District Attorney Eddie Jordan of New Orleans has resigned.

The move comes after growing controversy over his tenure, which involved a federal race-discrimination lawsuit that has left the office facing a $3.7 million judgment and possible asset seizures, his initial failure to bring charges for the murder of Hot 8 Brass Band drummer Dinerral Shavers, and a bizarre incident earlier this month in which a suspected criminal sought refuge at Jordan's home.

Jordan will be replaced by Keva Landrum-Johnson, a 34-year-old veteran prosecutor who he recently named as his first assistant. The first woman to hold the office, Landrum-Johnson has said she will not run for the position when an election is held.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that a group of the city's top business leaders met with Mayor Ray Nagin to find a private-sector job for Jordan. A former U.S. attorney during the Clinton presidency, Jordan helped win a conviction on corruption charges of former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards. Jordan was also a trailblazer as the first African-American U.S. attorney in Louisiana's history and first African-American district attorney in New Orleans' history.

Jordan's resignation comes just days after the New Orleans-based Safe Streets/Strong Communities and New York's Center for Constitutional Rights held a public hearing on law enforcement in the post-Katrina reconstruction. It examined how rather than focusing on violent crime New Orleans’ criminal justice resources are being spent targeting nonviolent offenders and innocent citizens -- particularly in poor communities and communities of color. Let's hope this trend begins to change under Landrum-Johnson's watch.

Labels: criminal justice, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, new orleans

For the first time in more than four decades, the South* is the only region in the country where low-income children make up a majority -- 54 percent -- of public school students. That has critical implications for the South's future, since low-income students as a group lag behind their wealthier peers by most measures of educational progress.

These are among the alarming findings of a new report from the Southern Education Foundation, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that promotes excellence in education. Titled "A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South's Public Schools," the report was issued in honor of SEF's 140th anniversary.

Low-income students have constituted a majority of the South's public school children for the last three years, according to the report. In the 2004-2005 school year, 50 percent of Southern school children were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. In 2005-2006 that number increased to 53 percent, and it climbed another percentage point the following year. (Click on map from the report at right for a larger image.)

The report attributes the disturbing trend to several factors. Demographically, many Southern states are experiencing a higher rate of population growth among Latino and African American children, who are statistically more likely than white children to be born into low-income households. Economically, many Southern states are struggling with high rates of underemployment and unemployment due to the outsourcing of good jobs to cheaper foreign labor markets. And historically, the Deep South and Southern Appalachia have experienced persistently high poverty rates.

But policy choices made by Southern politicians are also partly to blame for the problem, the report says:

The South's challenges are made even greater by the fact that Southern states provide the least educational resources to their low income students. The South has the lowest per pupil expenditures in the nation. In 2000, for example, Mississippi's highest per pupil expenditures did not even match many states' lowest student expenditure. That year, public school districts in Mississippi with the state's highest per pupil expenditures spent less per child than school districts in more than 20 other states spent in their lowest per pupil expenditures. Also, the South provides the nation's smallest amounts of need-based aid to assist the low income students who do graduate from high school and have a chance to attend college.

As the report concludes, how Southern states address this new majority in public school classrooms is the most important challenge the region -- and perhaps the nation -- will face this century.


* SEF defines the South much as we at the Institute do (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia), but unlike us it also counts Maryland and Oklahoma.

Labels: schools, southern history, Southern Politics

Last week, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal became the first non-white governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction -- and the first Indian-American governor in U.S. history. The Republican congressman will succeed Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco after winning 54 percent of the vote in last Saturday's jungle primary. He'll take office in January.

The last non-white to serve as governor of Louisiana was P.B.S. Pinchback, a former Union soldier and Republican who held the office from Dec. 9, 1872 to Jan. 13, 1873 after impeachment charges were brought against his predecessor and party mate, Henry Clay Warmoth. The first non-white governor of any U.S. state following Pinchback's brief time in office was L. Douglas Wilder, who was elected governor of Virginia in 1989.

Jindal's victory shows how far we've come as a nation since 1923, when in United States vs. Thind the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Indians were non-whites and thus ineligible for citizenship. Back in Jindal's ancestral village of Khanpura, his victory was reportedly celebrated with sweets and bhangra dancing.

But when it comes to matters of race, perhaps Louisiana politics haven't come quite as far as Jindal's election seems to suggest.

Just four months before Jindal's victory, Keith Rush was elected to the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee, the governing body of the state GOP. A right-wing radio talk show host, Rush has close ties to former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, who lost his 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial bid. As the Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported:

When Duke ran for governor in 1991 (winning, shockingly, nearly 700,000 votes), he backed Rush's candidacy for the Jefferson Parish Council, telling his supporters that Rush "thinks like we do." In one of Rush's own campaign fliers, entitled "Who Is This Racist?" Rush answered his own question: "This racist believes that 'real' racism thrives on affirmative action programs." Rush also was a featured guest speaker at "Duke Fest," held July 4, 1991, in New Orleans.

SPLC points out that the story of Rush's Duke ties was originally reported by the blog Your Right Hand Thief after a tip from the person behind the now-defunct blog, The Flaming Liberal. As YRHT wrote:

Can we really celebrate progress when former David Duke supporters like Keith Rush are elected to the governing arm of the state Republican party?

Call me liberal, but I don't think so.

Labels: louisiana, politics, race and racism

While President Bush has used the California fires as an opportunity to swipe at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, legendary South Carolina civil rights attorney Tom Turnipseed has an interesting column today which argues a major factor is Washington's failure to confront global warming:

With water supplies rapidly shrinking, Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared a state of emergency for 85 counties and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area on October 20, 2007. A drought of historic proportions is affecting Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia. Meanwhile, drought is feeding a fiery fiasco in California. [...]

