing to people like the ones being surveyed by the United Nations. That such a survey is necessary is a national scandal -- but that's not important now.

What's important is eliminating the scandalous conditions.

And I don't see how it should take that much effort to make this project "shovel ready" -- or "saw and hammer ready," to be precise.

Take stimulus funds, hire unemployed and underemployed tradesmen and women -- hell, train "unskilled" workers for the job -- and salvage the abandoned housing stock in New Orleans. Turn it into livable residences for low-income people.

IT HAS BEEN four years since Katrina (and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) laid waste to New Orleans. If properties have not been razed or rehabilitated by now, it probably is safe to assume they won't be. At least not by the owner. Those property owners should be given 30 days to reclaim -- and remediate -- their property or forfeit it to the city.

If there are "legal impediments" to that, change the law. Property rights are important, but they are neither inviolable nor limitless.

Houses that can be saved should be. Those that can't should be torn down and replaced with "Katrina cottages" or new "green" construction. Most of the housing should be owned and administered by the Housing Authority of New Orleans as "scattered site" housing.

Some, say a quarter or a third, should be turned over to Habitat for Humanity and made available for purchase by eligible families.

DAMN IT, this is America. We don't "do" the Sudan -- or Haiti . . . or Somalia -- here. That's the party line.

It would be nice if that weren't just another damned lie in a world clogged with too many damned lies.

We say we are a great nation. But our collective inaction is that of small men and women.

Government by flim-flammery

When a hurricane comes, you need to watch out for the snakes after it goes.

They'll be all over, displaced by the storm and by rising water. Usually, folks are careful around tarps or piles of debris, because you never know when you're going to grab hold of a cottonmouth, copperhead or water moccasin -- or, more accurately, when one's going to grab hold of you.

After Hurricane Katrina, at least one Army three-star added the Louisiana capitol to his list of reptilian hiding places.

One day in late September 2005, Lt. Gen Russel Honoré rang up Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The plan was to tell her his men had restored New Orleans' Charity Hospital to working order.

THE PLAN was to get the city's biggest hospital back serving a city where precious little of anything still worked.

What Honoré didn't plan on was falling into a pit of vipers with a plan of its own -- to shake down the federal taxpayer for every possible penny. And now Honoré, retired a year and a half, has a plan of his own -- he's spilling his guts and yelling "rat" . . . uh, "snakes" to The Associated Press:

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

It comes as state and federal officials continue squabbling over how badly the hospital was really damaged and how much federal recovery funding should be allocated to it.

The state wants $492 million for a new hospital to replace the Depression-era building as part of a proposed $1.2 billion medical complex. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered $150 million for repairs. The dispute is on appeal at FEMA headquarters.

Blanco said she could not remember the conversation with Honore. She said she didn't know the military had scrubbed Charity until she was contacted by the AP.

But she said Honore's comments struck her as out of context. "I would not have made that statement because I would not have the first idea of having other plans for Charity at that moment," Blanco said.

Honore suggested that money, not medical judgment, was at the heart of the decision.

"This is about business, man," Honore said. "This is about rich people making more money. This is not about providing health care."

AND WHILE LOUISIANA shuttered a perfectly functional teaching hospital and world-class trauma center, FEMA and doctors were stuck trying to turn an abandoned downtown shopping mall into an emergency room. Private hospitals were stuck with a tidal wave of sick, uninsured, poor people.

A city is stuck to this day with a critcal lack of health-care facilities.

One "reform" governor later, Louisianians are stuck -- still -- with the same ol' same ol', complete with all the pathologies and deprivations stemming from that deviant status quo.

And President Obama is stuck dealing with his own private Chechnya . . . a thinly veiled criminal enterprise on his southern flank masquerading as a governmental subdivision. Obama to Putin in Moscow last week: "So, Vlad, how did you squash the bastards again?"

HONORÉ, however, isn't the Army's only star-studded squealer. Gen. William Caldwell of the 82nd Airborne Division had something to tell the AP, too:

About 150 soldiers and a team of medical professionals worked to get the hospital running, Caldwell said.

Meanwhile, a German military team's pumps sucked water out of the basement. Air sampling found no contamination — a concern, considering the flooding and bodies in the flooded morgue, Caldwell said.

Caldwell recalled telling Honore the hospital was nearly ready to receive patients. "We were actually thinking of having a ribbon-cutting ceremony, give a thumbs up and turn it over to the health care professionals," Caldwell said.

But then, Caldwell said a decision came to stop the cleanup.

Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room doctor who helped clean the hospital after Katrina, said Charity was made usable, and the medical staff was eager to see it back in use.

Moises said state officials used Katrina as an excuse to close Charity and ask FEMA for the money to build a new medical complex. Moises said: "It was their orchestrated plan. It was, 'How can we manipulate the disaster for institutional gains?'"

DAT'S LOOSIANA for you! Some of us were loathe to believe that our home state's pols, apparatchiks and business leaders could be that crooked in the wake of its greatest disaster ever.

Stupidly, we thought Charity really had been ruined, and that reopening it wasn't an option.

