The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall number of poor people grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor people isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

Washington, D.C. ... has a higher concentration of severely poor people -- 10.8 percent in 2005 -- than any of the 50 states, topping even hurricane-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, with 9.3 percent and 8.3 percent, respectively. Nearly six of 10 poor District residents are in extreme poverty.

"What appears to be taking place is that, over the long term, you have a significant permanent underclass that is not being impacted by anti-poverty policies," said Michael Tanner, the director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, disagreed. "It doesn't look like a growing permanent underclass," said Sherman, whose organization has chronicled the growth of deep poverty. "What you see in the data are more and more single moms with children who lose their jobs and who aren't being caught by a safety net anymore."

Labels: economic justice

Each morning, Debra South Jones drives 120 miles into New Orleans to cook and serve over 300 hot free meals each day to people in New Orleans East, where she lived until Katrina took her home. Ms. Jones and several volunteers also distribute groceries to 18,000 families a month through their group, Just the Right Attitude. Who comes for food? "Most of the people are working on their own houses because they can't afford contractors," Ms. Jones said. "They are living in their gutted-out houses with no electricity."

Why do thousands of people need food and why are people living in gutted-out houses with no electricity? Look at New Orleans eighteen months after Katrina and you will realize why it is so difficult for people to exercise the human right to return to their homes.

Half the homes in New Orleans still do not have electricity. Eighteen months after Katrina, a third of a million people in the New Orleans metro area have not returned.

FEMA told Congress that 60,000 families in Louisiana still live in 240 square foot trailers usually at least 3 to a trailer. The Louisiana Hurricane Task Force estimated in December 2006 that there was an "urgent need" for 30,000 affordable rental apartments in New Orleans alone and another 15,000 around the rest of the state.

Eighteen months after Katrina, over 80 percent of the 5100 New Orleans occupied public housing apartments remained closed by order of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which controlled the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) since 2002. HUD pressed ahead even though internal HANO documents revealed the cost for repair and renovation was significantly less than for demolition and redevelopment. A professor from MIT inspected the buildings and declared them structurally sound. Architecture critics applaud the current garden-style buildings. Yet HUD plows ahead planning to spend tens of millions of Katrina dollars to tear down millions of dollars of habitable housing and end up with far fewer affordable apartments a clear loss for the community.

Over $100 billion was approved by Congress to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion of that money was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.

Louisiana received $10 billion to fix up housing. Over 109,000 homeowners applied for federal funds to fix up their homes. Eighteen months later, less than 700 families have received this federal assistance. Renters, who comprised a majority of New Orleans, are worse off they get nothing at all. Some money is scheduled to go to some landlords and apartment developers for some apartments at some time.

There were uncountable generous and courageous and heroic acts of people and communities who stretched themselves to assist people displaced by the hurricane. Many of these continue. However, there are several notable exceptions.

Obstacles to public funding of affordable housing came from within New Orleans and in neighboring parishes. Many in New Orleans do not want the poor who lived in public housing to return.

St. Bernard Parish, a 93 percent white suburb adjoining New Orleans, enacted a post-Katrina ordinance which restricted home owners from renting out single-family homes "unless the renter is a blood relative" without securing a permit from the government.

Jefferson Parish, another adjoining majority-white suburb, unanimously passed a resolution opposing all low-income tax credit multi-family housing in the areas closest to New Orleans effectively stopping the construction of a 200 unit apartment building on vacant land for people over the age of 62 and any further assisted housing.

Across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans, the chief law enforcement officer of St. Tammany Parish, Sheriff Jack Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina presence of "thugs and trash" from "New Orleans public housing" and announced that people with dreadlocks or "chee wee hairstyles" could "expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff,s deputy."

With rebuilding starting up and the previous work force still displaced, tens of thousands of migrant workers have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery. Many were recruited. Most workers tell of being promised good wages and working conditions and plenty of work. Some paid money up front for the chance to come to the area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour of the area reveals many Latino workers live in houses without electricity, other live out of cars. At various places in the city whole families are living in tents.

Many former residents of New Orleans are not welcome back. Race is certainly a factor. So is class. As New Orleans native and professor Adolph Reed notes: "With each passing day, a crucially significant political distinction in New Orleans gets clearer and clearer: Property owners are able to assert their interests in the polity, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as in the early eighteenth century."