On October 21, 2007, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reported that “recently there has been an enormous change in Western fires. In truth, we’ve never seen anything like them in recorded history. It appears we’re living in a new age of mega-fires — forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we’re used to seeing.” According to the number of acres burned, 7 of the 10 busiest forest fire seasons in the United States have occurred since 1999 based on records going back 47 fire seasons to 1960. [...]

Pelley also talked with Tom Swetnam, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. Swetnam has the largest collection of tree rings in the world, that go back 9,000 years, with each one of those rings capturing one year of climate history.

Swetnam says recent decades have been the hottest in 1,000 years, with a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires were rare in the past. “As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there’s a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S.,” Swetnam says.

Swetnam contends that climate change — global warming — has increased temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four times more fires. Swetnam and his colleagues published those findings in the journal “Science,” and the world’s leading researchers on climate change have endorsed their conclusions.

Meanwhile, state leaders in South Carolina are moving forward with plans for a new coal plant on the Pee Dee River, which environmental groups argued this week would be a public health disaster -- and only contribute further to global warming:

Conservation groups oppose Santee Cooper’s proposed plant as a “worst-choice” alternative. Each year the facility would emit thousands of tons air pollution in an area with already high asthma rates. It would require hundreds of acres of landfills and mile-long coal trains. The plant would consume nearly three millions of gallons of water each day and emit over a hundred pounds of mercury annually next to the Great Pee Dee River, which has existing health advisories due to dangerous mercury levels in fish.

Labels: global warming, South Carolina

Barack Obama isn't the only one trying to elbow his way into South Carolina churches in time for next year's presidential primaries.

In the latest of a series of excellent dispatches on South Carolina politics, Ken Silverstein of Harpers' magazine points to some buzz he's getting for his revelations that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has been angling for the Palmetto State "values vote" the old-fashioned way -- he's paying them:

The New York Times reported yesterday that some “movement conservatives are buzzing this week” about my November magazine story that showed that Mitt Romney had “made some strategic donations to a number of well-connected conservative groups in the pivotal early primary state of South Carolina.” Romney, as I noted, has doled out money to at least half a dozen right-wing organizations, including the Palmetto Family Council, South Carolinians for Responsible Government, South Carolina Citizens for Life, and to an organization that sponsored a drive to ban same-sex marriage.

“The donations illustrate how Mr. Romney has invested his financial resources to build his credibility on the right,” the Times reported. “Mr. Romney has been a major donor to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but has scant history of contributions to conservative groups before he began planning a presidential run.”

Romney insists he's shoveling money to South Carolina religious conservatives not for himself, but to help Republicans in general -- an interesting choice, given that the state is already, as Silverstein notes, "about as red as it gets."

Labels: Election 2008, Southern Politics

Crime is on people's minds -- and according to a Gallup poll released this week, many think crime is getting worse:



But crime isn't getting worse. In fact, violent crime rates have been on a steep 10-year decline, and the average U.S. resident is less likely to be victimized than anytime in recent memory:


This is especially true in Southern states, which historically have had higher violent crime rates. To take just one case, here's how murder rates per 100,000 people have plummeted in the South over the last 10 years -- note that only West Virginia saw an increase, and it was slight:

STATE -- 1996 MURDER RATE / 2006 MURDER RATE

Alabama -- 10.4 / 8.3
Arkansas -- 8.7 / 7.3
Florida -- 7.5 / 6.2
Georgia -- 9.5 / 6.4
Kentucky -- 5.9 / 4.0
Louisiana -- 17.5 / 12.4
Mississippi -- 11.1 / 7.7
North Carolina -- 8.5 / 6.1
South Carolina -- 9.0 / 8.3
Tennessee -- 9.5 / 6.8
Texas -- 7.7 / 5.9
Virginia -- 7.5 / 5.2
West Virginia -- 3.8 / 4.1

So why so people think crime is up? I agree with Texas blogger Grits for Breakfast that a leading cause is local news coverage, where each night's story lineup is driven by "if it bleeds, it leads."

Combine that with national TV's endless parade of cop shows and court coverage, leavened with bouts of politicians stirring up crime hysteria (usually with racial overtones), and you have the makings of a national perception about crime far out of pace of reality.

Labels: crime, criminal justice

Lately it seems campaign finance reform has fallen out of favor with some progressives and public interest advocates. Encouraged by their ability to raise money online -- and discouraged by the ability of candidates to find endless loopholes and end-runs around election spending laws -- many who used to champion getting money out of politics now just want to see if they can raise as much as the other side.

The problem with this view is that powerful, wealthy interests will always have the upper hand in the political spending wars. This is especially true when it comes to corporate interests who target candidates with support in the hopes of getting their support on key legislation -- the quid pro quo.

Proving that our elected leaders pay back big donors with votes that benefit them is hard to prove, but sometimes it's not too hard to connect the dots. An excellent case in point this week comes from Sen. John Rockefeller IV (D-WV); the New York Times laid out the story nicely:

Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.

The surge in contributions came from a Who’s Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.

The money came primarily from a fund-raiser that Verizon held for Mr. Rockefeller in March in New York and another that AT&T sponsored for him in May in San Antonio.

Mr. Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged last week as the most important supporter of immunity in devising a compromise plan with Senate Republicans and the Bush administration.