Naively, we thought that even Louisiana could resist using unspeakable tragedy as just another excuse for a shakedown -- an opportunity to trick unsuspecting American taxpayers into building geegaws to adorn its politicians' résumés.

We thought it was only right that the federal government rebuild what its flood-control negligence destroyed. And, indeed, the Army fixed Charity Hospital within a month.

It was good to go.

But that wasn't good enough for some in the Gret Stet. And officials were perfectly willing to let hapless New Orleanians die rather than go back what they had no problem using previously.

AND NOW Louisiana's new reform governor, Bobby Jindal, is happy to flim-flam the feds in the same manner as the unreformed Blanco.

In the face of state pols and hospital officials so vile -- a state so corrupted that it sacrifices its poor upon the altar of Greed as it seeks to pocket money from the collection plate -- the question suddenly isn't "How much do we pay Louisiana over Charity Hospital?"

Instead, the question Barack Obama and FEMA ought to be asking themselves is "What would Putin do?"

Nobody ever listens to Cassandra

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If somebody had warned the citizens of ancient Pompeii that Vesuvius was about to blow its top, they probably would have accused him of fear mongering.

Whole towns and cities just northeast of Rome lie in ruins today, victims of a powerful earthquake. Scores are dead. They needn't have died, because they had been warned.

THE DEPRESSING DETAILS come from Reuters:

An Italian scientist predicted a major earthquake around L'Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city on Monday, killing dozens of people, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic among the population.

The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, creating mounting alarm in the medieval city, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Rome.

Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor's anger.

Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for "spreading alarm" and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

Italy's Civil Protection agency held a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, grouping scientists charged with assessing such risks, in L'Aquila on March 31 to reassure the townspeople.

"The tremors being felt by the population are part of a typical sequence ... (which is) absolutely normal in a seismic area like the one around L'Aquila," the civil protection agency said in a statement on the eve of that meeting.

"It is useful to underline that it is not in any way possible to predict an earthquake," it said, adding that the agency saw no reason for alarm but was nonetheless effecting "continuous monitoring and attention."

EVEN TODAY, an Italian science-o-crat still was blowing off the tragically obvious: "As far as I know nobody predicted this earthquake with precision. It is not possible to predict earthquakes."

Except that someone just did. The man who, as it turns out, was Cassandra.

That dynamic worked out well for Troy, too.

But don't go picking on the Italians. They're just as human as the rest of us -- a motley lot who never want to hear the bleedin' obvious when the obvious involves bad tidings.

After all, who'd a thunk that, someday, a major hurricane would hit New Orleans, swamp the whole place and kill more than a thousand?

Uhhhhh. . . .

HISTORY TELLS US no one much cared to hear what the New Orleans Times-Picayune (and all its scientific sources) predicted, either. Faced with the sure knowledge more than 100,000 poor people would be completely unable to flee an oncoming hurricane, the city's best response was to settle on telling them they were on their own.

But something happened before the official notification to that effect. Her name was Katrina.

The weird thing is that Katrina missed New Orleans, landing only a swiping blow. And look what still happened.

Of course, lots of people still try to stick their heads in the sand about climate change and the rising oceans. And all they get is a snootful of salt water. Every time.

UPDATE: Hey! Big spender! Nothin' like rich Uncle Sam throwin' the big money around to help whole cities that have been wiped out.

From Agence France-Presse:

The United States said Monday it would donate 50,000 dollars in emergency aid to Italy after a powerful earthquake killed at least 100 people.

"We send our heartfelt condolences to the families of those killed in the earthquake. Our embassy in Rome will provide 50,000 (dollars) in emergency relief funding," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.

Remind me not to bother trick or treating at the Obamas' house.

Somewhere in Louisiana, it's always 1959

In Louisiana, you're OK, I guess, so long as you're posting stuff critical of the gay-rights movement.

A commenter on my last post had this advice for me: "Please post more like this rather than the anti-Louisiana stuff, okay?"

Not a chance.

Not when there's so much "anti-Louisiana stuff" to choose from. Not when it's so factually irrefutable. Not when the "anti-Louisiana stuff" usually is about things so egregious they take Nebraskans' breath away -- just as they do others unfamiliar with the state's certain reductio ad absurdum je ne sais quoi.

THERE'S NOT a chance in hell I'll quit posting the "anti-Louisiana stuff" so long as, for example, Louisiana vigilantes can kill a man just for being black . . . and Louisianians are OK with that. Naturally, the latest "anti-Louisiana stuff" -- the latest "anti-Louisiana" horror, actually -- has bubbled up from New Orleans like so much swamp gas . . . straight into the pages of the latest edition of The Nation:

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

(snip)

During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help me--I'm shot," Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buckshot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.

"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."

After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."

IN MUCH of this country after a natural disaster, sworn law officers wait to see evidence of looting, take the looters into custody and then read them their Miranda rights.

In New Orleans after a natural disaster, the cops either haul ass or turn into Mad Max, and armed good ol' boys shoot first, then yell "nigger."

But that only happens because Yankees hate Louisiana, right?

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful" -- her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

THE PROBLEM with Louisiana is that Louisianians are more upset that their dirty laundry gets aired than they are that their laundry is so dirty in the first place. I don't know how you fix such a culture.

