Image: Inside the Astrodome (Jacob Appelbaum)
Snip from a NYT piece — the GOP sees opportunities:
Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation.
"There are about a thousand churches right here in Houston, and a lot of them are helping people with housing, but FEMA says they can't reimburse faith-based organizations," Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Oh, wait, is this the same Tom DeLay who asked some evacuee children who'd lost their homes if staying in a shelter was "kinda fun?"
While on the tour with top administration officials from Washington, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, DeLay stopped to chat with three young boys resting on cots. The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked, "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"
They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.
(…) "You are becoming famous all over this country and even the world," he said.
Snip from NYT story about one of countless mothers scouring the internet, missing persons lists, and shelters for her missing child:
"I keep telling myself it's going to be all right," said Ms. Boyd, breathing deeply to control frayed nerves and turning her face away from her room, where 11 people are sharing two beds. "I can't start crying because of the other children. I can't break down. I'm all they've got right now. But I just want to know, where's my baby?"
Snip from NYT story about the rush to rebuild:
From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic rebuilding effort ever undertaken.
Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.
Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.
In this video clip, a Dallas Morning News photojournalist reports that authorities are now shooting homeless, ownerless dogs that have survived in New Orleans. Link
On Thursday, Bush signed a proclamation suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act which protected wage-earners who work for federal contractors like Halliburton and The Shaw Group — companies likely to receive the bulk of those federal billions earmarked for reconstruction. Link (Thanks, M Sinclair Stevens)
Farhad Manjoo from Salon says,
This might be the most informative, compelling, amazing thing I've seen so far about the storm. A photographer/hotel worker/Nicaraguan immigrant who lives in the city took about 200 pictures from the time before the storm struck, during — including the eerie, beautiful calm when the eye passed through — and after. There are some fantastic pictures of what the wind did to the city before the flooding came through, all the surreal damage (a line of cars whose back windows only were blown out), buildings completely destroyed. And then you see how things got progressively worse, how the devastation of wind was compounded by water, how the looting began, how the whole thing was destroyed. It takes a while to get through, but it's well, well worth it.
Snip from a report by KPRC-TV in Houston: "A plan is in place to make sure the city's largest shelters at Reliant Park, known as Reliant City, are closed in eight days, which is one day before the Houston Texans' first home game at the complex." Link (Thanks, Bill)
And Boing Boing reader Gabriel says,
"Cool" people can be truely tastless sometimes, as you can see here with Imitation of Christ's take on the sidewalk memorial to Vera, an elderly woman who died on the street in New Orleans from the effects of Katrina. Presumably she was someone's mother, friend, sister, daughter. Link
(Thanks, Ned Sublette)