Sure, "netroots" donors and other new sources of political cash have changed the equation. But in the end, they're no match for corporate money in an economy where the richest 1% of the population holds over 1/3 of the country's wealth. And most importantly, they definitely can't match the political influence of targeted special interest donations, which clearly still have the power to move mountains in Washington.

(Chart courtesy of "Threat Level"/Wired)

Labels: money and politics

NOTE: Sue Sturgis and R. Neal on vacation this week, light blogging.

Barack Obama -- stalled in the primary polls -- is getting some Old Time Religion, enlisting a slate of gospel acts to join him on a South Carolina barnstorming tour, the NY Times reported last week.

So old-timey, in fact, that he's headlining a black preacher infamous for attacking gay people.

Donnie McClurkin -- a 48-year old unmarried gospel singer and minister who supported Bush in 2004 -- will be featured in Obama's "Embrace the Change" tour, which aims to "engage people of faith."

More like "Embrace the Homophobia," according to Keith Boykin, someone who has been following McClurkin for a while. Boykin paints a picture of a man who is using his own "conversion story" -- McClurkin "wrestled" with his own homosexuality for years, which he then "overcame" -- to attack gays:

It began with McClurkin's 2001 book, Eternal Victim/Eternal Victor, where he explained his 20-year experience with homosexuality, which he said started after he was raped by an uncle.

"Love is pulling you one way and lust is pulling you another and your relationship with Jesus is tearing you," McClurkin told the media. He says that God delivered him from homosexuality, and since that time, he has been counseling adolescent boys that homosexuality is merely a lifestyle choice that can be overcome.

After years of avoiding the issue, McClurkin has come out strong as a leader in the "war" against gays. He now describes churches as places infested with gay predators, and says gay people have a "lying problem."

Commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson says it's time for Obama to ditch McClurkin's too-old-timey message:

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama ripped a page straight from the Bush campaign playbook with his announced upcoming three date barnstorm tour through South Carolina with notorious gay basher, gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. [...]

Obama has hitched his string to McClurkin's high flying gay bash kite in part out of religious belief (he purports to be somewhat of an evangelical), in bigger part because he's falling further and further behind Hillary Clinton with the black vote in South Carolina and everywhere else, and in the biggest part of all because he hopes that what worked for Bush's reelection will work for him. [...]

[Obama has] sold himself as a healer and consensus builder. Legions have bought his pitch, and have shelled out millions to bankroll his campaign. But healing and consensus building does not mean sucking up to someone that publicly boasts that he's in "a war" against gays, and that the aim of his war is to "cure" them. [...]

Obama has spent months telling everyone that he's everything that Bush isn't. He can prove it by saying a resounding no to McClurkin and to gay bashing. He can cancel and repudiate the South Carolina "gospel" tour, and do it now.

Labels: barack obama, Election 2008, gay and lesbian

On Wednesday, we wrote about how the post-Katrina demographic shift will impact Louisiana elections. But a new story at Stateline.org wonders if another wildcard factor will impact the race: football.

Louisiana voters will vote for a new governor this weekend -- and leader Rep. Bobby Jindal (R) is worried a competing LSU game might affect the outcome:

The country could have its first new governor of the 2007 elections this Saturday (Oct. 20) if U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) holds on to his lead and wins a majority of the vote in Louisiana’s gubernatorial primary. But the decision could hinge on a football game.

Only in Louisiana, known for its peculiar election laws and devotion to college football, could a Louisiana State University football once again play a role in deciding the victor in a governor’s race.

Jindal is worried that voters will be so distracted by this Saturday’s LSU-Auburn University football game — held the same day as the primary — that they will forget to vote.

The last time Jindal made a bid for the governor’s mansion in 2003, the LSU Tigers played the Crimson Tide in Alabama on Election Day. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and said, `I was going to vote for you, but I went to the game,’” Jindal told The Associated Press earlier this month.

This weekend is also the start of deer hunting season -- adding to Jindal's fears that he won't get the 50% of the vote he needs to avoid a run-off election next month.

Labels: louisiana, Southern Politics

Readers of Facing South know that the Hurricane Katrina crisis never really ended, and the Gulf Coast is still in dire need of a real recovery. But they can't do it alone -- if the 60,000 people still living in "temporary" FEMA trailers are to get the help they need, we need to make Katrina recovery a national issue.

But how do we take this message to the American public? Derrick Evans, a grassroots activist on the Mississippi coast, had an idea: literally drive it to our doorsteps. Earlier this year, Derrick bought a standard-issue FEMA trailer, and has been driving it around the country so people can see first-hand what Katrina victims have to deal with. Here's how Derrick describes the KatrinaRitaVille Express:

A young coalition of survivors and advocates called the Gulf Coast Peoples Movement for Full and Fair Recovery has launched a nationwide Katrina-Rita-ville Tour, featuring two modified FEMA trailers outfitted to show the American public and federal policy makers what is actually happening throughout their region. “Not only in New Orleans, but across the Gulf Coast, dislocation, privatization and the trashing of our public trust resources are the escalating norm. Our families, communities and environment can’t stand much more,” says Evans, whose nonprofit, Turkey Creek Community Initiatives/Turkey Creekkeeper, has sued both the City of Gulfport and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on environmental matters since Hurricane Katrina.

Want to bring the KatrinaRitaVille Express to your community? Contact Derrick and Turkey Creek Community Initiatives here.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this week to discuss the controversial case of the Jena Six, in which trumped up charges were brought against six black teens following a series of racially charged incidents in a small Louisiana town sparked by the hanging of nooses at a public high school.

