Barbour's post-Katrina "miracle"
Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis shine a hard light on Katrina recovery in Mississippi:
Today, Hancock County and the rest of coastal Mississippi are 21 months into a recovery that has garnered Gov. Haley Barbour lavish praise. Governing magazine named Barbour its 2006 Public Official of the Year largely due to his supposed post-Katrina leadership and savvy, including his skill in convincing federal lawmakers to channel billions of relief dollars to the Magnolia State. As Billy Hewes III, a Republican official from Gulfport, said: "He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11." Outsiders might be surprised to learn then, that despite the plaudits, and despite the fact that Barbour's GOP connections seem to have won him a disproportionate share of relief money from Washington, post-Katrina recovery in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast is moving as fast as molasses in winter. [Salon]
We learn that almost two years after the storm, residents of Hancock County, still aren't getting their mail because their post office still hasn't been rebuilt. Nor, for that matter, has any other major public building in the county.
Pretty shabby, when you consider how much more generous the Bush administration has been towards Barbour's Republican MS than it has been to Blanco's Democratic LA.
Read Kromm and Sturgis to learn why Barbour is being hailed as reconstruction hero while alligators are still prowling the ruins of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Because he's part of the republican spin machine. One of the originals.
Posted by: mudkitty | May 26, 2007 at 08:15 AM
The hard cold facts are these:
Both states had damage on such massive scales that rebuilding will take an incredibly long time and be excrutiatingly slow because there is a shortage of truly capable and skilled people in the construction trades. You can have all the money in the world to pay him with; but if you can't find a man to do the job, the job will not get done...unless you can learn to do it yourself.
I live in Louisiana and have family in Mississippi. Frankly I'm tired of the whining and bean counting. What is really bothering our politicians is that those damned Mississippi politicians got a bigger "pot-o-cash," to steal from than we did! Unfair1 Unfair!
The lack of ethics and the cosmic amount of waste, fraud, and corruption in Louisiana's public sector (government, public education, etc. )is incredible and commonly acknowleged. The natives themselves jokingly refer to Louisiana as a, "Banana Republic."
If you think Louisiana's Democrat governors have been paragons of virtue, by all means please research the careers of former (and conviced felon) Gov. Edwin Edwards and his cronies. Bush and the Republicans are not even on the same planet with those slicksters.
Posted by: BEC | May 28, 2007 at 02:24 AM