New Orleans is now the charter capital of the U.S. All the public schools on the side of the Mississippi which did not flood were turned into charters within weeks of Katrina. The schools with strongest parental support and high test scores were flipped into charters. The charters have little connection to each other and to state or local supervision. Those in the top half of the pre-Katrina population may be getting a better education. Kids without high scores, with disabilities, with little parental involvement who are not in charters are certainly not getting a good education and are shuttled into the bottom half - a makeshift system of state and local schools.

John McDonogh, a public high school created to take the place of five pre-Katrina high schools, illustrates the challenges facing non-charter public education in New Orleans. Opened by the State school district in the fall, as of November, 2006, there were 775 students but teachers, textbooks and supplies remained in short order months after school opened. Many teens, as many as one-fifth, were living in New Orleans without their parents. Fights were frequent despite the presence of metal detectors, twenty-give security guards and an additional eight police officers. In fact several security guards, who were not much older than the students were injured in fights with students. Students described the school as having a "prison atmosphere." There were no hot lunches and few working water fountains. The girls, bathrooms did not have doors on them. The library had no books at all, not even shelves for books in early November. One 15 year old student caught the 5am bus from Baton Rouge to attend the high school. "Our school has 39 security guards and three cops on staff and only 27 teachers," one McDonogh teacher reported.

It took two federal civil rights actions in January 2007 to force the state to abolish a waiting list for entry into public school that stranded hundreds of kids out of school for weeks.

Healthcare is in crisis. The main public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, which saw 350,000 patient visits a year, remains closed, as do half the hospitals in the city. It is not clear it will reopen. Plans are being debated which will shift indigent care and its state and federal compensation to private hospitals. Much of the uncompensated care provided by Charity has shifted to other LSU hospitals with people traveling as far as 85 miles to the Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge which reports a 50 percent increase in uncompensated care. Waiting lines are long in emergency rooms for those who have insurance. When hundreds of thousands lost their jobs after Katrina, they lost healthcare as well. A recent free medical treatment fair opened their doors at 6 am and stopped signing people up at 8 am because they had already filled the 700 available slots for the day.

Mental health is worse. A report by the World Health organization estimates that serious and mild to moderate mental illness doubled in the year after Hurricane Katrina among survivors. Despite a suicide rate triple what it was a year ago, the New York Times reported ten months after the storm New Orleans had still lost half of its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health care workers.

In the months after Katrina, the 534 psychiatric beds that were in metro New Orleans shrank to less than 80. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed the area and found 45 percent of residents were experiencing "significant stress or dysfunction" and another 25 percent were worse.

By default, the lack of mental health treatment facilities has forced more of these crises towards law enforcement. "The lack of mental health options forced the New Orleans Police Department to incarcerate mentally ill people who normally would have been taken to Charity," said James Arey, commander of the NOPD crisis negotiation team. "The only other option is to admit them into emergency rooms ill-equipped to handle psychotics who may have to wait days for care. This is past the point of being unsafe," Arey said. "It's just a matter of time before a mental patient goes berserk in one of the ERs and hurts some people."

With day care scarce down 70 percent, and public transportation down 83 percent of pre-Katrina busses, there is little chance for single moms with kids.

It is impossible to begin to understand the continued impact of Katrina without viewing through the lenses of race, gender and poverty. Katrina exposed the region,s deep-rooted inequalities of gender, race, and class. Katrina did not create the inequalities; it provided a window to see them more clearly. But the aftermath of Katrina has aggravated these inequalities.
In fact if you plot race, class and gender you can likely tell who has returned to New Orleans. The Institute of Women,s Policy Research pointed out "The hurricanes uncovered America,s longstanding structural inequalities based on race, gender, and class and laid bare the consequences of ignoring these underlying inequalities."

The pre-Katrina population of 454,000 people in the city of New Orleans dropped to 187,000. The African-American population of New Orleans shrank by 61 percent or 213,000 people, from a pre-Katrina number of 302,000 down to 89,000. New Orleans now has a much smaller, older, whiter and more affluent population.