But maybe if I, and others, write about "the anti-Louisiana stuff" enough, someone just might get embarrassed enough to come up with something. But that might take a while because, as I 've written before on this blog, somewhere in Louisiana, it's always 1959.

You know it don't come Big Easy

If one is of a mind to bear witness to an American city coming apart, bit-by-bit, amid the bitter fruit of great catastrophe, it might be instructive to bear witness to New Orleans' pre-eminent chronicler -- Times-Picayune features columnist Chris Rose.

EXHIBIT 1, from the Columbia Journalism Review:

For the next 4,000 words, Rose described a spiral familiar to many Katrina survivors: the “crying jags and fetal positionings,” the “thousand-yard stare,” the inability to hold conversations. “I’d noodle around on the piano, read weightless fiction, and reach for my kids, always, trying to hold them, touch them, kiss them. Tell them I was still here,” he wrote. “But I was disappearing fast.” Finally, Rose described how the anti-depressant drug Cymbalta helped clear away some of that darkness, enabling him to function again.
In few cities would such a personal account have received such prominent play—or elicited more than 6,000 e-mails. But Katrina has transformed how journalism is practiced at The Times-Picayune. It has blurred the lines between those who suffer and those who chronicle that suffering, and has challenged traditional notions of objectivity. And it has become a better newspaper in the process. Every reporter and editor was directly affected by Katrina, and the Picayune’s pages are suffused every day with outrage and betrayal—and with solid reporting. The paper has relentlessly investigated the Army Corps of Engineers, which built New Orleans’s faulty levees, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose response to the storm provoked such frustration and anger. It has sounded the alarm about Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands, which would render New Orleans even more vulnerable during the next hurricane. And it has sent reporters to Japan and the Netherlands to learn what makes successful flood-control systems work.

And the newspaper has bonded with its readers; the Picayune is an essential part of coffee-shop conversation all over the metropolitan area. At a time when dailies are wondering how to hold onto wandering readers, it has proven that a paper that claims a stake in its city’s survival, reporting with passion and voice, can remain an essential part of the civic conversation. “Other papers would kill to be that relevant,” says Harry Shearer, the actor and satirist and part-time New Orleanian.

No Picayune writer epitomizes this transformation more than the forty-seven-year-old Rose, whose journey through breakdown and redemption spurred a communal catharsis. “He bled for us in those columns,” says Linda Ellerbee, the former NBC anchor who covered Katrina’s aftermath for Nick News, a children’s broadcast. “He made it more real than any photo, any TV coverage could—more than Anderson Cooper crying on the air, more than Sean Penn going though the water in his boat. He let us into his dark places. In the old-fashioned, Biblical sense, he bore witness.”

(snip)

In fact, for Rose, recovery was proving harder than just taking a pill. Feeling impatient, he started upping his dose of Cymbalta. Then he added painkillers to the mix. He began withdrawing again, and losing weight, until he weighed what he did in eighth grade. His columns became “unrunnable,” says O’Byrne, who spiked three in a short span of time. “They were just angry, rageful rants against life and the universe.”

Finally, last April, Rose’s wife Kelly arranged for an intervention. She and O’Byrne, along with three neighbors, confronted the columnist at his house and urged him to enter rehab. He didn’t need much persuasion. Not only did Rose understand he was in trouble, but he had an additional incentive: he had also recently learned that he was a bone-marrow match for his sister, who had leukemia. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna save Ellen’s life and then write a story that will blow people away,’” Rose says. “And I get to be the hero.” Rose went into rehab for thirty days, kicking both the painkillers and the antidepressants. But not in time to donate marrow to his sister, who died three months later.

There is no thousand-yard stare on Rose’s face now. He is as transparent in person as his columns are. One afternoon last October, he brought forty copies of 1 Dead in Attic, the best-selling compilation of his post-Katrina columns, to a meeting of the Ladies Leukemia League in suburban Kenner. After a spirited talk—Rose repeatedly mocked the country-club neighborhood where they were meeting—his friend Jacquee Carvin raised her hand. “Is there anything else that you can personally impart to the leukemia society?” she asked. Rose let out a sigh. “You put me on the spot there,” he said.

“Just watch me and you’ll get through it,” Carvin replied.

Rose’s eyes welled up. “My sister died of leukemia in August,” he said, his voice choking. “I was her bone-marrow match, but we never made it.” He told the women about his struggle with depression and slide into drug addiction. “I was killing myself real fast. When I found out I was a bone-marrow donor, I said, ‘I’ve got to fix myself.’ And I went to rehab. So what happened was, instead of saving my sister’s life, she saved mine.”

These days, Rose laughs hard and cries easily. His marriage has dissolved, but he is hanging on. “I’m a work-in-progress,” he says, sitting on his new front porch near Tulane University and watching his children race in and out of the house. “I got these little guys; I gotta take care of them.” And Rose is trying to figure out the next step for his journalism. He’s writing fewer internal monologues and more reported stores. He feels settled into New Orleans for the long haul.

AND NOW . . . EXHIBIT 2, from Sunday's newspaper:

Chris Rose, a columnist for The Times-Picayune, was arrested Friday night and booked in an alleged domestic violence incident.

