New York Times reports that Mark W. Everson, the commissioner of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has ordered his agency to delay collecting back taxes from Hurricane Katrina victims "until after the Nov. 7 elections and the holiday season, saying he did so in part to avoid negative publicity." Or was that done to help the Republicans at the polls? I would say the later.
This file contains 928 pages of e-mail messages to and from former FEMA head Michael Brown. The e-mails cover the period from Aug. 26 to Sept. 8, 2005, just before, during and after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The Center for Public Integrity obtained the documents on May 5, seven months after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. FEMA withheld additional e-mails, citing FOIA exemptions related to personnel, internal decision-making and privacy concerns.
You don’t need no stinking teaching hospital New Orleans. Or at least that seems to be what the Federal government is tell Louisiana officials. LSU has been working for months with the Veteran Administration (VA) on a plan to build adjoining hospitals that would share common features such as a physical plant, food services, and laboratories
Congress has already allocated $600 million for the VA’s share of the project, but LSU has yet to allocate the $650 million for a 350-bed teaching hospital. From the Times-Picayune article.
The Bush administration is questioning the need for a new Louisiana State University teaching hospital to replace Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans, state officials said Thursday, deepening a rift between Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the federal government over the restructuring of the region’s health-care system.
Blanco said questions about the new public hospital are creating a “wedge issue” for members of the Louisiana Health Care Redesign Collaborative who are trying to craft a broader overhaul plan for the health-care delivery and financing system in the New Orleans area.
The message was delivered to LSU officials this week by federal Gulf Coast recovery coordinator Donald Powell, according to university officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. They said any delay could jeopardize a nascent partnership between LSU and the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs to build two new hospitals in downtown.
The New Orleans, and therefore the regions health care system is in shambles. That a year later, when less then half of New Orleans pre-Katrina hospital are open, it is a crime the city can’t get the funding they need to move forward.
Not only do the residents of New Orleans need the help of the Federal government, but so does the coast line. “We had a 50-year projection for wetlands loss as part of the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration plan,” said USGS scientist Jimmy Johnston, referring to the proposed $1.2 billion collection of restoration projects still awaiting congressional approval. “Guess what? That’s outdated. We went through 40 percent of that loss with these storm events.”The story goes on to detail further USGS findings:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped away 217 square miles of Louisiana’s fragile coastline, with each turning huge swaths of land to water overnight, accelerating a process that already posed grave threats to coastal communities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.
Survey scientists compared satellite images taken in 2004 with similar images from October 2005 to match areas that were wetlands, undeveloped dry land and farmland with what looked like open water several weeks after the storms.
One of the reasons, if you are not aware, Katrina caused so much damage, is the traditional or natural coast line that used to protect New Orleans has disappeared. It needs to be rebuilt sooner rather then later and steps need to be put into place to ensure future erosion is at a much slower place.
The President just signed The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act of 2007. The Act was put together in response to FEMA’s disastrous response (or lack thereof) to Katrina—led by the former Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, Michael Brown (a.k.a. Brownie)—Congress included some minimum professional requirements for FEMA’s director. From the bill:
However, President Bush included a "signing statement." In the statement he asserted his constitutional right to continue to install incompetent people. From the statement released by the President:
Section 503(c)(2) vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office. The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(2) in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.
It’s unclear how requiring someone to have basic management experience and a little background in emergency management "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified." Georgetown Law School professor Marty Lederman noted, "It’s hard to imagine a more modest and reasonable congressional response to the Michael Brown fiasco," he said.
According to an article in the Associated Press:
Fewer than 190,000 people are living in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina, according to a door-to-door survey released Thursday. The population of 187,525 is about 41 percent of the 454,000 people estimated to be living in Louisiana before the storm hit Aug. 29, 2005. The survey was conducted for the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals by the Louisiana Public Health Institute, reports The Associated Press. Mayor C. Ray Nagin has cited a slightly higher figure, and last month said he believed the city was on track to reach 300,000 people by year’s end.
These may be the most precise set of numbers we’ve seen, since the survey used a method commonly employed by the Census Bureau.
As I’ve written about before, metal health issues are going to be a problem in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast for years, if not decades to come. So this is a pretty amazing story.
The federal government has funneled more than $50 million to post-Katrina mental health programs in Louisiana, but the money comeswith strings attached. For example, state officials said they’re notallowed to spend it on doctors, reports The Times-Picayune.
Instead, the money is earmarked for traditional social service work, what the field calls “crisis counseling,” which can’t go beyond five meetings and can’t include anything physicians would label treatment. The money flows freely, however, to fund newly minted bureaucratic positions, a telephone hot line, massive literature dumps, therapy sessions featuring muffins and coffee, as well as the recruitment of victims, according to public records and interviews with professionals involved in the project.
What America do we live in? The Federal government gives a state money to help with mental health issues, but they can’t spend it on doctors. Ok, that makes total sense doesn’t it.