Crime plagues parts of the city and every spoke of the criminal justice wheel is broken. Hundreds of police left the force and several were just indicted for first degree murder of an unarmed mentally retarded man during Katrina. When the accused police reported to jail, they were accompanied by hundreds of fellow officers holding up signs calling them heroes. The DA and the police are openly feuding and pointing fingers at each other. The judges are fighting with the new public defender system. Victims and witnesses are still displaced. People accused of serious crime walk out of jail because of incompetence and the fear of witnesses to cooperate with police.

Others are kept in jail too long because they are lost in the system. For example, Pedro Parra-Sanchez was arrested six days after he arrived in New Orleans to find work in October 2005. He got in a fight and allegedly stabbed a man with a beer bottle. He went through the local temporary jail in a bus station and two other Louisiana prisons. Under Louisiana law he was supposed to be charged within 60 days or released. However, he never went to court or saw a lawyer. When he did not show up for his original arraignment date last May, a warrant was put out for his arrest, but he was already incarcerated. He was found by a Tulane Law Clinic attorney and was released in November 2006. Lost in the system, he was doing what they call in the courthouse "Katrina time."

Though crime is issue one in most of the city, crime is not the cause of a city dying. Crime is a symptom of a city dying. Crime is the sound of a city dying.

There are major problems with the drinking water system eighteen months after Katrina. According to the City of New Orleans, hundreds of miles of underground pipes were damaged by 480 billion pounds of water that sat in the city after Katrina. They were further damaged by the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees whose roots were wrapped around the pipes.

The city of New Orleans now loses more water through faulty pipes and joints in the delivery system than it is uses. More than 135 million gallons are being pumped out daily but only 50 million gallons are being used, leaving 85 million gallons "unaccounted for and probably leaking out of the system." The daily cost of the water leaking away in thousands of leaks is about $200,000 a day.

The second major water problem is that the leakage makes maintaining adequate water pressure extremely difficult and costly, particularly in tall office buildings. Water pressure in New Orleans is estimated at half that of other cities, creating significant problems in consumption, sanitation, air-conditioning, and fire prevention.

Insurance costs are skyrocketing for homes and businesses. So are rents. Though low-wage jobs pay a little more than before Katrina, they do not pay enough for people to afford rent.

The overall planning process for the rebuilding of New Orleans has been derailed by several competing planning operations. The Mayor initially created a Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which met for months. While the Bring Back New Orleans Commission was underway, the Urban Land Institute, a D.C. based think tank, created and released a report of recommendations in January 2006. After several months of hearings, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission issued a report issued from the Mayor,s Office, but it was never funded. In April 2006, the New Orleans City Council awarded a $2.9 million grant, funded by federal grant money, to a Miami consultant to create a plan for the 49 neighborhoods of New Orleans. A fourth planning process, the Unified New Orleans Plan, was launched in spring 2006 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to integrate all the planning processes. In September 2006, the City Council plan was released, while the UNOP process was just getting underway that fourth plan is starting to wind up now.

These problems spread far beyond their most graphic illustrations in New Orleans throughout the Gulf Coast. As Oxfam documented, government neglect has plagued the rebuilding of smaller towns like Biloxi Mississippi, and rural parishes of Louisiana, leaving the entire region in distress. In Biloxi, the first to be aided after the hurricane were the casinos, which forced low-income people out of their homes and neighborhoods. In rural Louisiana, contradictory signals by government agencies have slowed and in some cases reversed progress. Small independent family commercial fishing businesses have been imperiled by the lack of recovery funds. The federal assistance that has occurred has tended to favor the affluent and those with economic assets.

Visitors to New Orleans can still stay in fine hotels and dine at great restaurants. But less than a five minute drive away lie miles of devastated neighborhoods that shock visitors. Locals call it "the Grand Canyon effect" - you know about it, you have seen it on TV, but when you see it in person it can take your breath away.

Our community continues to take hope from the resilience of our people. Despite lack of federal, state and local assistance, people are living their lives and repairing their homes. People are organizing. Many fight for better levee protection. Some work for affordable housing. Some are workers collectively seeking better working conditions. Neighborhoods are coming together to fight for basic services. Small business owners are working together to secure grants and low-cost rebuilding loans. Others organize against crime.