Among those who testified was Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. His testimony challenged the notion promoted by some that the way toward justice in Jena would be for hate crime charges to be brought against the white students behind the noose incident:

"The criminal law is a blunt instrument, and too many of our young people are already being pushed out of our schools and into our prisons. A far wiser course than increasing federal prosecutions would be increasing federal investment in services designed to soothe the racial and ethnic tensions simmering in our nation's schools and to respond promptly when hate crimes occur."

Instead, Cohen said, Congress should consider increasing the size of the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, a program that was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ease conflicts arising from differences in race and national origin but that has shrunk even while the nation has grown more diverse.

Cohen also called on Congress to hold hearings about the collection of hate crime data, and he urged lawmakers to support the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2007, which would require the collection of data about hate crimes committed by and against juveniles.

The Center's Tolerance.org program has produced a guide for educators called "Six Lessons from Jena" that aims to prevent such incidents from happening again. The guide is available online here.

Labels: jena six

Why is Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast recovery an important national issue? There are lots of reasons, but a big one is political.

The failing Gulf Coast recovery, which has kept at least a third of those displaced by Katrina from coming home, has dramatically changed the political map of Louisiana and the South.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune today offers one of the first assessments of the partisan impact of slow-moving Gulf recovery:

A few trends seem certain ... The number of Democrats, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the electorate, is continuing to fall. Registered Democrats make up 53 percent of the voting rolls, down from 57 percent in 2003.

Nearly 79,000 fewer Democrats are registered now than four years ago, while Republicans have gained more than 50,000.

Complicating the picture is that fact that many who haven't returned are still on the voter rolls, meaning the partisan impact will be even larger after the lists are cleaned next year:

A federally regulated cycle of voter roll scrubbing will occur late next year that likely will clear a large number of registrants off the state's list. In 2010 a new census will be conducted, resulting in fresh population figures in 2011 and potentially new political districting in 2012.

In the short term, this will definitely help candidates like GOP gubernatorial hopeful Bobby Jindal and other Louisiana Republicans, who are celebrating their party's good fortunes even as the party struggles nationally.

But there is another trend on the horizon: like other states, Louisiana has been witnessing a steady rise in Latino voters. This was only accelerated by the influx of a new immigrant workforce for post-Katrina rebuilding. The number of Louisiana voters who identify their race as "other" has grown by 15,000 over the last four years, which Louisiana's secretary of state says are largely Latino voters.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, louisiana, Southern Politics

The Senate Subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health is holding an oversight hearing this morning about efforts to protect public health under Superfund, a federal program that manages the nation's most toxic waste sites.

As Sen. Barbara Boxer noted in her opening remarks, one in four U.S. residents lives within four miles of a Superfund site, including 10 million children. Yet cleanup efforts have slowed to a virtual crawl. Indeed, a year-long investigation conducted by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity released earlier this year found that:

* Cleanup work was started at about 145 sites in the past six years under President Bush, while the startup rate was nearly three times higher during the last six years of Bill Clinton's presidency;

* The number of sites declared "construction complete" in the six Clinton years averaged 79, while that average dropped to 42 a year under the Bush administration; and

* The EPA's 2007 target for construction completions was 40 sites, but it has been scaled back to 24. The 2008 target is 30 sites, according to the EPA's 2008 budget request.

CPI also found that the number of cleanups being carried out by the polluters responsible for the waste has dropped by more than 50 percent between the two administrations. Companies conducted cleanup activities at 473 sites from 1995 to 2000, but at only but at only 210 sites from 2001 to 2006. Cost recoveries from responsible companies have also dropped markedly, from about $320 million each year in the late 1990s to about $60 million in the past two fiscal years.

As a result, there 517 sites across the country where human exposure and/or contaminated groundwater migration are not under control. The region we consider the South -- Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia -- is home to 102 of these uncontrolled sites.

EPA officials have blamed the slowdown in cleanups on the difficult nature of the remaining sites. But another reason the program is in such dire straits is due to Congress's 1995 decision to allow a Superfund tax levied on polluters such as the petroleum and chemical industries to expire. President Bush has refused to reinstate the tax, depleting the program's trust fund and forcing taxpayers to bear cleanup costs. This fall marks four years since the trust fund went broke.

Among those testifying at today's hearing is Lenny Siegel of the California-based Center for Public Environmental Oversight, who is asking Congress to take action to replenish the fund. Legislation has been submitted in Congress to renew the polluter pays tax; for more on those bills, click here and here.


NOTE: For some interesting reading on Superfund, check out Superfund365, a project led by Brooke Singer, a New York-based professor of new media who's spending a year traveling around the country documenting some of the most hazardous Superfund sites. For a list of the sites she and her team plan to write about, click here. To read about my own childhood encounters with hazardous waste as documented by the project, click here.

Labels: environment, regulatory oversight

About two weeks ago, Steven Thomma wrote an excellent piece for McClatchy Newspapers outlining the decline of the religious right's political influence.

After three decades of striking fear into the hearts of progressives everywhere -- and serving as the driving force behind the South's shift to the GOP since the 1960s -- Thomma found may signs of the religious right's decline. Some excerpts:

Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendance in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence through the 1980s and 1990s are being replaced by a new generation that's less interested in their agenda and their hold on politics and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt. [...]

In church, the generation of politically active, high profile evangelists such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell is giving way to new preachers such as Joel Osteen and Rick Warren, who shun partisan politics or are willing to embrace Democrats. [...]

In elections, the organizations that once gave political focus to Christian conservatives and turned their passions into votes have splintered or disappeared.

