Katrina Coverage

From this:
The struggle was never more evident than last week when Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appeared before congressional committees asking for help to rebuild after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in a series of speeches that each included a defense of the state.
With several members of Congress […]

WASHINGTON — A U.S. senator from Idaho is the latest to slam Louisiana's reputation for political corruption as Congress considers whether to spend billions of dollars on hurricane recovery.
Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican, told his home state constituents that fraud is as much a part of the fabric of Louisiana as it is in Iraq […]

From the AP report "With U.S. Katrina aid, tracing money isn't easy":
Trying to track who is getting what portion of the billions of dollars in federal Hurricane Katrina aid is enough to give any auditor a headache - and is a problem that critics say creates alarming gaps in public oversight.
The database of contracts is […]

There's a roundup of recent events in "History of corruption stirs fears about relief aid", also available here.This was printed in the NYT 10/1 here.

At the very least, they deserve an award for boldness:
Acting New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Thursday that as many as 40 officers from the department's 3rd District, including the commanding captain, are "under scrutiny" for possibly bolting the city in the clutch and heading to Baton Rouge in Cadillacs from a New Orleans […]

The Defense Dep't commissioned an "independent and critical review" of the response to Katrina to be conducted by "Stephen Henthorne, a former professor of the US Army's War College and an adviser to the Pentagon who was a deputy-director in the Louisiana relief efforts."
The Independent UK says it's seen a copy of the report:
It charts […]

[11/14/05 UPDATE: To avoid confusion, see also "NOPD phantom cops: real or fiction?"]
The New Orleans Police Department had 1500 to 1700 officers. Well, not exactly. See, it's like voting, Democratic Party style. In actual fact (article was at allheadlinenews.com/articles/7000310543, but now missing) they might have only had 900 to 1000 actual, living, breathing, uniform-wearing officers. […]

Gregory Rodriguez - a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times - offers "La Nueva Orleans". He discusses how illegal aliens from Mexico will help rebuild New Orleans and then will settle there, displacing the original population of blacks and whites. Obviously, if we were talking about whites displacing blacks and Hispanics that would be […]

I'll leave it to someone else to figure out if anything illegal was done in the following, but it shure sounds suspicious:
Less than a month before Hurricane Katrina wrecked the Orleans Levee Board's finances and left the levees it maintains in shambles, board President Jim Huey requested and got nearly $100,000 in back pay that […]

This post reprints an email from Allan McIsaac, who is apparently an engineer who worked on NO's levee system for the feds:
I tell you truly that in my 40-year career as an engineer, the local authorities in our New Orleans levee project take the prize in the area of callous disregard and their bungling remains […]