We graciously accept the kindnesses of strangers who come by the hundreds every day to help us gut and rebuild our homes. Churches, synagogues, and mosques from around the country come to partner with local congregations to rebuild and resource their sisters and brothers.

The new Congress appears poised to give us a hand. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, head the House Subcommittee overseeing HUD, delivered pointed questions and criticisms to federal, state and local foot-draggers recently and promised a new day.

Young people are particularly outraged and activated by what they see they give us hope. Over a thousand law students alone will come to the gulf to volunteer over spring break with the Student Hurricane Network.

The connections between the lack of resources for Katrina rebuilding and Iraq and Afghanistan are clear to everyone on the gulf coast.

Despite the guarantees of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement that people displaced through no fault of their own have the right to return to their homes and have the right to expect the government to help them do so, far too little progress has been made.

As U.S. Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver of Kansas City observed in a recent public hearing, "When it is all said and done, there has been a lot more said than done."

But still each day, Ms. Debra South Jones and her volunteers drive into New Orleans east to dish out hot food and groceries to people in need. In the past eighteen months, they have given out over 3 million pounds of food to over 130,000 families. We never dreamed we would be still be so needy eighteen months after Katrina. We look forward to the day when she will not have to feed us, when we will not need volunteers to gut and fix up our homes, when we can feed ourselves in our own fixed up homes in a revitalized New Orleans.

[ If you would like to learn more about Ms. Debra South Jones and the work of her organization Just the Right Attitude, see http://www.jtra.org ]

Bush’s approval rating down, fewer say they are Republican. Given President Bush’s falling approval ratings in Tennessee (34% vs. 42% a year ago), the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and dissatisfaction with response to Hurricane Katrina, Tennessee – once solidly Republican – may be shifting toward the “blue” end of the spectrum. Also, in the fall of 2004 – when President Bush won handily – some 35% of Tennesseans identified themselves as Republicans, 29% as Democrats, and 23% as independents. This spring the results are 31% Republican, 33% Democrat, and 22% independent.

• 58% favor raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25, and 18% more favor raising Tennessee's minimum wage to $8.25.



• 43% rate the state's economy as "good" or "excellent", 43% say it's fair, and only 12% say it's poor.



• 67% approve of the governor's job performance, while only 50% approve of the state legislature's performance.



• 28% say they have not heard enough about Barak Obama to form an opinion v. only 2.3% for Hillary Clinton. (Curiously, 17.8% say they haven't heard enough about Edwards, who ran in the 2004 presidential primaries and ran for vice president in the 2004 general election.)



• 60% believe global warming is having a serious impact now v. 28% who do not. (48% believe that Al Gore deserves a Nobel Prize v. 36% who don't.)



• 54% believe the law should allow illegal immigrants to become citizens, but only 40% support a guest worker program.



• 31% say illegal immigration is an "extremely important" issue to them personally, 28% say it is "very important", 24% say it is "moderately important", and 9.2% say it is "slightly important." Only 5.6% say it is "not important at all."



• 57% support the death penalty as the maximum penalty for murder, while 32.3% believe it should be life imprisonment with no parole. 42% approve of the governor's recent suspension of the death penalty for further investigation of lethal injection methods. 31% disapprove.



• 65% believe medical malpractice lawsuits should have to pass a review by a board of medical experts. 45% believe the state should limit punitive awards in malpractice cases.

The poll was conducted by telephone Feb. 6-17, 2007 by students in the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee State University. Students interviewed 554 people age 18 or older chosen at random from the state population. The poll has an estimated error margin of ± about 4 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence. Theoretically, this means that a sample of this size should produce a statistical portrait of the population within 4 percentage points 95 out of 100 times. Other factors, such as question wording, also affect the outcome of a survey. Error margins are greater for sample subgroups.

The sample varied somewhat from the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest available projections for age, race and gender proportions within the state. Such variation commonly occurs because certain demographic groups are more difficult to contact. The data were thus weighted to more closely match Census projections for these demographics.

As a result of this transaction, the newly privatized company will deliver price cuts and price protection benefits to electric customers, strengthen environmental policies, make significant investments in alternative energy and institute corporate policies tied to climate stewardship.

