10729: FEMA Approved—And Tasty Too.

Finding opportunities in natural disasters…?

8170: Maybe Kanye West Was Right.

Former President George W. Bush has been hawking his new book, and his media appearances have mostly focused on the tough decisions he made during 9/11 and the war on terror. The majority of attention surrounding Hurricane Katrina, however, centered on the criticism Bush received from Kanye West—which led to an apology from the recording artist. Yet when you really consider the response to the disaster, with bodies floating in the streets for days and people still awaiting aid as revealed by this story from The New York Times, well, maybe this is one instance when West’s crazy talk wasn’t so crazy after all.

Katrina Victims in Mississippi Get More Aid

By Campbell Robertson

GULFPORT, Miss. — Federal and state officials and housing advocates announced on Monday the creation of a $133 million program to address housing problems that remain for poor Mississippi residents five years after Hurricane Katrina.

The announcement comes after months of negotiations by officials from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Mississippi governor’s office and housing advocates on the coast, and could bring to a close a long-running dispute about the state’s spending of federal grant money after the hurricane.

“We’re pretty happy about it,” said Reilly Morse, a senior lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit group. But, Mr. Morse added, it did not come easy.

Housing advocates have long criticized the state for not spending enough of its $5.5 billion in federal grant money on low-income residents, but that criticism reached a fever pitch in 2007 when Mississippi announced it was redirecting $600 million of federal money to refurbish and expand the shipping port here.

Mr. Morse and a group of public-interest lawyers filed a suit against HUD, charging that the diversion was an unlawful use of federal disaster money, especially with serious housing problems remaining. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, but the lawyers appealed the decision.

Mississippi had set up a variety of programs to address housing problems after the storm, and state officials argued that these were adequate. But in a series of meetings starting in April, housing advocates and HUD officials began to convince state officials that there were many Mississippians, especially poor ones, who had been left out.

“The assumption was that all of these unique programs were taking care of everything, including the hard cases,” said Gerald Blessey, a former mayor of Biloxi who was appointed by Gov. Haley Barbour to oversee post-hurricane housing issues. “When we started to look under the hood, we found that there was a number of hard cases that were not being taken care of.”

Over the summer, Mr. Morse worked with state officials to design a program around a list of 4,400 such hard cases in Mississippi. People in need of help had to fall below a certain income level and the problem had to be directly caused by the hurricane. In all the cases, some kind of adjustment needed to be made to the rules governing hurricane assistance.

Taking a random sample of these cases, estimators visited houses to assess damage. Based on those figures, they calculated that $93 million would be needed to close the financing gaps in the case list.

“Once the governor was convinced of that point by research and analysis, he was willing to make that move,” said Fred Tombar, a senior HUD official who oversees Gulf Coast recovery.

Mr. Morse and HUD officials also insisted that there were an unknown number of Mississippians who had been overlooked or had not applied for assistance, many of whom lived inland but nonetheless suffered severe damage from the storm. The governor agreed to set up an aggressive outreach program to find people who might qualify for assistance, and to set aside $40 million in a reserve fund for these cases.

All of the money in the new program comes from existing Hurricane Katrina assistance programs; any money left over in the reserve fund will join the nearly $600 million now dedicated to port expansion.

Some of the recipients will be poor residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by hurricane winds, but who did not have homeowner’s insurance. This marks a departure from the assistance plan that Mr. Barbour put before Congress in 2005, which excluded people who did not have homeowners’ insurance. (The federal grants in this program were mainly directed to people whose homes were swamped by the storm surge, but who lived outside the federally designated flood plain and thus were not required to carry federal flood insurance.)

In a news conference on Monday, Mr. Barbour said this new program came about largely because HUD was willing to show flexibility on that point.

“This administration made the decision that they felt like people who were damaged by wind, even though we had made that agreement with Congress, should be covered if they were poor,” he said. “That is why there’s a change.”

Mr. Morse, however, said that the state had been reluctant to show flexibility and that it was the lawsuit that, to a large degree, had moved the discussions forward.

The appeal of the lawsuit was dropped when officials agreed to the creation of the new program at the end of October. Arguments were to have started last Friday in federal appeals court.

8158: Here Today Show, Gone Tomorrow.

From The New York Post…

Kanye West media trainer quits after disastrous ‘Today’ interview

Kanye West’s media trainer quit after just three days of working with the hotheaded rapper following his disastrous interview on the “Today” show this week.

West was invited onto the program to respond to comments ex-President George W. Bush had made to Matt Lauer about West calling him a racist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The rapper’s camp on Monday hired Susie Arons, an executive vice president at Rubenstein Communications, for help handling the interview. Collectively, they agreed West should cancel the interview, and it was called off Monday night.

But on Tuesday morning, Arons was notified that West was waiting at NBC’s Rockefeller Center studio for the Lauer chat, and she rushed over at West’s request.