The biggest of them all, the Christian Coalition, is a shell of its former self. Its budget has crashed from a 1996 peak of $26 million to about $1 million. Its new director wants to expand to issues besides abortion and marriage. And state chapters in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio have parted ways with the group they think is now too liberal.

The fall of political religious conservatism looms large as the 2008 primaries approach, and will only be exacerbated by the candidates leading the GOP pack.

For example, yesterday Robert Taylor -- dean of South Carolina's evangelical Bob Jones University -- announced his support for Mitt Romney. It was a stunning endorsement, given that in 2000, Bob Jones' then-president denounced Mormonism -- Romney's faith -- and Catholicism as "cults which call themselves Christian."

It's not that religious conservatives will likely swing Democratic in 2008. But they are no longer the highly-energized voting block they once were. In addition to the reasons above, Thomma also finds they're also losing their identity on the issues:

In the country, many people have shifted priorities. Even among white evangelical Christians, Iraq and other domestic issues are now more important than social issues, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

One reason could be that religious conservatives are victims of their own success. They managed to win a ban on late-term abortions and see it upheld by the Supreme Court. They helped drive dozens of states to adopt constitutional amendments or laws against gay marriage.

Labels: Election 2008, religious right

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco traveled to Capitol Hill yesterday to ask federal lawmakers to provide the additional $3 billion to $4 billion needed to fully fund the states' Road Home program, which assists residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Traveling with the governor were New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, city recovery director Ed Blakely, Louisiana Recovery Authority Chair Dr. Norman C. Francis, LRA Board Member David Voelker, and LRA Executive Director Andy Kopplin. The group will continue meeting today with members of Congress to make the case for additional funds.

"The Road Home is the largest housing program ever launched in response to a major disaster, and the size and scope of its need has simply surpassed early federal estimates," Blanco said in a statement. "The program is projected to serve nearly 50,000 more homeowners than originally anticipated by FEMA, and is on track to run out of funding in January, less than 100 days from today. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their colleagues have been generous in their commitment to fund this program. Now we urge all Members of Congress to help finish the job."

According to the latest published statistics, the program has received more than 184,000 applications, and more than 60,000 homeowners have received awards totaling over $3.75 billion. At the current rate of pay-outs and the current average award per grant of about $66,000 per homeowner, the Road Home program is projected to run out of money by year's end, according to Blanco.

Louisiana has asked Congress for $3.3 billion in additional funding and for a legislative directive to FEMA that will allow the state to utilize $1.17 billion of Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds that have been allocated but tangled in red tape for more than a year. At the same time, the Louisiana legislature has also committed $1 billion to fill the gap.

According to an analysis by ICF International, the Virginia-based contractor running the program (which itself has come under fire for its performance), three main factors have contributed to the deficit:

* An increase in eligible homeowners. About 50,000 additional homeowners with major or severe damage are expected to be found eligible, far more than FEMA initially thought.

* Actual damages are higher than FEMA estimated. The level of damage per house and construction costs have been significantly greater than anticipated.

* Lower than expected insurance payments to homeowners. On average, insurance payments are covering a smaller portion of damages than initially expected.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, louisiana, politics

A Louisiana State University program that provides mental health services for children traumatized by Hurricane Katrina faces cutbacks as a result of the Bush administration's rejection of a $400,000 grant application, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The move comes despite a congressional directive that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should give "high priority" to grants for programs that treat hurricane victims.

The Louisiana Rural Trauma Services Center, which operates out of the LSU Health Sciences Center, initially received a four-year federal grant in 2003. The program sends mental health professionals into schools, courts and Head Start programs in Orleans, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes to evaluate children for signs of mental illness and provide treatment, and it also trains school workers to recognize symptoms of mental illness.

The center's fiscal year 2006 grant application specified that the money was being used to serve "children and adolescents exposed to traumatic events in Louisiana."

Program Co-Director Dr. Howard Osofsky learned the application had been rejected last last month, according to the Times-Picayune. Without those funds, the program will have to be cut back "considerably," he said -- and that could be devastating:

"The children are the most traumatized in the United States," said Howard Osofsky, chairman of the psychiatry department at LSU Health Sciences Center. "If we are going to prevent the scars and give them the best chance to succeed, they really need these services."

Studies have found that children whose lives were directly affected by Hurricane Katrina suffered lingering psychological stress. A survey of displaced children in the New Orleans area conducted by the LSU Health Sciences Center found that 54 percent of the children surveyed experienced symptoms that put them in need of further mental health care, while screening data collected from storm-displaced children returning to New Orleans and St. Bernard parishes indicated that over 31 percent reported clinically significant symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told the paper that when the fiscal 2008 HHS spending bill comes to the Senate floor this week as expected, she plans to offer an amendment that would direct $400,000 in grant money to the jeopardized program.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, health care, louisiana

The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to former Vice President and U.S. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Said Gore in a statement:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis -- a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Gore becomes the fourth Southerner to win the prestigious award, joining former President and human rights advocate Jimmy Carter (2002), civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), and fellow Tennessean Cordell Hull (1945), an ex-Secretary of State who played a key role in the formation of the United Nations.

Though some cynics have questioned Gore's Southern credentials because he was born in Washington, D.C., Gore has undeniably deep roots in the South as the son of two native Tennesseans -- Al Gore Sr., who also served as a U.S. representative and senator from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. Growing up, Gore Jr. split his time between Washington and the family farm in rural Carthage, Tenn., where he developed a love of nature that would shape his environmentalism. After graduating from Harvard and serving with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, he returned home to Tennessee where he attended Divinity School at Vanderbilt University and later worked as a reporter for The Tennessean, where his investigation into corruption on Nashville's city council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two members.

