So in all the stories and reports from Katrina, one story I have paid marginal attention to is that of the people working for the newspapers — the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Sun Herald in Biloxi. A lot of the staffers of the T-P evacuated with their families for a few days and are beginning to come back to work now that things are getting more settled. But a lot of them stayed…
This evening I heard a CNN dispatch by a female reporter I’m not familiar with (she had blond hair) that was a basic overview of the day’s events. But she told a tale of some men who had covered a body with some sort of sheet or tarp, held down by a frame of bricks. She said they wrote “Here lies Vera: May she rest in peace” on the covering. But a couple of hours…
All week, Michael Chertoff has succeeded in displaying just how slow on the uptake he and his department are, unfortunately. Today’s “Meet the Press” didn’t help his case much. He contends that on Tuesday, he picked up a newspaper and breathed a brief sigh of relief because the headlines told him that New Orleans, while ravaged by the hurricane, had essentially dodged a bullet and that that’s why massive relief efforts weren’t already mobilized to…
CA reporter Aimee Edmondson has a compelling report out of New Orleans about a Tennessee-based rescue team charged with plucking survivors out of flooded homes and nursing homes. I’m proud of these Volunteers (capital ‘V’ intentional). Their job is so enormous I can’t fathom it. I’m also proud of the work the CA reporters and photographers are doing down there. Some snippets: • “They’d found 60 nursing home patients alive on the second floor of…
I keep thinking about the difference between CNN’s musical accompaniment (I don’t know the technical term) and FOX’s. FOX plays this setimental violin-y stuff and CNN’s got this weird industrial trance music going. It sounds like there are people beating on bamboo-plank roofs with two-by-fours while steam fizzes in the background and a tugboat honks outside the warehouse. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like FOX is saying, “Aw, isn’t that sad?” and…
The nightmare begins to dissipate for some, but the gruesome imagery will linger forever. From the AP: “The last bedraggled refugees were rescued from the Superdome on Saturday and the convention center was all but cleared, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care. “No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina’s floods and how many…
Rehnquist is dead. Holy crap on a stick. WASHINGTON — Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening at his home in suburban Virginia, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.
I, like all of my fellow pinko bleeding-heart quasi-socialist brothers and sisters, like to frown and mutter when giant soul-sucking corporations are the topic of conversation, but I recognize that they do good things too, like donating millions to the Katrina relief effort. I won’t quibble over their profit margins vs. the amount they donate or anything like that, because what’s important is that they’re giving at all. Wal-Mart is donating $15 million, and various…
Only not. I’m about to start carting out conspiracy theories if someone doesn’t explain to me why people have to stay in NO and no other people can come in. Seriously, I know the conditions are toxic but there are still people who need to be fed and millions of dollars in civilian aid have been donated to the Red Cross to do just that. So let them do it.
I’ve done my part to FOX-bash in the past, but Shep Smith and the always-dramatic Geraldo are fantastic in their indignation in the clip of Hannity and Colmes linked over at Crooks and Liars. Unfuckingbelievable. There is a piece over at Slate chronicling the collective re-balling, if you will, of the nation’s major news broadcasters, who suddenly have decided to resume their posts as watchdogs for the poor and disenfranchised. That article is full of…
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