On Friday I quoted at some length from a New Orleans Times-Picayune newsblog item about deaths occurring among people waiting for relief in the St. Bernard-Placquemines Parishes areas south and east of New Orleans. Congressman Charles Melancon, who represents the area, was the paper’s main source for the horrifying reports.Well, today Melancon wants the President of the United States to come see conditions on the ground in his district, in a statement that directly challenges the we-did-the-best-we-could, and it’s-the-state’s-fault spinathon coming out of the administration for the last several days. Here’s the summary from the T-P newsblog:

Today, 3rd District Congressman Charlie Melancon invited President Bush to personally tour the devastated areas outside New Orleans in Southeast Louisiana. President Bush has announced plans to be in Louisiana on Monday.Congressman Melancon’s comments on the invitation follow:”People in Plaquemines Parish, St. Bernard Parish and other affected area in the Southeast Louisiana’s 3rd District need to see that the federal government has not forgotten them.” “Today, I invited President Bush to join me on the ground in these parishes as soon as possible – ideally tomorrow – as we work to rescue survivors and get supplies where they are desperately needed.””The fact is that 124 hours after Katrina hit, Plaquemines Parish still had received little or no contact from FEMA. Other parishes in southeast Louisiana went days without hearing from federal officials – that’s unacceptable.””Thankfully, Louisiana State Senator Walter Boasso and local officials, along with the Louisiana National Guard, Louisiana State Police, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries and other entities were able to reach folks on the ground. Together, we worked to put support efforts in motion and coordinate efforts to convey specific needs in the area to those who could take action. While slowly improving, conditions in parishes throughout Southeast Louisiana are beyond dire. Hundreds died among the thousands of residents who were stranded at Camp Katrina on Chalmette Landing. Areas nearby are equally grim. We need all the federal support we can get, and the only way to understand that is to witness it first hand.”

Melancon’s certainly right that it’s the lack of a prompt federal response that’s truly “unacceptable,” and probably right in assuming that you apparently have to be involved in a presidential photo op to get an appropriate degree of federal help even now.

Finally, finally, finally, there are some signs of federal action to relieve the primordial crisis in New Orleans, timed no doubt to coincide with the president’s disaster tour, but welcome nonetheless.There’s not much question the relief is late in coming, but the more important question now is this: is it enough?Here’s an editorial from the Times-Picayune posted this afternoon:

On the elevated portion of Interstate 10 near Orleans Avenue, a group of displaced people pushed a wheelchair carrying a dead woman. She wore pink pajama bottoms — and a white kitchen garbage bag on her head. People wandered around expressway on-ramps hoping for a ride to… anywhere. Outside the Superdome, refugees were crowded onto a concrete walkway. The situation inside the Dome was beyond hellish.Hurricane Katrina has created a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions. And if the main strategy for addressing that crisis is to evacuate the east bank of New Orleans, then local, state and federal officials need to move much faster to get people out. On streets across the city, people are in agony. And lives are in danger, because of looters, because of dwindling medical supplies, because of conditions that would strain even the healthiest of people.Security had improved in much of the city late Thursday and Friday. It was a relief to see so many uniformed men bearing machine guns patrolling expressways and major intersections. But in some parts of the city — particularly those slivers of Uptown New Orleans that suffered relatively little flood damage — the presence of law enforcement and relief agencies seemed minimal at best. In those same areas, some residents were still under the dangerous illusion that they could wait out Katrina’s aftermath at home, just as they waited out the hurricane itself. Others understood the dangers but had no way to travel and little hope of getting authorities’ attention. On Constantinople street near Prytania, a severely sunburned, diabetic 80-year-old had run out of insulin, and the woman who had given her shelter could get no assistance. On Belfast Street near Fontainebleau, two 93-year-olds needed to evacuate but could not. As more and more people clear out of the city indefinitely, those who remain are at even greater risk. People across the east bank need help in getting out, and lives will be lost if they do not get it.