Gore went on to attend law school at Vanderbilt but quit in 1976 to run successfully for a seat in the U.S. Congress as a Democrat. He was re-elected three times before running successfully for the U.S. Senate in 1984. He served there until 1993, when he became Vice President under President Bill Clinton.

In Washington, Gore was a leader on environmental issues, holding hearings on toxic waste in Toone, Tenn. in the late 1970s and on global warming in the 1980s, long before those became issues of broad public concern. In the early 1990s he wrote Earth in the Balance, an ecological treatise that became the first New York Times bestseller written by a sitting senator since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. On Earth Day 1994, Gore launched the GLOBE program, which used the then-nascent Internet to increase students' environmental awareness. He also pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, though he was rebuffed by the Senate.

After serving two terms as Vice President, Gore ran for president in 2000 with Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate. Though he and Lieberman won the popular contest by more than a half-million votes, they lost the electoral college vote in a controversial election that was eventually decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Bush v. Gore.

Following that loss, Gore focused his energy traveling the world and speaking on climate change. His popular talks became the subject of the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which earned glowing reviews from climate scientists as well as Academy Awards for best documentary and best song.

Gore currently chairs Generation Investment Management, a firm he founded in 2004 that focuses on companies making a proactive effort to address climate change and other pressing global issues. Gore also takes personal steps to protect the climate: He and his family drive hybrid vehicles, and he also buys carbon offsets when traveling by plane.

There has been chatter that Gore's Nobel win might inspire him to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But at least one reporter who has followed him closely over the past year says he so strongly doubts that will happen that, if it does, "I'll eat my copy of An Inconvenient Truth. (The paperback, not the DVD.)"

We would note that Gore's Nobel is not a milestone only for the South but also for the environmental movement. The Peace Prize was awarded to an environmental leader for the first time in 2004, when Wangari Maathai of Kenya was honored for founding the Green Belt Movement, which has helped women plant over 30 million trees in Africa. Environmental leaders are hailing Gore's win for helping focus attention on the connection between human needs, security and the environment.

"Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to peace and security the world has ever known," said Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin. "This prize marks another turning point for the climate issue -- the question now is whether law makers around the world will rise to the challenge of implementing new treaties and laws that reduce the world's dangerous addiction to fossil fuels."

(Photo by Scanpix/Tom Hevezi courtesy of the Nobel Foundation)

Labels: environment, global warming, southern history, Tennessee

Steven Greenhouse, a long-time reporter for The New York Times covering labor issues (remember when all papers had labor reporters?), has an excellent piece today on the impact of immigration raids in the South.

He looks at Smithfield Foods' giant hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., where more than 1,100 Latino workers have fled the plant since officials arrested 21 workers and held others at gunpoint nearly a year ago.

The result? According to Greenhouse, Smithfield is having to look harder to find new workers, shuttling in fresh employees who live over an hour away:

Around 1 p.m. each day, C. J. Bailey, a Smithfield worker, picks up Ms. Worley and 10 other employees in his big white van. They arrive at the plant around 2:15, and he drops them back home after 1 a.m.

Several of the newly hired workers in the van — they pay $40 a week for the ride — said they were thinking of quitting, unhappy about having to commute so far and work so hard. At the plant, where the pay averages around $12 an hour, many spend hour after hour slitting hogs’ throats, hacking at shoulders and carving ribs and loins. At the end of their shifts, many workers complain that their muscles are sore and their minds are numb.

Smithfield's workers -- whether black or Latino, documented or not -- pay the highest price for these grueling and dangerous jobs; many quickly leave even though they have few economic options (Smithfield admits that 60% of workers quit within 90 days).

Immigration raids do nothing to improve this situation for workers. In reality, the costly raids end up separating families and tearing up communities -- all for a short-term solution to the long-term problem of immigration reform.

But Greenhouse's piece also points out that the raids aren't good for business, either. This echoes research done in the 1990s in Nebraska, where a state task force found that raids were decimating the meatpacking industry while doing little to address immigration problems.

High-profile ICE raids and deporting Latino workers may be politically expedient and good media candy for the Lou Dobbs anti-immigrant set, but it doesn't do much to help workers, and business doesn't like it, either. It's a costly approach that's not good for taxpayers, either.

So who really benefits?

Labels: immigration, Work and Community

A U.S.-based legal team today filed a civil lawsuit [PDF] against Blackwater USA, the North Carolina-based private security contractor whose employees were involved in a Sept. 16 Baghdad shooting incident that at last count left 17 Iraqis civilians dead and wounded 22. The team includes the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the law firms of Burke O'Neil and Akeel & Valentine.

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on behalf of an injured survivor, Talib Mutlaq Deewan, and the families of three men -- Himoud Saed Atban, Usama Fadhil Abbass, and Oday Ismail Ibraheem -- who were killed in the incident. The suit claims that Blackwater violated U.S. law and "created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company's financial interests at the expense of innocent human life."

The complaint alleges that Blackwater violated the federal Alien Tort Statute in committing extrajudicial killing and war crimes, and that the company should be liable for claims of assault and battery; wrongful death; intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress; and negligent hiring, training and supervision. It also names as defendants Blackwater Security Consulting LLC, a holding company called The Prince Group LLC, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

"This senseless slaughter was only the latest incident in a lengthy pattern of egregious misconduct by Blackwater in Iraq," said plaintiffs' attorney Susan L. Burke. "At the moment of this incident, the Blackwater personnel responsible for the shooting were not protecting State Department officials. We allege that Blackwater personnel were not provoked, and that they had no legitimate reason to fire on civilians. We look forward to forcing Blackwater and Mr. Prince to tell the world under oath why this attack happened, particularly since a Blackwater guard tried to stop his colleagues from indiscriminately firing."