This turnaround marks the beginning of a new, competitive focus on clean, efficient, renewable energy strategies to deliver the power we need while cutting global warming emissions. It is a big step forward for the State of Texas and for the American energy economy as a whole.

TXU’s ... decision not to build eight new plants and to help work toward global warming emissions caps is a huge victory, but the company is still planning to build the Oak Grove and Sandow plants, the three dirtiest plants in its proposal.

In addition, eight other plants have been proposed by other companies. We predict that they will now move their applications into the hearing stage, and the coal wars will continue.

...[S]ome of TXU's critics were unhappy because the two groups agreed to a nonbinding deal that would let the new owners build three other coal plants, including two units called Oak Grove that could emit more mercury than the proposed plants that will be scrapped.

"Environmental Defense blessed those two stacks when they don't have the authority to do that," said Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. She leads a coalition of cities, including Houston, that opposes TXU's coal plants.

* Will this mean that the company will move forward on its six proposed nuclear plants?

* What will the deal mean to consumer prices? While the company promises a 10 percent reduction in prices, we think that the prices they are charging are about 30 percent above the prices charged by the neighboring co-ops and municipal utilities that buy the same energy.

* If the company buys TXU at the proposed price and then flips it in several years, the increased costs will have to be passed on to consumers. Regulators in Oregon and Arizona have recently blocked these types of leveraged buyouts because of these concerns.

Labels: environmental justice

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, Hurricane Katrina

Unlike Valerie Plame, who was removed from covert duty years earlier, the subjects of the L.A. Times story, three North Carolina pilots, were recently involved in extremely sensitive covert actions flying CIA rendition flights. The three pilots have, along with ten others, been indicted in a German court, for their involvement in the “extraordinary rendition” of Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. [...]

The pilots’ real names were not disclosed in the L.A. Times, but some pretty specific information was. The report included information that all three pilots live “within a 30-minute drive of the guarded Aero hangar and offices at the rural Johnston County airport.” Also reported was the type of car driven by two of the men and some details about what else might be found in their driveways, as well as some information about their homes.

Labels: extraordinary rendition, peace and security

The survey of 719 residents of Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas shows 57 percent of those questioned disapproved or strongly disapproved of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Sixty-four percent disapproved or strongly disapproved of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. That compares to 57 percent in a survey of the same states one year ago. The poll shows 31 percent approved or strongly approved of Bush's handling of the war -- down from 39 percent last year.

When asked to identify the most important issue facing the country, 45 percent of respondents named the war in Iraq, compared to 26 percent in February 2006. An even 50 percent said a stalemate is the most likely outcome for the United States in Iraq, while 56 percent said the war is not worth fighting.

"There is outrage when a couple hundred people are killed in aviation fatal accidents, yet you don't seem to see, share or demonstrate the same outrage when 4,300 people die on our nation's highways annually," Rosenker said. "We can make changes here on this board . . . to chip away piece by piece at the 4,300 people who die on highways."

Labels: regulatory oversight

Schaller is right about the above factoids. But will somebody -- anybody -- please explain why, if the south is so hopeless, Democrats currently hold majorities of both houses of the state legislatures in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina and West Virginia (and one House in TN and KY), as well as the governorships of Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia and Tennessee, two U.S. Senate seats in both Arkansas and West Virginia, and one each in Virginia, Florida and Louisiana.

Labels: Election 2008

• In 73 of the 80 cases, defense lawyers gave jurors little or no evidence to help them decide whether the accused should live or die. The lawyers routinely missed myriad issues of abuse and mental deficiency, abject poverty and serious psychological problems.



• By failing to investigate their clients' histories, lawyers in these 73 cases fell far short of the 20-year-old professional standards set by the American Bar Association. Their performances also appear inconsistent with standards that the U.S. Supreme Court has mandated several times.



• Appeals courts for the most part have ducked those Supreme Court directives about the importance of quality defense counsel. So far, only two of the 80 death sentences have been overturned for bad lawyering.



• In 11 of the cases, the defendants already have been executed. Their cases moved through the appeals process without a single judge flagging lapses in the defense attorneys' performances.

In Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi, this poor legal representation is a result of official policy. The states pay no more than a pittance to help lawyers defend their clients, and none requires that well-trained attorneys handle death cases.