Rose, 48, caused a disturbance and refused to leave the home of a former girlfriend, according to a New Orleans Police Department report filed in Municipal Court.

Police booked him with a municipal domestic violence charge and disturbing the peace. The police report said Rose refused to leave the woman's home but does not mention physical violence.

The incident took place at about 7:30 p.m. in the 7400 block of Pearl Street, the report says.

Rose allegedly became involved in a dispute with a 34-year-old woman, his former girlfriend, and another man. Responding officers wrote in their report that Rose had a "strong odor of alcohol and slurred speech."

After being booked, Rose posted a $2,800 bond. He is scheduled to appear in Municipal Court on Monday morning, according to court records.

Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss declined to comment on the incident.

Reached Saturday afternoon by telephone, Rose said he "had the poor judgment to try to have a conversation" with the woman when it was clear she did not want to talk.

Rose said the woman's companion took offense and punched him in the mouth. Rose said he then left and was walking home when he was arrested.

NOBODY GETS out of this life unscarred. Nobody gets out of this life without screwing up big-time sometime.

These days, folks seem to be living that concept large in the City Formerly Known as Big Easy. Especially newspaper columnists of the sensitive type.

Like Ringo says:

It don't come easy,
You know it don't come easy.

Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,
And you know it don't come easy.

YEP. God help us all.

Proof there is a devil in hell

If Barack Obama were president, would the Democrats give a tinker's damn about New Orleans?

Even when the suffering, storm-battered people of southeast Louisiana were no longer useful as a battering ram against the Republicans?

I WONDER. See, it's starting to look -- with a Category 4 monster in the Gulf waiting to finish off what Katrina didn't -- that people who stand to lose everything they have are nothing more to their "champions" than expedient pieces of meat.

And Gustav's pending arrival on Monday -- as the Republican National Convention kicks off --"just demonstrates that God is on our side," according to former Democrat party chair Don Fowler.

To filmmaker Michael Moore, speaking Friday on MSNBC, the storm is "proof that there is a God in Heaven."

Meat to the Dems. Meat to the GOP.

A blood sacrifice to the worst demons of our fallen nature.

And in a day and change, possibly well cooked pieces of meat. That, of course, isn't important now. Not when there are political points to be made.

You broke my heart! You broke my heart!

A member of the stopped clock that is the Bush Administration comes up with the correct time regarding the ongoing disaster that is New Orleans.

YOU'LL NOTE I didn't say the ongoing disaster that is post-Katrina New Orleans. At any rate, The Times-Picayune asked federal recovery czar Douglas O'Dell what time it was, and he said it's late.

Late, indeed:

On one of his frequent visits to New Orleans, federal recovery coordinator Douglas O'Dell delivered a bruising critique of the Nagin administration on Thursday, saying "there is growing frustration" in Washington with the speed, efficiency and competence of City Hall's efforts to manage the local recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

O'Dell, who consults with dozens of federal, state and local agencies and troubleshoots regulatory logjams, said Mayor Ray Nagin's recovery director, Ed Blakely, often does not return his calls and seems to be operating under the premise -- erroneous, O'Dell thinks -- that a new presidential administration next year "will reload the cannon and start shooting money down here."

O'Dell's critique, developed over several interviews, came as The Times-Picayune accompanied him on an all-day New Orleans visit Thursday. The coordinator visits the area at least every other week to discuss a wide range of recovery issues with regional officials, his aides said.

O'Dell's most recent visit included a problem-solving technical session with local, state and federal housing officials; a discussion of education issues with state Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek; meetings with local business leaders and law enforcement officials; and consultations with Paul Rainwater, his state counterpart as director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

O'Dell praised the work of some local and state leaders, such as Pastorek, who recently unveiled a massive school reconstruction plan involving 28 new or rehabilitated schools and $685 million in hand for construction.

And he singled out for more praise Bill Chrisman, the city's new capital projects director, and Cynthia Sylvain-Lear, who oversees capital projects as the city's deputy chief administrative officer. "She has her finger on the pulse," he said.

But in several interviews, O'Dell expressed continuing frustration with Blakely, an urban planning professor from Australia who once served as deputy mayor of Oakland, Calif.

He said Blakely is often absent and unavailable and leads an office that produces "ethereal visions" of recovery that cannot be financed with federal recovery dollars.

"I'm basically asking Blakely, who's probably getting paid a whole hell of a lot more money than I am, to do his damn job," O'Dell said.

"He's there not only to plan, but to execute. Not only to manage, but lead. He's not an elected official, but as a nonelected official he wields enormous influence over the future of this city and the speed of its recovery," he continued.

"And he's failing, in my view."

(snip)

Asked why he chose to be so blunt about the work of Blakely's office, O'Dell said: "What I'm trying to do is plainly tell the federal view, the universal federal view . . . that the federal government has created $126 billion worth of response to this tragedy. And there are a lot of people in the federal government who are not happy with the way it's being applied -- with the speed it's being applied, the efficiency with which it's being applied. And there's great concern as to the transparency with which its being applied."

