Today the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, and HUD, Shaun Donovan, visited New Orleans to get an update on our recovery from the hurricanes of the last 4 years. At the same time, Brad Pitt was in Washington, DC meeting with Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn to discuss his rebuilding efforts in the 9th Ward.
The president has already signed a couple of executive orders extending our recovery benefits in Louisiana... and has just named a new, well-respected director of FEMA, Craig Fugate. Additionally, Barack Obama recently met with the King of Zulu, Charles Hamilton, in Washington DC in order to receive his hand-painted coconut from this year's Mardi Gras parade dedicated to our new president.
I am well pleased to see our region, though greatly ignored during the campaign, take a bit of the spotlight these days.
Keep up the good trend, President Obama!
Lynda Woolard
Change Corps of New Orleans
www.changecorpsnola.org
Words of Wisdom from the highway scribe
*the highway scribe is a blogger... please note, this post was not written by Lynda.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Why is the winter of our winning becoming the winter of our discontent?The media narrative has President Obama denied bipartisan support and schooled in the harsh realities of Washington politics, failing his core constituencies and settling for a plan that is not "stimulative" enough (which "spellcheck" agrees is not a word)."New York Times" columnist Paul Krugman says "Mr. Obama's victory feels more than a bit like defeat."Except that it's a victory.Joan Walsh at "Salon" says Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) "humiliated" the President by accepting and then rejecting his offer to head the Department of Commerce.Except that he'll go back to being one of a minority in the Senate and the President will still be the President with large majorities in both houses."The compromise stimulus is probably better than nothing," she writes. "With its expansion of food stamps and unemployment benefits, its tax rebates for low-income workers, aid to states and cities and billions for infrastructure projects." Sounds good right?"BUT," Walsh continues, "it won't be as effective as a bigger spending bill would have been, and let's hope Obama doesn't come to regret how much he gave Republicans to get so little."and later:"He better have learned that Washington bipartisanship is dead."It has been dead and not fixing it on the first go-round is hardly a failure. Lacking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama got the support of three senators who do not occupy red meat conservative seats. And they delivered him a stimulus package.Glenn Greenwald, also of "Salon," accuses liberal groups of precipitating this non-debacle by, "subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician."That leading politician, of course, being the guy we all broke our asses and wallets to get elected: Barack Obama, the guy who renovated the Democratic Party and won states south and west long-treasured by rank-and-filers."During the 2008 election," he noted, "Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas."That's because his Ideas where their/our ideas.Krugman is a brilliant, Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Walsh a darling and charming soldier of progressive forces, and Greenwald a hard-boiled walking left-litmus test who keeps his eye on the issue rather than the personality.But they are not helping things.Each, as a loyal member of the anointed commentariat, is allowing the mass media's narrative focus on stimulus to block out their own sun and bum the rest of us out.Day in day out, the Obama administration is doing what progressives, liberals, leftists, or whatever flag you fly under, had prayed for, but feared never would happen.Every place in government, in ways big and small, whether it's admitting the Earth is getting warmer, cancelling energy industry fire sales offshore and on treasured Western lands, undoing a conservative Supreme Court's ruling by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Law, forestalling foreclosures, or appointing a pro-union Latina to the Labor Department, we see change we dared not dream of in the darkest days of the Bush era.But romps in the House of Representatives are tainted by the fact Obama "failed to garner a single vote," from the GOP, when the failure, of course, is their own.Victories in the Senate are deemed "razor-thin" when 61-37 is something of a trouncing. Or should the scribe remind you of how votes went, say, three years ago under guys with names like Delay, Frist, and Bush?It's razor-thin because the Republican filibuster is an unchallenged daily blessing to a sorely challenged minority, when it should be subject to national derision.The way the Senate operates now, all you have to do is inform the leadership of your plan to filibuster and the altered, more difficult, voting math kicks-in.highwayscribery's suggestion is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) drop the courtesy and force Republicans to sustain their filibuster for real.Reid should obligate them to wear catheters so they can pee while reading from newspapers, and do midnight relays to fresh senators making a spectacle of themselves while delaying the nation's business.(Just a thought).If the Republicans' desire is that they should glue themselves to one another while walking over a cliff, than liberals should be glad of it.They are not insulting Obama or the Democrats. Rather they are flipping a middle-finger at the American people, who are suffering and currently of a unified mind regarding the guy and party they want running things.Those senators and representatives of the GOP, in herding together like hunted buffaloes (which they are), will have a hard time separating themselves out should the public render a negative verdict on their obstinate groupthink, which is very likely.Paul Krugman is much smarter than the highway scribe, who agrees with him and would like to see more money spent on good things for a beleaguered people.But there are doubts and they are legitimate.The package is enormous and backed by the questionable force of an already overheated U.S. Mint. As most Americans are now painfully aware, spending with one hand while borrowing with the other usually triggers a law of diminishing returns.There needs to be a balance and to the extent the opposition party used a scalpel to trim things and orient some of the package toward their own constituents, the system is working the way it was designed to.The stimulus bill represents the largest nonmilitary expenditure on public since the Great Depression and deals a telling blow to Republican dreams of burying forever the New Deal and the idea of government activism.No wonder they are of one mind. What's perplexing, and the reason for this post, is that our joy doesn't match their despair.The president compromised and got nothing for it.But he remembers -- where Walsh, Krugman, and Greenwald don't -- that the idea is to look beyond the other party to the people they represent...and govern for the entire country.We just got through with a guy who governed for one half of the populace simply because he had the votes.His gang's gone. Obama would like a more enduring coalition like the one that lasts for some 40 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled it.You win big by being big, not petty.This stimulus debate, which has consumed our media's narrow bandwith of attention, at the expense of many other issues, is naught but an opening night performance.As the day-in-day-out business of legislating the country's future unfolds, a filibuster will not serve at every turn nor will its giddy impact on a dwindling Republican base resonate quite so strongly as in the first round.Because the reality will set in on both sides of this national debate.