In other words, photo-op relief efforts concentrated on the most visible problems are nice, but something more systematic needs to happen right away.And that brings me to the difficult but necessary subject of the politics of this. A lot of Republicans have claimed that Democrats are “politicizing” Katrina by raising questions about disaster preparations and relief efforts, especially in terms of FEMA’s languid pace in taking charge, the background of FEMA mission-drift and funding cuts, and the tardy White House focus on the crisis.But it’s now pretty clear the White House is politicizing the situation even more starkly and much more divisively. The underlying theme of the president’s tour of the region today is that things are going very well in places like Alabama and Mississippi with the right (literally and figuratively) state and local leadership. Meanwhile, the storyline continues, Bush has to go down to New Orleans (with the wrong, i.e., Democratic leadership) himself to get things turned around.This is apparently what Bush meant this morning before his departure from Washington when he said the relief effort wasn’t “acceptable.” He wasn’t talking about FEMA’s universally derided initial response; in Mobile, he told FEMA Director Michael Brown (or “Brownie,” as he called him) he was doing a great job. No, Bush’s stern disapproval was aimed at New Orleans and Baton Rouge.Watch the conservative blogs and news outlets; we’re about to see a big effort to scapegoat Kathleen Blanco, perhaps Ray Nagin, and even the stranded low-income people of New Orleans themselves, for the disaster that’s happened over the last few days; there have already been hints of this in so many places that I can’t begin to cite or link to them. Maybe that’s the price the victims of this nightmare have to pay for real and adequate federal relief, but it should not and will not go unchallenged.

For all the horror in New Orleans, it’s been clear that Katrina’s impact was actually more intense in suburban and rural areas south and east of the city, where the populations have largely been cut off from contact with the outside world, including the news media. Here’s an especially harrowing report from St. Bernard Parish, published tonight in the Times-Picayune newsblog. Note the time lines in this report; how much of this tragedy occurred well after Katrina left the area; and the implied reproach to non-existent federal help.

About 100 people have died at the Chalmette Slip after being pulled off their rooftops, waiting to be ferried up the river to the West Bank and bused out of the flood ravaged area, U.S. Rep. Charles Melancon, D-Napoleonville, said Thursday.About 1,500 people were at the slip on Thursday afternoon, where critical supplies like food and water are scarce, he said. Melancon expressed serious frustration with the slow pace of getting these items to the people waiting to finish their journey to safety. Many of those at the slip were evacuated from a shelter set up at Chalmette High School that suffered massive flooding as the waters rose during Hurricane Katrina. Melancon said people are being plucked out of their water-surrounded houses, but the effort to get them out of Chalmette and provide them with sufficient sustenance is the problem.While he did not directly criticize the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Melancon said they are ultimately responsible for making sure that people are taken care of. “That is where the buck stops,” said Melancon at a briefing at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness.People at the slip indicated that 100 people had died since they arrived, although Melancon said he did not know how they perished. Melancon said he saw 300 people sent on a tug-boat pulled barge to the Algiers landing, but there weren’t any buses once they landed.

We’re just now beginning to come to grips with the region-wide death toll, and how much of it might have been avoided with a massive and immediate federal response.

I’m not sure how calmly I can talk about today’s developments in New Orleans. Let’s take a quick inventory. You had:* Thousands of hungry, thirsty, sick and desperate people crowding evacuation points amidst dead bodies and ongoing violence.* Stretched-to-the-max and sometimes beseiged police officers having to siphon gasoline from parked cars to patrol the streets, and after stopping looters in stores, expropriating goods to keep themselves hydrated, fed and clothed.* More failed efforts to fix the breaches in the levee system, even as new flooding was temporarily halted by an equalization of water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain (in other words, maximum flooding).* A second straight televised speech by the President of the United States that exhibited an eery disconnection from events on the ground, and perhaps a panicked realization that this is quickly becoming a potential political disaster for the administration.* A public comment by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representativescasually suggesting that New Orleans might not be worth rebuilding.Eventually federal help will arrive; Guard units did start showing up this evening to restore order, and evacuations from the Convention Center and the Superdome resumed.But the suffering endured by the most vulnerable people in New Orleans in the interim cannot be erased, and the damage to the city–physically, economically, and morally–during the last few days of chaos will make the task of recovery and reconstruction (assuming Denny Hastert lets it go forward) vastly more extensive, expensive, and potentially futile.This has been another one of those unacknowledged “accountability moments” for the Bush administration. The president is not responsible for Acts of God, but by God, he should be responsible for acts of the federal government when Americans most need it.

