NN New Orleans panel

The big conference that might have been in New Orleans has a panel about New Orleans

John Barry speaks first, author of “Rising Tide”. He is starting off by talking about the geology, the fact that so much of the area at or below sea level. But, there is nothing special about being at sea level. All port cities by default are at sea level. Many parts of the 9th Ward are as high as anywhere in New Orleans.

New Orleans was not always a dangerous place. Why is it now? First, the loss of land… there is no buffer from the sea any more. The land lost was not just marsh or wetlands, some of it was firm. The Mississippi River carries alot of sediment. Something has happened to this sediment. The oil industry has dredged 10,000 miles of passages through the area.

He likes to point out that the entire country benefits from this, but New Orleans is bearing the costs of the disaster.

New Orleans is a port. Because of the river and the port, places like Pittsburgh and Tulsa have access to the ocean.

Back to canals, like MRGO…intracoastal waterway (this was created for national security). With all the removed land back where it was before the canals were dug, there would have been no water in the Ninth Ward.

There are dams in the Dakotas. They generate electricity, a benefit for those states. New Orleans and Louisiana pay for this because the sediment lost to these dams contributes to the loss of land…His time is running out, and he talks about how pitiful the surge protection is for New Orleans compared to Holland, London, and Providence RI. Talking about the funding for flood protection - the current Congress has not been helpful.

Karen Gadbois is up next! “A ground level view of efforts to rebuild New Orleans.”

Oooo! First slide is to Maitri’s blog! Maitri returned to NOLA soon after the hurricane came through.

Now we are on a slide with a NOLA map, showing where the redevelopment activity is. A picture of a house slated for demolition is shown. and we see a house that does not appear to be in need of demolition. At all. The damage assessment for this house from the government was placed at 90%. Homes were declared “Imminent Health Threats” but noone had any standards explaininghow this was determined. Many owners started painting “do not demolish” on the outside of their houses when this started happening. There is a picture of an elevated house clearly built to avoid flooding, yet was slated for demolition.

A picture of Karen’s “Squandered Heritage” website…

Talks of her work with Sarah Lewis to help homeowners find what they need to rebuild.

Karen is great at making these stories of aggrieved homeowners personal. There was great fear for many that their homes would be deemed “threats.” (Karen is doing a great presentation, but it is based on slides - hard to liveblog!!). DEMOLITION IS NOT RECOVERY!! Then she plugs the New Orleans Institute (for resilience and innovation).

Now there is the Rev. Marshall Truehill, Jr. “Neighborhood Based Planning for the Future of New Orleans”. Organization called “City-Works”. Talks about the reinvigoration of neighborhood organizations in the face of government inaction… Not surprising that the neighborhood’s location made a difference in the issues their organizations focused on; flooded neighborhoods focused on housing issues, while the dry neighborhoods focused on other things.

HONESTLY now… I’d be a liar  if I said there has been a lot of concern for New Orleans at the big Kos gathering here.  It’s great that there is this panel, but… if this conference is a fair representation of national concerns, the NOLA needle barely registers.

NN: Live blogging is hard

Just wanna sit and listen… the keynote address by Lawrence Lessig about the influence of money was inspiring and entertaining. Good enough to take my mind off the mediocre cookie in my box lunch.

I am going to get panels together on “better cookies” and “better laptop batteries…”

I am sitting in the “Bloggers and Books” panel. Markos, Marcy Wheeler…. Markos says he wrote a book and then decided he would never ever write another book again. Then he wrote a second book. ( And we’re attending his conference. What does that say about us?).

Marcy Wheeler is impressed that in her book she didn’t use the word “turdblossom” even once. Which is not like her, she says. Maybe not, but this is making me like her.

Perhaps I should save my energy and battery power for the New Orleans panel later… I’m feeling the early symptoms of snark poisoning right now.

NN Live: ZOMG! Al Gore!… and into the health care panel

He is awesome. A nice surprise guest!

Technology failure be damned, I couldn’t blog it, but I sure liked it. No electricity, battery problem yada yada yada. All those Apple computers with their better battery life were taunting me.

I am now sitting in a health care reform panel. Ezra Klein, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer… there is a strong push for single-payer in the room, and I am going to like that part.