Georgia had a similarly inadequate system until 2005, when a publicly funded, statewide capital defenders office began spending whatever is necessary to scour clients' backgrounds for mitigating evidence. So far, none of that office's 46 clients has been sentenced to death.

Overall, the 80 cases that McClatchy reviewed show how poorly these four key death-penalty states fulfill a basic constitutional principle.

The manual's minute-by-minute guidelines for lethal injections includes the following instruction: "The Executioner will engage the automatic rheostat." A rheostat controls the voltage flowing to an electric chair.

The guidelines also tell the facility manager to disconnect the electrical cables in the rear of the chair before a doctor checks whether the lethal injection was successful.

In a move that received very little attention, Gov. Phil Bredesen recently suspended all executions in Tennessee until May, pending a full review of what he called our "sloppy" execution procedures. The governor is to be commended for this brave and wise decision.

But I suggest that he take this opportunity to review not just the execution procedures, but the entire application of the death penalty in this state. That will take far longer than a few months. We need a death penalty moratorium—not just in Tennessee but in all states.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that states could resume executions, they mandated that any state doing so must apply this ultimate penalty in a fair and consistent, rather than arbitrary and capricious, manner. No one can honestly look at the current application of the death penalty in Tennessee and believe that we have met that test.

It would take another column to review the biblical arguments, which in the South are a profound factor in support for the death penalty. Even if we were to take the Old Testament alone as our guide, it requires the eyewitness testimony of two or three witnesses (Deut. 17:6), a stricter standard than our own. It also requires that the justice system "not show partiality" (Deut. 16:19) and therefore that every accused person be treated similarly. And this is not even to consider the profound issues raised by the New Testament’s focus on mercy.

As of now, at least, the death penalty is a public policy that fails the most basic standards of justice. It is time for a moratorium and a comprehensive review.

Labels: death penalty, justice

The excess of hog operations is greatest in areas with both high poverty and high percentage nonwhites. Operations run by corporate integrators are more concentrated in poor and nonwhite areas than are operations run by independent growers. ... Disproportionate impacts of intensive hog production on people of color and on the poor may impede improvements in economic and environmental conditions that are needed to address public health in areas which have high disease rates and low access to medical care as compared to other areas of the state.

Labels: environmental justice

When John McCain campaigned in the 2000 South Carolina primary ... he said [the Confederate flag] was a matter for state officials to decide.

Later, McCain said the flag should be removed. "I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary," he admitted.

And now?

Danny Diaz, a McCain spokesman, gave a brief statement when asked if the senator thinks the flag should be removed: "A bipartisan solution to this issue was developed by the General Assembly, and the senator applauds their efforts."

Earlier in the week, African-American state Sen. Robert Ford announced he was backing Hillary Clinton. "Everybody else on the ballot is doomed," Ford said, explaining what would happen if Obama were nominated. "Every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because he's black and he's at the top of the ticket—we'd lose the House, the Senate, and the governors and everything."

Ford's endorsement, along with that of another prominent African-American official, was timed to steal a little of Obama's thunder and presumably contribute to another round of stories about whether he could appeal to black voters. Instead, it was a gift. "I've been reading the papers in South Carolina," Obama said before using a preacher's cadence to paraphrase Ford's remarks. "Can't have a black man at the top of the ticket." The crowd booed. "But I know this: that when folks were saying, We're going to march for our freedom, they said, You can't do that." The audience roared. "When somebody said, You can't sit at the lunch counter. … You can't do that. We did. And when somebody said, Women belong in the kitchen not in the board room. You can't do that. Yes we can." (At this point I can't reconstruct the remarks from my tape recorder because the screaming was too loud.) The crowd responded by chanting: "Yes, we can."

Labels: Election 2008, South Carolina

This community lost so much in Katrina and in the 17 months since the storm that it is sometimes difficult to see the beauty of what we still have.

When you lose your home, your neighbors and your most treasured possessions, the ache stays with you for a long time. But as we work to rebuild what was taken in the storm, it is a comfort to realize that no hurricane, no inept bureaucracy, no self-involved politician can change the wealth of our culture and traditions.

Today, of all days, is the time to express who we are.