O'Dell said Thursday that Blakely's office sometimes seeks recovery money for projects "based on rough sketches, arm waving, 'imagineering,' whatever."

THERE'S ONE THING, however, that I couldn't tell you whether O'Dell grasps or not. It's the sad fact that this is as good as it gets in the Big Uneasy.

I don't know that the former Marine general apprehends that New Orleans is the slow-witted goombah in the godfather's coterie -- the one who's just as eager to skim a few Benjamins off the top of the weekly protection-money haul as he is clueless that the capo (that would be the Louisiana statehouse) knows the score and would have had him whacked years ago, except that N'Awly is mama's sister's baby boy, and even Michael Corleone doesn't need that kind of heat.

And even Michael Corleone doesn't need that kind of heat. . . .

And even Michael Corleone doesn't need that kind of heat. . . .

AS THE CIVIC-MINDED IDIOT with an admitted soft spot for N'Awly, I've been saying and saying, "N'Awly, cut that s*** out . . . the Big Boss is wise to you, and if he don't whack you, the G-Man will!"

And N'Awly, he say, "Aw, Favog! You worry too much. Ain't nobody gonna mess wit N'Awly. If Cuz get too mad at me, I'll shake Unk Sam down for a few thou more, and we be square. Chill, Cap!"

And den I say, "Cher, you don' unnerstand. It different this time. Unk Sam sick of coughin' up more protection money than what he owe da Capo. I hear he been talkin' to da feds, an' if push come to shove, da Big Boss gonna hang you out to dry wid da G-Man.

"Dat way, you outta his hair, and he don' have to tell his Mama he had her sister's baby boy whacked."

And then N'Awly say . . . well, N'Awly was gonna say sumptin', but right then the floodwall started leakin' through the newspaper expansion joint . . . and this wall a water started headin' our way . . . and I ain't ashamed to say I got the hell outta there.

Last I saw N'Awly, he was kickin in the door of da liquor store, tryin' to grab him a case of Early Times before the water got too high and rurnt it.

I GUESS UNK SAM -- not to mention Gen. O'Dell -- knew how to get N'Awly out of everybody's hair after all. Something tells me N'Awly's (and the Capo's, too) days in the "protection" bidness are numbered.

NOAH's lark lands on mountain o' cash

The Times-Picayune has a couple of tales of your tax money "at work" in New Orleans.

TALE NO. 1:

Doris Grandpre knows exactly who gutted her 7th Ward house last year, then helped her start rebuilding the single shotgun where she lived for three decades before Hurricane Katrina.

"There was David. You got Christopher. Then there was Jason. Oh, and Simon," Grandpre, 76, said this week, recalling the student volunteers who came from Boston and Seattle to tear out her plaster walls and save the few precious items the flood did not destroy.

"I call them my little angels," she said.

It appears, however, that another crew has taken credit for demolition work at Grandpre's house. City records show that Hall & Hall Enterprises, the highest-paid contractor in Mayor Ray Nagin's home remediation program, billed the city $7,830 for gutting and boarding up the house and cutting the grass at the St. Anthony Street property.

The house is one of at least seven addresses that appear on two lists detailing post-storm remediation. One list belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana's Office of Disaster Response, which organized volunteers from across the country to come to New Orleans and provide free home remediation services, such as gutting and boarding up homes, to residents in need of help.

Those same addresses appear on a list produced by the nonprofit New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., which oversaw a remediation program that contractors billed a total of $1.8 million.

The homeownership corporation, also known as NOAH, billed taxpayers more than $25,000 for work at those addresses.

Grandpre, a retired nursing aide at Charity Hospital, said Wednesday that she has no idea how her address got on NOAH's gutting list. Since January 2007, she has lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer in her side yard, and no city contractor has ever stopped by.

"A group of kids took the stuff out," she said. "The only people who helped me was people from outside the city."

The duplicate entries on the NOAH and church lists raise more questions about the management of a short-lived city program designed to help elderly and poor residents along the road to recovery. A city official said last week that, to his knowledge, NOAH had paid out all of the $1.8 million to its subcontractors.

In light of the scrutiny, NOAH's board of directors suspended the organization's business last week and served notice Wednesday that its remaining four employees will be terminated Friday as of 5 p.m. Officials declined to name the employees or disclose their salaries. NOAH's former executive director, Stacey Jackson, resigned in June.

Also on Wednesday, the NOAH board asked the New Orleans Finance Authority to put into escrow federal funds that were to have been funneled to NOAH for use as soft-second mortgages for low-income homeowners.

(snip)

The shutdown of the agency comes as the FBI and the inspector general of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which authorized grants that financed the gutting program, have launched their own investigations. The city official who oversaw the program has acknowledged that City Hall improperly used the federal money and may have to pay back more than $223,000.

Meanwhile, Jackson, the former executive director, has been linked through business and personal connections to several contractors who worked for the program, including Richard Hall, whose firm billed for $345,000 worth of work, including gutting and boarding up Grandpre's house.

Another house, on Forshey Street near the Monticello Canal, fits the same pattern. Records provided by the Episcopal Diocese program show that volunteers from Texas arrived in October 2006 and tore drywall, tile and floorboards out of the house, which took on 7 feet of water in Katrina. The volunteers even managed to save a few heirlooms.