According to a show insider, “West shut himself in a dressing room with Susie, and could be heard rehearsing possible questions and answers. But the interview began, and it was as though he had crammed for a test and then his mind went blank.”

West grew frustrated when a clip of him interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards was shown and said, “Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you’re going to run the thing in the middle while I’m talking?”

When Lauer and West took a break, West “huddled again with the media trainer because he still hadn’t found a way to express himself,” said our source. The disastrous interview aired Thursday, and Arons resigned from working with him yesterday morning.

Meanwhile, West, who attacked Lauer on Twitter after the interview, claiming he “forced his answers,” canceled his upcoming concert on “Today,” which had been scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving.

A rep for West called our story “malicious and clearly manufactured.” Reps for “Today” and Rubenstein had no comment.

7910: Black Churches Fighting The Flood.

From The New York Times…

In New Orleans, Black Churches Face a Long, Slow Return

By Samuel G. Freedman

NEW ORLEANS — Five minutes past 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday this month, which is to say five minutes past the time the worship service was supposed to start, Shantell Henley pushed open the front door of her pastor’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She entered the living room to find a gospel song playing on the stereo, two ceiling fans stirring the sticky air and 25 folding chairs for the congregants waiting empty.

“Am I late?” she asked the pastor, the Rev. Charles W. Duplessis.

“No,” he replied, smiling. “We’re Baptists.”

His joke, though, could not dispel the truth. The problem at Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church had nothing to do with any Baptist indifference to punctuality and everything to do with Hurricane Katrina, even as its fifth anniversary on Aug. 29 approached.

Having lost his house and his church to the broken levees in the Lower Ninth, Mr. Duplessis had managed by grit and will and fathomless faith to reopen in early 2009, using his rebuilt home to replace the sanctuary he couldn’t afford to replace, the sanctuary that had stood in some grim coincidence on Flood Street.

He installed an electric piano and a computer with a projector. He collected several dozen copies of the Baptist Hymnal. He put out weekly editions of the church bulletin; he put up a lawn sign declaring, “Our Church Is Back!”

What was not back was the bulk of his congregation. Of the 120 members before Hurricane Katrina, only 40 had returned. The rest were still strewn across the map — Alabama, California, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas. And Mr. Duplessis could not in-gather the exiles, as the Bible commands, because most of the Lower Ninth remained a ruin of buckled roads, cracked foundations and swamp grass six feet high.

“It’s church — it’s serving the Lord,” Mr. Duplessis, 59, said in an interview in his house. “If I linger on what I don’t have, I can’t see what I do have.” He paused. “But I know this isn’t where God wants us to be.”

In his plight and his persistence, Mr. Duplessis represents the experience of churches, ministers and congregations throughout the Lower Ninth. While the fifth anniversary of Katrina offers much reason to celebrate New Orleans’s revival, this neighborhood that once thrived with a black working-class of homeowners and churchgoers continues to stand as a desolated disgrace.

As every level of government has failed to restore more than a fraction of former residents to habitable homes, the black churches have tried desperately to return through a combination of sacrifice, insurance and charity. And anyone with an even cursory understanding of African-American life knows that without vibrant churches, the Lower Ninth can never truly rise again.

Where about 75 churches operated before Katrina, barely a dozen have been able to reopen, according to the Rev. Willie Calhoun, a local minister who has closely tracked the process. Even among those churches that have rebuilt, what were once congregations of 150 to 200 now number in the dozens. The monthly intake of tithes and offerings, previously $20,000 or more, has fallen to the low thousands.

“You got those that are still struggling to come back,” said Mr. Calhoun, the assistant pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist Church, “and you got those that came back but the congregations are so small they’re struggling to keep their doors open. And without the churches, you got no community.”

East Jerusalem, for example, has only $55,000 of the $150,000 it needs to replace the church building that was destroyed when the floodwaters propelled a house into it. In an especially perverse touch, which several other congregations have faced, New Orleans officials are requiring the church to buy land for off-street parking, as if the pressing problem of the Lower Ninth is traffic gridlock.

“I remember that film — ‘build it and they will come,’” said the Rev. Hall Lanis Kelly Jr., 62, the pastor of East Jerusalem. “I believe in that. The Bible tells us, you plant the seed, God will do the watering. But we sure thought that in two, three years, we’d be back.”

The Rev. Michael Zacharie did get back, rebuilding Beulah Land Baptist Church for nearly $400,000 with a combination of savings, insurance money and a grant from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization. On the Sunday in early 2009 when he rededicated the trim red-brick sanctuary, Mr. Zacharie preached to only 50 of the 400 pre-Katrina members. Etched in the church cornerstone were the names of four who had died in the flood.

“We were determined to come back so we could be the light shining in the darkness,” Mr. Zacharie, 54, said in a phone interview. “We want to be there for anyone that needs comfort, counseling, compassion.”