On the Small Change page of our Change Corps of New Orleans website you will find a new idea every month of how you can make a positive impact on our city.
http://www.changecorpsnola.org/small_change
Following are the entries for the first two months. Please feel free to send us your ideas!
What can I do right now?
FEBRUARY 2009
Throw Me Something, Mister... it's Mardi Gras in New Orleans! Catch all the beads that you can... but wait! Don't throw them away or sit them street-side hoping someone will come along and use them for something. The Green Project will recycle your Mardi Gras beads! Why not organize your office, your restaurant, your class, your dorm, your neighborhood and be the one who collects all those unwanted beads at the end of the season? Then take them down to the Green Project at 2831 Marais Street, New Orleans 70117. For directions, call (504) 945-0240. For more info on the Green Project, visit http://www.thegreenproject.org/.
JANUARY 2009
Last month, Change Corps joined Save Our Cypress and Levees.org in asking home improvement chains to stop selling cypress mulch.
Our coastal cypress forests that provide natural storm and flood protection for the communities on the Gulf Coast are being clear-cut to produce cypress mulch.
The easy way YOU can help with this effort is simply to not buy cypress mulch when you do your gardening. Sustainable alternatives that work well are pine straw and melaleuca mulch. Easy, right?
Get more information:
http://www.saveourcypress.org/
Hello again Agents of Change!
There is finally some word coming out about the transition of the campaign from Obama For America to Organizing For America. It's been a slightly confusing time without any real input from the genius team at the top... but then, they've had their hands full with a few other minor issues.
We have been organizing as best we can here in New Orleans... we know fairly well how to self-manage at this point! Change Corps of New Orleans has a website (www.changecorpsnola.org) and a Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=48577924364&ref=ts) and has been growing steadily. We have held several community service events and have many more in the works. We had a great Inauguration Night Celebration at Tipitina's and are planning an art show for this spring. We have been slow to get information out to people who have signed up to be members... but we are trying to work out a functioning emailing system that will fix that problem. We have also applied to be an active group on Organizing For America which will give us list-serving capabilites so we can communicate with one another. We are also hoping to link up to all the other Change Corps that are springing up across the state and across the country.
It has always been our intention to be a part of Organizing For America and USA Service. We will blend into/merge with whatever they are planning. Our work in the meantime is merely an attempt to keep as many people informed and active as possible as well as to start to build relationships with non-profits and government groups in our region. We are not looking to reinvent the wheel, but rather to push our volunteers out into the community to work with all the great groups who are already doing good works all around us. We hope to help build a network of caring citizens and promote the volunteering opportunities that await each of us in our own back yards.
Please sign up to join us and stay tuned for the exciting news that will be coming to us from Chicago and DC soon. By all means, check on our website often and keep in the loop as we are planning events weekly. We have the chance now to really make an impact on our world by taking care of our own little corners of the universe. We worked hard to see this dream become a reality. Now let's put the energy into keeping it alive.
Be the Change...
http://www.changecorpsnola.org
I am really dsmayed at the use of the Rev Wright controversy in New Orleans. They ads are even running on CNN! I have seen very few Obama ads on local CNN, and hope there will be more.
The Republicans even withough McCain's blessing are still trying to make people in LA, afraid.
But after Katrina, I don't see how anyone would want another Republican in the White House.
Al Gore was here in a helicopter resucing people- yes he even rescued my Preist- before Bush was anywhere to be found. All the southern states seem to go Republican, and I don't see how that has worked for us.
I noticed the parts of the country with the best jobs and opportunites are all Democratic.
I hope Louisiana surprises the nation and votes OBAMA!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSVG7jRp_g
By Peter Slevin FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. -- Sen. Barack Obama delivered an impassioned defense of the Constitution and the rights of terrorism suspects tonight, striking back at one of the biggest applause lines in Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech to the GOP convention.
It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."
Obama had a few problems with that.
"First of all, you don't even get to read them their rights until you catch 'em," Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. "They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later."
If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government's sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.
"My position has always been clear: If you've got a terrorist, take him out," Obama said. "Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take 'em out."
But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.
Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"
The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, "because we don't always have the right person."
"We don't always catch the right person," he said. "We may think it's Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it's Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president."
Obama turned back to Palin's comment, although he said he was not sure whether Palin or Rudy Giuliani said it.
"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting," Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. "Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years."
He finished with a dismissive comment about his opponents.
"These people."
TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS HISTORIC AND MOST IMPORTANT OF ELECTIONS... PLEASE SEE MY PREVIOUS BLOG "OBAMA VOLUNTEERS - OUR TIME IS NOW!"