Founded in 1997 by Prince, a former Navy SEAL and son of an auto-parts billionaire, Blackwater has close ties to the Bush administration. For example, its vice chairman is J. Cofer Black, who served as the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism from December 2002 to November 2004, resigning from that post shortly after President George W. Bush was elected to a second term, and its former outside counsel is Fred Fielding, who now serves as White House counsel. Besides working in Iraq, Blackwater also had a $73 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security to guard federal workers on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

Labels: blackwater, iraq

Danielle Super, a student at Smyrna High in suburban Nashville, Tenn., is suing her school district for denying her the right to wear to class a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Free the Jena Six," the Associated Press reports.

Assistant Principal Jolene Watson reportedly told Super she couldn't wear the shirt -- which refers to a controversial case involving six black teens arrested on trumped up charges following a series of racially charged incidents in a small Louisiana town -- because it could "cause a problem."

James Evans, a spokesperson for Rutherford County Schools, told the AP that district officials "don’t believe the school is in the wrong, and we are confident this will play out in our favor."

According to the district's dress code, students are prohibited from wearing in school anything associated with criminal gangs or bearing slogans "that are about or suggestive of drugs, alcohol, sex, obscenities or prove to be a disturbing influence."

Super is seeking an injunction allowing her to wear the shirt as well as unspecified damages.

Labels: civil rights, jena six, schools, Tennessee

Yesterday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a record $4.6 billion settlement with American Electric Power in a lawsuit brought by eight northeastern states and a number of environmental advocacy groups. The Ohio-based company also agreed to install pollution controls in order to reduce air pollution coming from its facilities, including coal-burning plants in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.

"Less air pollution from power plants means fewer cases of asthma and other respiratory illnesses," said Granta Nakayama, assistant administrator for EPA’s enforcement and compliance assurance program.

It's true that the settlement reached with the company will allow millions of people to breathe cleaner air. But it also raises a question: What will the company do with the additional coal combustion waste collected after installing more effective emissions controls?

The EPA currently does not regulate coal combustion waste as hazardous waste, and this lack of regulation is creating serious environmental problems. Across the South and the nation, coal combustion waste landfills and surface impoundments have released to the environmental toxic chemicals and metals including arsenic, lead and cadmium at levels dangerous to human health. At least 23 states including Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina have poisoned surface or groundwater supplies from the improper disposal of coal ash. As we reported last month, the agency recently released a draft risk assessment on coal combustion waste disposal that found unlined coal ash waste ponds pose a cancer risk 900 times above what the government considers acceptable.

Environmental advocacy groups have been urging EPA to begin regulating coal combustion waste as hazardous waste, and the agency is now accepting public comments on the matter. The AEP settlement and the additional waste the company's cleanup efforts will create highlight the importance of addressing this environmental hazard soon.

Labels: coal, environment, public health, regulatory oversight

This year, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart ranked #1 in Fortune's list of the 500 biggest corporations in the United States, bringing in $351 billion in annual revenues.

But the retail giant doesn't believe it should have to pay much in the way of property taxes where it locates its stores, according to a new report by Good Jobs First. Their study finds that Wal-Mart "systematically seeks to minimize its payment of taxes that support public schools and other vital government services" by challenging property tax assessments.

"Wal-Mart ... drains vitally needed funds from communities by regularly challenging the valuation put on its properties by public officials," said Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First and principal author of the report. "When the company succeeds in one of these challenges, it diminishes the funds available to pay for education, police and fire protection, and other essential services provided by local governments."

Based on a large national sample of Wal-Mart stores and a review of all of its distribution centers open as of the beginning of 2005, Good Jobs First concludes that Wal-Mart has filed assessment challenges at more than one-third of its facilities around the country. At many facilities there have been appeals in multiple years. Overall, Good Jobs First estimates that the company has filed more than 2,100 property tax challenges nationwide.

The findings challenge Wal-Mart's attempts to portray itself as a "good neighbor" whose stores will boost the tax base of an area. As Good Jobs First notes, Wal-Mart's challenges often mean an area's tax revenue will go down, starving needed public services.

The challenges to income tax are on top of the over $1 billion in tax breaks and economic development incentives Wal-Mart takes in from state and local governments. To find out how many deals Wal-Mart has received in your state, visit here.

Labels: wal-mart, Work and Community

Nuclear Watch South and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League have filed a legal challenge that aims to halt construction of a plutonium fuel factory at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The move comes after the groups uncovered information that the DOE plans major modifications to the proposed factory, where the agency wants to use surplus weapons-grade plutonium to manufacture mixed-oxide or "MOX" plutonium fuel for use in nuclear reactors.

On Oct. 5, the groups submitted a citizen's petition [PDF] to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The challenge's expert witness is Dr. Edwin Lyman with the Union of Concerned Scientists, who points out that the DOE can't make MOX from the highly impure plutonium waste it's shipping to South Carolina without making major modifications to the plant. The groups charge that those modifications will result in significant environmental impacts that require analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act.