Such balm in Gilead has long been the mission of the Lower Ninth’s black churches. When Mr. Duplessis first inspected the wreckage of Mount Nebo’s building — pews tossed aside like toothpicks, chunks gone from the roof, the rear wall knocked loose — he also learned that several boats had been tied to the steeple. With 20 feet of water around, the second floor of Mount Nebo was, in more ways than one, a sanctuary.

And so he has persevered in his living room. On this particular Sunday, the faithful finally did arrive, a dozen by 10:15 a.m., nearly 25 by 10:35. Mr. Duplessis preached from the Book of Joshua, all about determination. He conducted a baby blessing. And he joined his people in singing lyrics that were almost unbearably freighted with double meaning:

“Storm clouds may rise
Strong winds may blow
But I’ll tell the world wherever I go
That I have found the Savior and he’s sweet, I know.”

Essay 4660

From The Chicago Tribune…

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A FALSE TALE OF 2 DISASTERS

Race as a burning issue

In media coverage of wildfires and Katrina, bias glows under surface

By Anthony Stanford

The wildfires that raged through Southern California, taking lives, burning homes and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, were this country’s most devastating natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina, another reminder that we mortals are at nature’s mercy. The victims, like those of Katrina, will suffer the firestorm’s effects for years.

But based on the media coverage of the two tragedies, the similarities end there.

Following their biased and racially divisive reporting on Katrina, the national media took it upon themselves to soothe America's collective psyche.

Perhaps some reporting was a good-faith effort to illustrate improvements in preparedness, coordination and leadership since Katrina. But amid the constant emphasis on order and humanity’s softer side, it’s hard not to sense that race and class biases played a role in the media’s portrayal.

The implication was that the socioeconomic standing of the California wildfire victims made the disaster response and evacuation effort easier. But that ignores how different the two disasters were.

Victims of the fires were distinguished in every possible way from Katrina’s victims. The media enthusiastically reported that unprecedented cooperation and coordination existed at every level of California’s disaster effort. Information about problems typically associated with a large-scale evacuation, such as food and water shortages, transportation headaches and unruly evacuees, was noticeably scant.

Some media outlets made direct comparisons with Katrina regarding crime. Besides reporting that an arsonist may have started some fires and a few non-specific mentions of “spotty looting,” the media rarely mentioned the ugly side of human nature.

Whereas media coverage of Katrina shocked America’s heartland with its exhaustive examination of human desperation, network news stations led their wildfires coverage with images of President Bush, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and federal and local officials working in concert to save American lives and property. Everyone on the Terminator’s team was in lock step. There were no media reports of defectors or inept bureaucrats, no accounts of finger-pointing for bungled tasks.

If Katrina coverage was defined by the almost constant harping on the negative, which presented an unreal portrait, the California coverage was marked by the almost complete absence of anything negative. That, too, presented an unreal portrait.

San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium would come to represent everything the New Orleans Superdome had not, ignoring the fact that, unlike the Superdome, Qualcomm had been prepared for the evacuees and staffed by trained professionals.

In television interviews, evacuees described the stadium as a sanctuary. Disaster victims came off like actors in a vignette, expressing appreciation for all that had been done for them. Broadcast after broadcast showed evacuees in an almost festive mood, with an abundance of food and water. There was no need for a lock-and-load order at Qualcomm Stadium.

Even the problem that received such intense media attention during the Gulf Coast crisis was easily resolved. “What to do with the pets?” Well, it turns out that in sunny Southern California, there is a home for every pet.

California’s convicts also got in on the Golden State’s Good Neighbor Fest when their help was requested to battle the inferno. This is in sharp contrast with Gulf Coast inmates, who were described as law enforcement’s top concern.

Night after night during Katrina, outraged viewers watched in horror as the networks aired lurid reports, true or not, of criminals roaming the landscape raping and pillaging in the storm’s aftermath. Compare this with one San Diego news report that described the convicts this way: “They may have stolen cars, used drugs or forged checks, but when California is burning, they fight fires.”

Airing side-by-side images of Katrina victims and those in California sent warped messages about then and now, right and wrong, order and chaos. And add to that the language used.

When Katrina’s victims fled the storm’s rage, the media described them as refugees. Two years later, surreal images of Californians motoring to refuge did not prompt negative labeling: The people were instead, rightly, referred to as disaster victims.

Instead of using the recent successes in California to illustrate improvements in governmental response and coordination, Bush administration officials got in on the spin, reaching back to criticize Louisiana’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

To be fair, New Orleans and Louisiana officials faced much greater challenges. And when they held news conferences, they had to think on their feet while sometimes standing in several feet of water.

Two years after the disaster, the temptation to point fingers remains hard to resist. But even harder for administration officials, it seems, is keeping the promises it made to America’s Gulf Coast victims.

Those who suffered at the hands of Katrina were done a disservice by the media coverage of the storm and the governmental response to it. Why they paid such a price, and continue to pay such a high price, is a question even more troubling given the events in California.

[Anthony Stanford is a Chicago-area writer and contributor to Chicago Public Radio.]