Despite the spreading horror in New Orleans (Mayor Ray Nagin said earlier today that the number of deaths in the city had probably already gone into the thousands), there are a few signs of the city’s quirky and indomitable sprit still in view. Check out this item from the Times-Picayune’s invaluable newsblog, posted this afternoon:

In the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral on Royal Street lies an incredible tangle of zig-zagging broken tree trunks and branches, mixed with smashed wrought iron fences. But right in the middle, a statue of Jesus is still standing, unscathed by the storm, save for the left thumb and index finger, which are missing.The missing digits immediately set off speculation of divine intervention.New Orleans has a long history praying to saints for guidance and protection in times of great peril. In fact it was Our Lady of Prompt Succor who was said to be responsible for saving the Ursulines Convent in the French Quarter from a raging fire that consumed the rest of the city centuries ago.Since then, New Orlenians have prayed to the saint for protection from natural disasters. On Saturday, Archbishop Alfred Hughes read a prayer over the radio asking for Our Lady’s intervention to spare the city a direct hit by Hurricane Katrina. Many in the Quarter are now saying it was the hand of Jesus, the missing digits to be precise, that flicked the hurricane east just a little to keep the city from suffering a direct blow. And the search is one for those missing fingers.Shortly after Katrina passed, several men went to Robert Buras, who owns the Royal Street Grocery and told him they know who has the finger. Buras said he’d give them all the water and beer they need if they bring him the finger. They told him they’d find it and asked to be paid upfront. But Buras told them he wouldn’t take it on credit. “I’m going to find Jesus’ finger,” Buras said. ”I’ve got a lead on it.”

The Royal Street Grocery, BTW, has remained open through the whole saga, so far at least, though the owner has to toss goods to purchasers through an upstairs window where’s he’s stored his most valuable wares.Here’s another tale of French Quarter imperturbability from the T-P newsblog:

Johnny White’s Sport Bar on Bourbon Street at Orleans Avenue didn’t close Tuesday night, and had six patrons at 8 a.m. drinking at the bar.“Monday night, they came by after curfew and wanted us to close,” bartender Perry Bailey, 60, said of officers then patrolling the French Quarter. But all we did was shut the doors and stayed open.”

Unfortunately, most of this anarchic good cheer will soon have to come to an end with the Governor’s mandatory evacuation order. Current estimates are that the city may be shut down for three to four months. New Orleans truly needs the Hand of God to provide a future that’s anything like its past.

I should be getting some real work done, but I’m finding it hard to stop thinking about what’s happening in my favorite city right now, and trying to follow developments through the news media.Unfortunately, media coverage is at best spotty. To some extent that’s understandable; after all, there are very few “on the scene” reporters, and information on key issues like progress towards plugging the gaps in the levee system is hard to come by. Still, Atrios has a very good point about the inability or disinclination of the media to provide basic explanations of the horrific images they keep showing:

It’s a shame that from what I’ve seen in the media they don’t seem to understand the importance of maps. Disaster footage is flashed randomly on the screen, devoid of any genuine geographic context. Maps appropriately scaled for the location of the footage would provide actual useful information. Otherwise, it’s mostly just disaster porn.

If you know a little bit about the geography of New Orelans and its many wonderful neighborhoods, these random images are maddening, since a flooded house in Bywater pretty much looks like a flooded house in the Irish Channel. Most viewers probably don’t care, and in the end, it doesn’t matter what I know when, but some effort to match images with words if not maps would be helpful. Even nightmares need scripts.