Ann Brown, whose brother owns the property, said she remembers the volunteers.

"I talked with someone from the church group who was there," said Brown, who lives a block away and keeps an eye on the lot. "I met them. I talked to them personally."

However, three separate NOAH contractors, including a firm owned by Nagin's brother-in-law, have billed City Hall a combined $5,115 to gut, board up and cut grass at the Forshey Street house.

Myers & Sons claimed it had done $4,415 worth of work at the lot, while Iron Triangle and Smith & Associates Consulting have billed $350 apiece. Smith & Associates is owned by Cedric Smith, whose sister is Nagin's wife, Seletha.

TALE NO.2:

Contractors working for New Orleans Affordable Homeownership billed taxpayers at least $123,000 to gut 30 homes that records show were torn down shortly thereafter -- also at public expense -- raising further questions about a troubled city agency charged with a leading role in flood recovery.

Interviews with neighbors suggest that some of that gutting work was in fact never performed.

Whether or not taxpayers were defrauded -- a question that has drawn the attention of federal investigators -- the fact that city-financed gutting crews were followed in short order by city-financed backhoe operators suggests, at best, a City Hall management debacle.

James Ross, a spokesman for Mayor Ray Nagin, said the city is required to pursue demolition of houses deemed to be health threats or in danger of collapse, regardless of whether they have been gutted. He also said that some homeowners may have reconsidered an initial decision to repair a home and sought its demolition instead.

All together, NOAH paid contractors about $1.7 million to gut about 460 properties, according to City Hall records. About 400 other properties received less costly services, mainly grass-cutting and boarding.

Slightly more than 10 percent of the homes the agency assigned to remediation contractors have since been demolished. The federal government financed about half of those demolitions; private individuals paid for the others.

Matt McBride, a blogger and activist who has maintained a database of all properties granted demolition permits since Hurricane Katrina, cross-referenced that list with a remediation list provided by NOAH. He found substantial crossover.

The Times-Picayune spot-checked 11 of the properties that the city spent the most money fixing, ranging from a property on Catina Street in Lakeview at a cost of $8,257 to a property on North Galvez Street in the Lower 9th Ward costing $4,070.

Ten of the 11 had been demolished. The city has issued a demolition permit for the only house still standing: the North Galvez property, one of only a couple of structures on a mostly abandoned block. The city issued the permit to one of the contractors hired to tear down blighted properties at taxpayer expense.

The house has been gutted, but it is unboarded and open to the elements. City records show the work on that house was done by Hall & Hall Enterprises, the highest-paid contractor in NOAH's remediation program.

Richard Hall Jr., who owns that firm, is a former business partner of NOAH's embattled former director, Stacey Jackson. He did not return a phone call Tuesday.

HERE WE HAVE two tales of a city. Do not expect any happy endings.

Here is what you can expect:

* The U.S. Attorney's Office in New Orleans -- the three federal prosecutors in Louisiana being the state's only effective defense against public corruption -- will get an indictment against Stacey Jackson, the former NOAH head. Perhaps other indictments will be forthcoming as well.

* Being that the trial has to be held somewhere in Louisiana, God only knows whether any convictions will be forthcoming.

* Federal relief money intended to help New Orleans and Louisiana recover from Hurricane Katrina will continue to be wasted, misallocated and blatantly stolen for as long as it continues to roll in.

* The people who need help the most will continue to get the least.

* New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin will continue to run reporters around in circles. When that stops working, he will denounce any reporter who's uncovered yet more graft, incompetence or outright stupidity as "hurting the recovery."

AS THEY SAY back home, "Dat's Looziana for you!"

And as they say everywhere else, "This just might be the time Louisiana cuts its own throat, but good."

Truly -- with the exception of harboring Islamist guerrillas who carry out attacks against the national government -- the Gret Stet reminds one of no less than Russia's troublesome Chechen Republic, an economically devastated region of the dysfunctional and the disadvantaged . . . and of grafters, mobsters and kidnappers. With every outbreak of shenanigans across its post-Katrina landscape, Louisiana further cements its status as America's Chechnya.

And in New Orleans, "an economically devastated region of the dysfunctional and the disadvantaged . . . and of grafters, mobsters and kidnappers" describes Central City on a particularly good day.

FOR THREE YEARS NOW, in the wake of Katrina and the federal flood, Louisiana pols and New Orleans "leaders" have trekked to Washington, D.C., with their hands outstretched. Billions upon billions of taxpayers' dollars, after much wrangling, have been put into those outstretched hands.

And now the outstretched hands full of taxpayers' dollars have been slipped, it would appear, into the pockets of politicians and their cronies -- just as the most cynical and parsimonious in the nation's capital said would happen.

Barring the resumption, after 140 years, of Reconstruction and military occupation (which, really, Louisianians ought to be on their knees praying for . . . that being their last, best hope) there is only one surefire way to stop Louisiana in its thieving tracks.

Only one remaining way to stop crooked pols, their crooked agencies and crooked contractors from collecting federal dollars for work volunteer church kids did. Only one last chance to stop fools in public office from taking federal money to "remediate" flooded homes . . . right before more federal money goes toward bulldozing those same "remediated" homes.