When the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina took place last year, New Orleanians felt something vital was missing: the strutting steps and triumphal horns of the city’s proud, immensely competitive high school bands marching between the floats.

The reason was obvious: Nearly all the city’s schools were still shut, and most of the students had been evacuated. This year fewer than a third of the public schools in New Orleans have reopened — many more are due this fall — and much of the city’s old population remains dispersed. But some of the top high school bands are back: a rare, heartening sign not only for the parades but also for the long-term vitality of New Orleans culture.

Moments after he sat down, Josephine, a gray toy poodle named for Napoleon Bonaparte's wife, bounded into French's lap, mussing his master's Rex organization tie, a black four-in-hand tie with purple, green and gold stripes.

French views this year's festivities as part of the continuing areawide recovery from Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

"I feel like this is a chance to tell the world that we have survived, we have come back, we're ready to return to being the greatest host city in the world.

"It's time to thank the world for all the help they've given us and are continuing to give us and to welcome everybody who had been to the city in the past year and will be here, because we're going to need them."

Merchants, hotel operators and others felt the crowd would exceed the 700,000 the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau said visited the city during the same time period last year.

"It was an excellent weekend," said Michael Valentino, managing partner of three French Quarter hotels. He said, "There is clearly more demand this year. It's feeling more like our normal Mardi Gras pressure."

[..]The first Carnival since Hurricane Katrina was scaled down — 68 daily flights into the city, 42 parades rolled and 600 restaurants open, according to the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation. Of the 20,000 hotel rooms habitable last year, only 13,000 were available to visitors. The rest were taken by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, volunteers and contractors.

This year there are 30,000 hotel rooms, 1,648 restaurants open, 110 daily flights and 50 major parades, according to the marketing corporation.

Feb. 5 could become a de facto national primary, political analysts say, because candidates who underperform in that vote would have trouble attracting donations that allow them to continue campaigning. And the party nominations could easily be sewn up in the three weeks between the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 14 and the Feb. 5 sweepstakes – giving the public insufficient time to watch and test the candidates, they say.

"With that many states front-loading their primary dates, the presidential campaign may get closure sooner, but people in each party may end up regretting the choice," says Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California. He cites the meteoric rise in 2004 of Howard Dean, the early Democratic front-runner, who later flamed out when voters watched him more closely over months of campaigning.

"They may find out things about the anointed nominees that they don't like, but find them out too late," says Dr. Pitney.

These assessments do not cancel out the rationale for California and other states that want more clout in who picks presidential nominees, analysts say.

"A Feb. 5 primary for California means California issues are finally going to be addressed by the candidates, rather than just farm or New England issues," says Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. "It means California voters – not just California donors like big Hollywood celebrities – [would] have a bigger say in the presidential primary."

If candidates are forced to consider California voters, concerns such as offshore oil drilling, illegal immigration, national security, and the environment might move up the issue agenda of candidates, say Mr. Stern and others.

Relying on the operatives' passport numbers, hotel records, credit card bills and aviation records, German prosecutors are seeking to properly identify the 13 Americans in a high-profile case that has upset relations between Washington and Berlin and caused a political scandal in Germany over whether government officials sanctioned the CIA operation.

Elsewhere in Europe, legal and parliamentary investigations have focused a harsh spotlight on the CIA's program to abduct suspected terrorists and ferry them to secret sites for interrogation, operations known variously as "black renditions" or "extraordinary renditions."

On Friday, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 26 suspected CIA operatives for allegedly abducting a radical Muslim cleric outside his mosque in Milan in February 2003 and delivering him to Egypt, where his lawyer says he was tortured. The trial is set for June 8 in Milan.

All the Americans charged, including the top two CIA officers in Italy at the time, have departed the country, but Italian law allows defendants to be tried in absentia.

None of the aliases used in Italy match those in the German case, although one of the pilots may have been involved in both incidents.

One former CIA operation officer who was involved in the Italian case at CIA headquarters, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case is classified, said he and his colleagues were increasingly nervous about traveling in Europe for fear of getting swept up in the investigations. He said he checked with a contact at the Italian intelligence service for reassurance that he would not be arrested.