I profoundly wish my last post had been accurate about New Orleans’ close brush with catastrophe. As I’m sure you know, today has brought forth scenes of ever-growing horror in the Crescent City, as a large breach in the levees protecting the city from a swollen Lake Pontchartrain developed, pouring water into the Central Business District at a rate that is overwhelming the city’s pumping system. Mayor Ray Nagin estimated earlier today that 80 percent of the city is already flooded, and it’s not clear how efforts to plug the levee gap are progressing.This levee breach is exactly the “doomsday” scenario that so many in New Orleans have long feared. The only good news is that it happened after about four out of every five residents were evacuated. But that still leaves well over a hundred thousand people there as waters rise and food and water supplies begin to run out–more than 10,000 of them, including patients from flooded hospitals, taking shelter in the Superdome, fast becoming a sweltering nightmare. Yesterday’s widespread looting led to a declaration of martial law in three parishes in the area, though I would guess today’s flooding has put the kibosh on all but the hardiest thieves.Even if the levee breach is plugged, and the waters subside without major loss of life, New Orleans’ will be in trouble for some time, given the huge health hazards associated with contaminated water, toxic wastes and disease. Having once worked on a flood recovery project in Georgia (of a much smaller dimension), I can tell you that floods are the nastiest of natural disasters, and that public health problems really emerge when the big water’s all gone.All we can do now is watch, pray, and send what we can to the Red Cross.When it’s all over, we should all renew our faith in this wonderful city, even if it’s just by heading down there and helping revive its heavily tourism-based economy. If nothing else, perhaps those who just think of New Orleans as the French Quarter and jazz clubs will understand this is a living, breathing city with problems as immense as its charm.UPDATE, late Tuesday night: another levee breach has developed; efforts to close the first one have so far failed; and in general, the situation in New Orleans continues to deteriorate. The best single source of first-hand reports from the city is the blog-style coverage being offered by the Times-Picayune, which has provided sporadic but vivid stories of the disaster and its effects on people and their neighborhoods.

I’ve just returned tonight from a quick weekend trip to Prince Edward Island, a delightfully remote corner of Canada, but all the talk while I was there was of the USA.Like Americans, Canadians have been riveted by the incredible destructive power of Hurricane Katrina, and particularly the predictions that New Orleans might finally be wiped out by catastrophic flooding. (Since New Orleans is my favorite place, I was frantic yesterday and today to get the news, and only after sitting through a long CNN feature about the impact on oil refinery capacity at the Charlottetown airport did it become apparent that massive loss of human life did not occur in the Crescent City, though Biloxi was less fortunate).But the news item that competed with Katrina across much of Canada involved America in a far less sympathetic story. Canadians are absolutely livid about a cavalier rejection by the Bush administration of a NAFTA-sponsored arbitration decision declaring U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber illegal under the agreement. In fact, under heavy public pressure, Prime Minister Paul Martin is reportedly thinking about calling a special session of Parliament to take retaliatory measures against U.S. exports.This hasn’t exactly been big news in the States, but Canada is America’s biggest trading partner, and the longstanding U.S.-Canada partnership on trade policy is the linchpin not only of NAFTA, but of hemispheric free trade efforts generally. And the long-simmering dispute over Canadian lumber is now leading a variety of voices north of the border to call for a reconsideration of that partnership, and of NAFTA itself.It didn’t help that Bush’s ambassador in Ottawa, David Wilkins, responded to outrage over the U.S. decision to ignore the lumber ruling by lecturing Canadians to eschew “emotional tirades.” Bush himself, of course, is vastly less popular in Canada than his predecessor, and Wilkins’ comments reinforced every available perception about the administration’s general disdain for the opinions of long-time allies.This incident also shines a bright light on the Bush administration’s generally bumbling and inconsistent stewardship of trade policy, which follows few clear principles other than solicitude for domestic business interests with political clout.In any event, it was fascinating to spend a few days among our neighbors whose love-hate relationship with the U.S. was illustrated by their worries over a hot wind from the south roaring into the Gulf Coast, and their willingness to launch a cold wind from the north towards Washington.

If you want to know why the ever-burgeoning Jack Abramoff network of meta-scandals really matters to people other than those he defrauded, check out Susan Schmidt’s front-page article in the Sunday Washington Post.The headline focuses on shadowy dealings between Abramoff and a Deputy Secretary of the Interior who appears to have intervened in two separate cases to put roadblocks in front of Indian casino plans that threatened the financial interest of Abramoff clients–the clients he was at the same time massively ripping off. Turns out Abramoff was also trying to hire the guy for his lobbying firm.But the subplot that strikes me as equally significant is the role played in one of these cases, involving a Michigan tribe, by a woman named Italia Federici, who headed an organization called Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy. Here’s what Scmidt says about this group:

Federici’s group, CREA, was founded in the 1990s by conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and Gale Norton, now secretary of the interior. It has received financial backing from chemical and mining interests, leading some environmentalists to brand it a front for industrial polluters. Abramoff directed tribes he represented to donate $225,000 to CREA from 2001 to 2003.