Cut off the cash. Now. Every penny.

There's an old saying I heard over and over growing up in Louisiana -- "Root, hog, or die." Maybe it's time my home state (and the crooks who run it, and the enablers who populate it) find out exactly what that means.

HAT TIP: Your Right Hand Thief.

Gutting ghosts in New Orleans

So far, here's what the American taxpayer -- and the long-suffering citizenry of New Orleans -- have gotten for the billions upon billions of dollars sent to rebuild that woebegone city in the wake of Katrina:

WAIT. That's not entirely fair.

The Louisiana Superdome did get fixed. And lots of homeless homeowners did get FEMA trailers reeking of carcinogenic formaldehyde.

Some people did get rebuilding money through the "Road Home" program . . . but only after first going through the ringer and then waiting a couple of years.

Oh . . . and some levees got rebuilt to prestorm standards. That means they leak, and they'll probably crumble in the teeth of a strong Category 2 hurricane. It also means that defective, washed-away floodwalls got rebuilt just as defectively, with contractors using newspaper for filler in expansion joints.

AND HERE'S WHAT we got in return for millions of federal "home remediation" dollars, according to a report by Lee Zurik of WWL television:

Using city and federal money, the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership program alleges to have gutted, boarded up and even cut grass in more than 1,000 homes.

“I would unequivocally say that's a false statement. There was no help,” said homeowner Mera Picou.

“I think somebody's lining their pockets,” added Garofalo.

In 2007, Mayor Ray Nagin urged low income and elderly New Orleans residents to sign up for his home remediation program, a $3.5 million program run by New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, a non-profit group that is actually a city agency.

A City Hall press release from last year says the remediation program uses "Community Development Block Grant funds to gut and board up to 5,000 homes of seniors and families with low to moderate income by year end 2007."

But did the program accomplish its goals?

Community activist and internet blogger Karen Gadbois started following New Orleans Affordable Home Ownership’s program shortly after its inception.

“The program may not be legitimate,” she said. “I wanted to see this program work, and I didn't see it.”

Eyewitness News joined Gadbois in reviewing pages of material provided by the non-profit agency, that details every property it claims to have remediated. One document even lists the cost. Gadbois calls the information we found startling.

For example, city records show some duplexes in Hollygrove are owned by a man who lives on Carrollton Avenue and used to rent them out. Under the plan's guidelines, that alone would likely disqualify him. But the units haven't even been gutted since the storm. NOAH still says its contractors did $5,000 worth of work to them.

On Jeannette Street, NOAH says it remediated a home in the 8900 block. When WWL-TV went to find the house, a news crew found an empty lot instead. A neighbor said the house had been torn down well before Hurricane Katrina.

NOAH documents also show a house remediated at 8741 Apple Street, a property that doesn't exist. Also on the NOAH list is a house on Willow Street owned by Orleans Metropolitan Housing and Community Development, a charity connected to indicted Rep. William Jefferson and his brother Mose, who is also facing federal charges.

Eyewitness News also found a property on General Pershing Street in one set of records. It is owned by Clourth Wilson, who happens to work for the City of New Orleans Safety and Permits Department.

When reached by phone at his City Hall office, Wilson told WWL-TV that New Orleans Affordable Homeownerhip did no work following the storm to his house. He said all of the gutting and boarding up was done by him.

On the West bank, NOAH claims to have done almost $1,700 of remediation to a property at 1301 Brooklyn Avenue. It's unclear if that property is an empty lot in that block or the warehouse behind it, which belongs to Mardi Gras World.

“I don't think those agencies or individuals or people were applying for free gutting,” Karen Gadbois said.

The owner of a home on Law Street said she didn't apply for help and NOAH didn't do remediation work, even though a NOAH sign recently popped up on the house, almost 12 months after the program shut down.

Gadbois said of the more than 100 properties she has reviewed, only two seemed to show signs of actual repair by NOAH.

So where did the money go? And why do the non-profit’s own records raise so many questions?

NOAH’s executive director left the agency in late June. Her interim replacement, Tonya Durden, e-mailed Eyewitness News on Friday, declining a request for an interview.

YOU REALLY NEED to see the video report on the WWL website. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and that report easily is worth a whole book.

As a nation questioned why New Orleans ought to be rebuilt at all -- for reasons ranging, basically, from sheer racism to sheer misanthropy -- it likewise fully realized that you just can't, in this day and age, come right out and admit that you're merely a bunch of hard-hearted bastards. No, you need something to justify kicking a region while it's down.

Unfortunately for Louisiana and New Orleans, their reputations preceded them. A blind man rattling a tin cup on a street corner ain't going to do much bidness if he's pullin' on a bottle of muscatel.

Despite all the flak . . . despite all the catcalls from Main Street and from Capitol Hill . . . despite the fact that what help it's gotten so far isn't nearly enough, what does the Crescent City do with what little cash that's dripped from the federal pipeline?