"Once again DOE's ready-shoot-aim approach to plutonium disposition has shot its own program in the foot," says Nuclear Watch South Coordinator Glenn Carroll. "It's clear that the plutonium fuel factory has to be redesigned yet again; construction and licensing have to be halted. We should quit wasting time and tax money on the losing MOX proposition. Instead we can deal with both our nuclear waste and weapons problems by immobilizing plutonium."

Duke Energy wants to use the MOX fuel from the Savannah site in its McGuire and Catawba nuclear stations near Charlotte, N.C. Lyman says a safer alternative for disposing of surplus weapons-grade plutonium would be to immobilize the material in glass.

Labels: nuclear power

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers insider alleges that the 40 pumps protecting New Orleans from catastrophic flooding still suffer from serious flaws that put the city's residents at risk -- and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has found her concerns so compelling that it's ordered the U.S. Department of Defense to respond to the charges.

Maria Garzino, a veteran Corps engineer based in Los Angeles who was the team leader for pump installation in New Orleans, has filed for federal whistleblower status with the OSC, which protects federal employees from reprisals for reporting wrongdoing. In a Sept. 21 letter [PDF] to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates released by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, OSC's Scott J. Bloch wrote:

The information provided demonstrates that in an effort to meet time-sensitive deadlines, and to avoid government imposed damages and instead earn financial incentives, the contractor, Moving [Water] Industries (MWI), along with USACE, are likely responsible for installing defective pumping equipment that has been largely untested. Therefore, pursuant to my responsibilities as Special Counsel, I am referring to you a whistleblower disclosure that employees at the Department of the Army, USACE, Mississippi Valley Division, New Orleans District, New Orleans, Louisiana, are responsible for a violation of a law, rule, or regulation, gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, and a substantial and specific danger to public safety.

Garzino was the same whistleblower behind earlier disclosures that MWI's pumping equipment was flawed and malfunctioned during tests conducted by the company. She blamed the problems on modifications that were not authorized under the $26.6 million contract and were improperly accepted by USACE. The pumps have been installed at the 17th Street, Orleans Avenue and London Avenue canals.

In her initial disclosure last year, Garzino outlined extensive problems with the pumps that included catastrophic failures of the assemblies and hydraulic fluid lines overheating and bursting. While the Corps acknowledged the problems, it also said they had been fixed. But Garzino disputes that. She says the Corps review team that investigated arrived on a Friday night and provided a report by the following night, failing to take adequate time to address complex technical issues or even interview her about her complaint. The team issued its report in June 2007.

This past summer, the Corps oversaw the installation of new non-hydraulic pumps at the canals by two other contractors, Patterson and Fairbanks Morse. Those pumps were supposed to complement MWI's hydraulic pumps, but Garzino says their installation was based on the incorrect assumption that the MWI pumps were operational. However, a commander of the Corps' hurricane protection office in New Orleans told the Times-Picayune that he is "confident" the pumps "will operate as they were designed to operate."

Under the law, Gates has 60 days to respond to Garzino's charges. Writes OSC's Bloch of the allegations:

If true, given the hardships suffered by the people of New Orleans, and the billions of tax payer dollars spent on post-Katrina recovery, the United States Government can ill afford to take unnecessary risks with public safety due to faulty pumping equipment and lack of proper government oversight of the MWI contract; a situation that indeed raises serious issues of public safety and government oversight.

The Government Accountability Office is also conducting a second investigation into the pumps at the request of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). An earlier GAO probe into questions surrounding the awarding of the MWI contract found no wrongdoing.

As we've reported previously, Florida-based MWI has close ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party. During the George H.W. Bush presidency in the late 1980s and early 1990s, MWI owner J. David Eller partnered with presidential scion (and later Florida governor) Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps overseas.

Eller has been under Department of Justice Investigation for shady pump deals in Nigeria for several years now, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing to donate generously to Republican political causes. According to the Center for Responsive Politics' campaign contribution database, he has contributed a total of more than $140,000 to GOP politicians and PACs since 1993 -- including $1,000 to Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in April of this year and another $500 to U.S. Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) in June.

Labels: contracting, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, new orleans

A report released this week by the Government Accountability Office is critical of the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency administered an alternative housing program for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

The methodology that FEMA used for the Alternative Housing Pilot Program deviated from most competitive grant programs run by federal agencies, and as a result unfairly funneled $275 million of the available $388 million to Mississippi. By taking a different approach, the GAO said, FEMA could have directed more than $140 million to three separate housing projects in Louisiana rather than the $74.5 million directed to one project that's still not underway.

The findings confirm charges made by Louisiana officials -- and that my colleague Chris Kromm and I reported on earlier this year for Salon.com -- that the politicization of the post-Katrina aid allocation process resulted in Republican-controlled Mississippi receiving disproportionately more money for the damage it suffered than its Democrat-led neighbor. As we reported then and as others have also noted, the irony is that Mississippi's recovery has been moving at a painfully slow pace for the neediest residents despite the fact that the federal government has assisted the state so generously.

This is what Adam Sharp, a spokesperson for the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), told the New Orleans Times-Picayune about GAO's findings:

"We saw something that walked like a duck, talked like a duck and now other branches of government are telling us it's a duck," Sharp said.

The GAO report comes on the heels of another study (PDF) released last month that also documents disparities in post-Katrina aid for Mississippi and Louisiana.

That study -- part of the GulfGov series from the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government -- examined funds allocated through FEMA's Public Assistance program as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program. It found that the amount of federal aid provided to Mississippi and Louisiana through those programs has not been proportional to the amount of damage each state suffered, and that what it called the "sluggishness" of aid distribution continues to be the primary concern of state and local officials.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, louisiana, mississippi, politics