Thursday, December 21, 2006

Airplanes That Land Safely, Update

Once before I quoted Haley Barbour's theory as to why Mississippi doesn't get more national media attention:
I‘ll tell you why we were forgotten. The news media doesn‘t like to cover airplanes that land safely. You know, they want to go where somebody is complaining and whining and saying, Give me something. People down here were saying, Let me help my neighbor.

He also said:
Our people didn‘t look for somebody to blame. They weren‘t whining. Mississippi‘s not into victimhood. We got hit by the worst natural disaster of our history and got knocked flat. But our people that day got up, they hitched up their britches and went to work. They went to work helping themselves and helping their neighbors. And that‘s the way it‘s been every since, and that spirit is all the difference in the world.

They might not be whining and saying give me something in Mississippi, but self-reliant Mississippi is still getting its federal aid:
La. to receive $75M for alternate housing, Miss. $280 million

Louisiana will receive $75 million in new federal money to pay for modular quick-assemble homes, known as "Katrina cottages," to replace the cramped FEMA trailers where many residents have lived since Hurricane Katrina, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said Thursday.

But that was far less than Louisiana had sought, and state officials said they were disappointed that Louisiana will get less than one-fifth of the $400 million pool available for the pilot program funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Mississippi is expected to receive more than $280 million.

The divvying up of alternative housing money restarted complaints that Mississippi has been treated better than Louisiana in the allocation of federal hurricane recovery cash. Landrieu said FEMA was being unfair because the 2005 hurricanes destroyed more than 205,000 homes in Louisiana compared to 61,000 homes in Mississippi.

For the record, I don't resent Mississippi getting the help. I do resent Haley Barbour and Joe Scarborough acting like Mississippi is getting short-changed or that its people are more self-reliant than the people of Louisiana. South Louisiana that is.

In an unrelated matter, I can't believe that nobody's pointed out one obvious thing about last Sunday's game. It was the first home game where I haven't heard the Ramones. There's gotta be a connection.

Is it just my imagination, or is there something odd about the answer to the first question in this week's New Orleans Know-It-All? I'm not just talking about the excessive verbiage, a terse answer would be unusual. I wrote in a question for that column once but received no response. I posted the same question on my blog a few years later.

Back to this week's question, it hard to believe that the Causeway's fifty years old. That makes it twice as old as Gambit Weekly. Though Gambit is only twenty-five years old, New Orleans certainly didn't suffer from a lack of alternative weeklies in the sixties and seventies. Many of us fondly recall both the Vieux Carre Carre Courier and the New Orleans Figaro.

The Courier is perhaps best remembered...

It's too late in the evening to audition for a job at Gambit. I'll ask some older relatives what Causeway Boulevard was called before the Causeway was built, if there was a street there at all. I only vaguely recall the Courier BTW, I certainly don't recall the opening of the Causeway -- I'm only older than one of its spans.

Comments:
The Ramones song "Loudmouth" comes to mind when I think of Haley Barbour. The song lyrics in their entirety:

"You're loudmouth baby
You better shut up
I'm gonna beat you up
'Cause you're a loudmouth babe"

And there sure might be a connection between the lack of Ramones and our miserable showing against the Skins. I say: If we are gonna play arena rock standards at the Dome, we must insist that the playlist include the Ramones.
 
It was the first game where I didn't hear the beginning of "Blitzkrieg Bop." Good song for Haley, "Loudmouth", that is.
 
beat on the brat for all home games
 
Politicians will be Politicians, they will all bend the media to suit their purposes.

Haley Barber is good at it.

Kathy isn't.
 
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