THIS JUST IN from our intrepid correspondent:

Down in New Orlean, where ev'rything is fine
All them cats is drinkin that wine
Drinking that mess, their delight
When they gets drunk, start singing all night

Drinkin' wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Pass that bottle to me

Drinking that mess, their delight
When they gets drunk, start fighting all night
Knocking down windows and tearin out doors
Drinkin' half a gallon and callin' for more

Drinkin' wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Wine spo-dee-O-dee, drinkin' wine (bop ba)
Pass that bottle to me

Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!
Wine, wine, wine (Elderberry!)
Wine, wine, wine (Or Sherry!)
Wine, wine, wine (Blackberry!)
Wine, wine, wine (Half 'n half!)
Wine, wine, wine (Oh Boy!)
Pass that bottle to me

COME TO THINK OF IT, pass that bottle to me.

Their 2 cents worth

When you start to thinking there's really no hope for New Orleans -- ruined by the Federal Flood, ruined before that by its own dysfunction, ruined forever by grafters and bad schools and bad will between black and white -- you stumble upon a little ray of sunshine cutting through the thick canopy of detritus.

Improbably, you almost ignore the light because you are so in wonder that a layer of dead vegetation, dead people, dead hopes and dead dreams can stay suspended above you -- a defunct version of a once vibrant, verdant ecosystem. But there it is.

A confounding light. A ray of hope. A beacon of excellence amid a world of failure.

IF YOU WANT TO SEE some first-rate guerrilla media from a bunch of kids who refuse to give up on their city, go here. If a once-great city is to be reborn and reformed, it's not going to be at the hands of its politicians . . . or those relics from Washington.

If New Orleans -- if Louisiana -- one day rises out of the muck of fatalism and apathy, it'll be because some young people were too clueless to know it was all a hopeless case, and that they oughtn't have wasted their time trying.

N.O.'s nutty buddy cuckoo for 'da surge'

What does this dispatch from The Associated Press sound like to you?

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he's asked Gov. Bobby Jindal to postpone a planned phase-out of National Guard troops, who have been in the city as a way to help fight crime after Hurricane Katrina depleted police force ranks.

The governor had planned to begin a three-month phase-out of the 360 soldiers patrolling New Orleans neighborhoods in June, but Nagin said that would be too quick because the city still is trying to recruit new police officers and needs more time for that effort.

"We thought the June 1st deadline was coming a little too quickly," Nagin said Tuesday after meeting with Jindal in Baton Rouge. "We haven't really ramped up our recruitment. We have a major campaign running right now."

Seventy-five people have been murdered in New Orleans so far this year, and overall violent crime has increased. The police department announced this month that it will begin a national campaign that it hopes will land at least 200 new officers for the city.

Nagin said he'd like the National Guard troops to stay in the city through the summer, with a reassessment of the need in the fall.

The mayor said Jindal "said that he would be very flexible. We didn't talk about any specific timelines or anything, but in previous conversations with he and his staff, he said he would work with us and that the June 1st deadline was not a hard deadline."

IN OTHER WORDS, Crazy Ray is begging the armed forces of the Gret Stet of Looziana not to stand down until the Iraqi Army New Orleans Police Department can stand up.

My God, the National Guard could be stuck there for another 100 years.

The third hosing is the charm

First comes Katrina and a demonstration of just how well the feds build levees and floodwalls.

Then comes the unending bureaucratic nightmare involved in trying to rebuild what Uncle Sam destroyed.

And just when you think you see that light at the end of the tunnel . . . it turns out to be the 8:15 to Houston, it has a full head of steam, and the engineer is drunk at the throttle.

That's right boys and girls, the Road Home program bites Louisianians in the ass yet again, as reported here by The Associated Press:

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

For thousands of Katrina victims, this may be a reality.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."

The bid invitation said: "The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000."

The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF's highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases — overpaid by an average of $35,000 — proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.

ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said in an e-mail Friday that the overpayment recovery effort was made inevitable when insurance and other aid to Katrina victims was eventually measured against what an applicant received from the Road Home program.

Brann said there was a sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF knew applicants might eventually have to return some money.

"The choice was either to process grants immediately or wait until the March 2008 deadline (for submitting Road Home applications) before disbursing any funds," Brann said in her e-mail.

Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is "quite good for large federal programs."

EVERY TIME I try to formulate a comment on this, I just keep falling into black-hearted, seeing-red fury and thoughts that mass violence might be an appropriate response, given that this follows nearly two years of red tape, bureaucratic bungling and extreme delays in getting compensation for anyone.

James Kunstler would name -- has named, actually -- a blog after just the sort of mess contractor ICF has made the Road Home program into. And now this.

And the hell of it is, professional liars (or so it would seem, at least) employed by the contractor expect us to believe the company has done a bang-up job with the whole thing.

If I'm Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, here's my response: I call all the top ICF executives to Baton Rouge for "urgent consultations" on the program. Make it mandatory that all the top executives of the company attend to "hash things out."

When they arrive at the governor's office for the meeting, state troopers immediately take them into custody. Fraud charges are filed. Bail is denied.

And then the state prosecutes with all the speed ICF has exhibited in paying out awards to flooded-out Louisiana homeowners. As those execs sit in the general population of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison.

Justice requires it.