Federici jumped into the Michigan case to demand an environmental impact statement for the proposed casino that Abramoff wanted to stop, after getting an “urgent email” from Casino Jack himself. And the ploy worked for quite a while, slowing the project down until this year.So you’ve got bogus environmentalists who’ve benefitted from Indian Casino money (not to mention Abramoff’s brother-in-arms Grover Norquist) asking for a bogus environmental impact statement from a department headed by one of its founders–a statement insisted upon by a deputy from that department whom Abramoff was trying to lure into a incredibly lucrative lobbying gig. Federal investigators are now looking into the whole mess, but whether or not indictments even come down, this case shows how incredibly incestuous a network Republicans set up linking high–level policymakers, far-right ideologues, and shakedown artists and influence-peddlers like Jack Abramoff. This billowing ring of smoke suggests a ring of fire that could burn down the whole conservative ascendancy if Abramoff’s hijinks were the rule rather than the exception in the ethical standards of the GOP. And so far, we aren’t seeing much evidence that anybody in authority in Washington thought Abramoff was anything other than an absolute prince.

Over at TAPPED yesterday, my man Matt Yglesias took the occasion of Gary Hart’s op-ed on Iraq in the Washington Post to dismiss the idea that the McGovern campaign (which Hart ran), and its antiwar message, was the pivotal moment in the demise of the New Deal Coalition. No, sez Matt:

The truth, which lots of left-of-center people of various stripes seem to have a hard time dealing with, is that the old, dominant Democratic Party was dependent on white supremacist voters for its majority. Take a look at the 1960 electoral map and ask yourself how far John Kennedy would have gotten without this bloc. Nowadays, naturally, the Democrats can’t just bring that coalition back, and the party’s troubles in the South are rather different, but it was Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights, not the McGovern campaign, that killed the Democratic Party.

Well, that’s maybe half-right. Matt forgets that (1) McGovern managed to lose 38 of 39 states outside the Old Confederacy, including many where the 1968 Wallace vote was negligible; and (2) Jimmy Carter won in 1976 on a pro-Civil Rights platform with near-universal African-American support, along with most of the old Wallace voters, who must have been motivated by something other than racism to return to the Democratic Party. Sure, Watergate, and in the case of the South, regional pride enormously helped Carter. But let’s don’t forget that Carter, despite his quasi-pacifist image today, also ran a campaign that emphasized his tough-on-defense views and background as an Annapolis grad and nuclear sub officer. Carter supported Scoop Jackson in 1972, and never really came out against the Vietnam War. That legacy, along with his open religiosity, helped him among many Democrats who defected in 1972, and actually hurt him in some upscale WASPy areas where he ran behind McGovern. No–repeat, no–I am not arguing for the point of view that anti-Vietnam War views generally, or George McGovern specifically, “killed” the old Democratic majority. But nor was it simply the Civil Rights Act, either. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s was the acceleration of long trend beginning in the New Deal of the realignment of the two major parties as ideological rather than regional and ethnic-group coalitions. This involved a wide range of issues, international and domestic, and it happened in fits and starts, not really culminating in rigorously left-of-center and right-of-center parties until 1980 at the earliest, and 1994 at the latest.Ideological realignment helped and hurt both parties with particular constituencies. The Democratic civil rights commitment obviously alienated many white southerners and quite a few ethnic white Catholics elsewhere, but also created a remarkably durable bond with minority voters, along with a significant share of previously Republican white liberals. Similarly, the late-Cold War realignment of “hawks” towards the GOP and “doves” towards Democrats drove voters in both directions, too. But overall, realignment benefitted Republicans more, due to the enduring numerical advantage of conservatives over liberals. In our party, we are all still arguing over how to deal with ideological polarization, but as Matt suggests, it’s important to understand how it actually developed.