Labels: investigative reporting, north carolina, peace and security

Unlike almost anywhere else in Baghdad, you could dine at the cafeteria in the Republican Palace in the heart of the Green Zone for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread, or a lamb kebab. The palace was the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American occupation administration in Iraq, and the food was always American, often with a Southern flavour. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food.

None of the succulent tomatoes or crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. US government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations. Milk and bread were trucked in from Kuwait, as were tinned peas and carrots. The breakfast cereal was flown in from the US.

When the Americans arrived, the engineers assigned to transform Saddam's palace into the seat of the American occupation chose a marble-floored conference room the size of a gymnasium to serve as the mess hall. Halliburton, the defence contractor hired to run the palace, brought in dozens of tables, hundreds of stacking chairs and a score of glass-covered buffets. Seven days a week, the Americans ate under Saddam's crystal chandeliers. [...]

If you had a complaint about the cafeteria, Michael Cole was the man to see. He was Halliburton's "customer-service liaison", and he could explain why the salad bar didn't have Iraqi produce or why pork kept appearing on the menu. Cole was a rail-thin 22-year-old whose forehead was dotted with pimples. He had been out of college for less than a year and was working as a junior aide to a Republican congressman from Virginia when a Halliburton vice-president overheard him talking to friends in an Arlington bar about his dealings with irate constituents. She was so impressed that she introduced herself. If she needed someone to work as a valet in Baghdad, he joked, he'd be happy to volunteer. Three weeks later, Halliburton offered him a job. Then they asked for his CV.

Cole's mission was to keep the air in the bubble, to ensure that the Americans who had left home to work for the occupation administration felt comfortable. Food was part of it. But so were movies, mattresses and laundry service. If he was asked for something, Cole tried to get it, whether he thought it important or not. [...]

Whatever could be outsourced, was. The job of setting up town and city councils was performed by a North Carolina firm for $236m [£121m]. The job of guarding the viceroy was assigned to private guards, each of whom made more than $1,000 [£513] a day. For running the palace - cooking the food, changing the lightbulbs, doing the laundry, watering the plants - Halliburton had been handed hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Green Zone was Baghdad's Little America. Everyone who worked in the palace lived there, either in white metal trailers or in the towering al-Rasheed hotel. Hundreds of private contractors working for firms including Bechtel, General Electric and Halliburton set up trailer parks there, as did legions of private security guards hired to protect the contractors. The only Iraqis allowed inside the Green Zone were those who worked for the Americans or those who could prove that they had resided there before the war. [...]

Americans drove around in new GMC Suburbans, dutifully obeying the 35mph speed limit signs posted by the CPA on the flat, wide streets. When they cruised around, they kept the air-conditioning on high and the radio tuned to 107.7 FM - Freedom Radio, an American-run station that played classic rock and rah-rah messages. Every two weeks, the vehicles were cleaned at a Halliburton car wash.

Shuttle buses looped around the Green Zone at 20-minute intervals, stopping at wooden shelters to transport those who didn't have cars and didn't want to walk. There was daily mail delivery. Generators ensured that the lights were always on. If you didn't like what was being served in the cafeteria - or you were feeling peckish between meals - you could get a takeaway from one of the Green Zone's Chinese restaurants. Halliburton's dry-cleaning service would get the dust and sweat stains out of your khakis in three days. A sign warned patrons to remove ammunition from pockets before submitting clothes.

Iraqi laws and customs didn't apply inside the Green Zone. Women jogged on the pavement in shorts and T-shirts. A liquor store sold imported beer, wine and spirits. One of the Chinese restaurants offered massages as well as noodles. The young boys selling DVDs near the palace parking lot had a secret stash. "Mister, you want porno?" they whispered to me.

Most of the CPA's staff had never worked outside the United States. More than half, according to one estimate, had got their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. If they were going to survive in Baghdad, they needed the same sort of bubble that American oil companies had built for their workers in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia.

"It feels like a little America," Mark Schroeder said as we sat by the pool on a scorching afternoon, sipping water bottled in the United Arab Emirates. Schroeder, who was 24 at the time, had been working for a Republican congressman in Washington when he heard that the CPA needed more staff. He sent his résumé to the Pentagon. A few months later, he was in the Republican Palace.

Labels: contracting, iraq, peace and security