There is enough absurdity and outrage to go around with this topic. I am now hearing about hospitals doing things like expanding “cosmetic vein surgery” programs, while mammogram and cancer services are being cut back at the very same facilities.

ONGOING:

We are emphasizing as usual the need for a new President to make serious progress on any of these issues. The speaker delivering this is Hilda Sarkisayan, a woman whose daughter died when the insurance company denied the claim for a liver transplant. Her story was frequently cited in John Edwards stump speech.

Next up: Rocky Delgadillo, the current city attorney of Los Angeles. This health care system is broken. The whole “we are going to eliminate fraud” line we keep hearing is utterly false. When was the last time you heard an insurance company say :” we have done a good job eliminating fraud. Here is your lower premium!” Yeah, right.

His lawyers are suing Blue Cross and Blue Shield, amongst others for fraud. Billion dollar lawsuits. He is discussing the aggressive techniques they use to deny claims. Didn’t report a health matter from long ago? Policy rescinded! (I am liking what this guy is saying…). The justice system can be used to force aggressive reform in health care. He is getting a round of applause for mentioning a “perp walk” for insurance company criminals.

Geri Jenkins, RN with the CNA/NNOC. Her emphasis starts on the idea we need to eliminate the private insurance companies, otherwise they are going to suck the pool of wealth dry. There is a big smoke screen out there providing a strong line of misinformation about the consequences of a bill providing single-payer healthcare… Insurance companies have been found denying policies to women who have had c-sections, because you were more likely to need another.

Ezra Klein is up now. He is kind of a bad guy here because he is not for single payer. He is arguing for the Health Care for America Now initiative. (This plan works with private insurance plans largely intact…). He is giving us the “it is the only realistic political alternative” idea, the perfect vs. the good thing. There is such a long, long history of failure in health care reform…Ezra is calling us all dreamers kinda…

NN: Not so live

The panel with Gov. Siegelman was intense.   The injustice here is in-your-face, you can’t ignore it,. The names of the players are well known, and the right-wing mechanisms of power and intimidation have come together to fuck someone over like never before.

Here’s a site progressives might like: contemptforrove.com.

Don Siegelman’s legal bills have reached 2.5 million dollars.

We all had box lunches with a panel featuring Markos and Harold Ford.  There was a live hookup for some fun input, they called the segment “Meet the Bloggers”, and we heard from Arriana Huffington , Marcy Wheeler and some others I can’t remember right now.  The Kos-Ford discussion panel was actually quite good.

Then there was another panel with Atrios, Digby, Rick Perlstein and Paul Krugman.  They didn’t say “fuck” once during this panel, but it was called “How the Media Learned to Bend Over.”  They managed to get their smutty incivility in somehow, using the name of the panel. Damn DFH’s.

Pictures later.

NN Live: Free Siegelman!!

Now at the panel in a big room called “Conversation With Don Siegelman”. Sitting with 4Legs and WaWo. Low battery worries…

They are telling the story behind Governor Siegelman’s imprisonment. Names like Karl Rove are being dropped…

Stats behind the party affiliation of investigations by Republican DOJ:

298 Democrats

67 Republicans

Some mathemeticians determined that there was a 1 in 10000 probability it was random…. therefore, it was not random.

This is cool:

They threw this guy in prison… yet Karl Rove walks free. Contempt of court please?

The Fuck Panel

We’re live people. I am sitting here with War On/War Off.

BTW, that is L to R: Amanda Marcotte, Atrios, Kevin Drum, Rude Pundit, Digby and Jesse.

This is cool. They are talking about profanity, saying fuck and stuff. What a qualified panel. Atrios is quoting Thomas Friedman:

“What they need to see is American boys in Baghdad going house to house…. to SUCK ON THIS!”. He concludes if Friedman can say this, he can say “fuck” on his blog.

UPDATE: Me thinks it is quite amazing that saying “fuck” on a blog was ever controversial.

Amanda Marcotte up now: She says she likes to cuss. She likes dirty jokes. ALLRIGHT!!! She invokes the name of Bill Hicks!

Jesse: The word fuck is cool.

Kevin Drum: I don’t like to use the word “cunt”

Kevin Drum: I don’t really here the criticism “the blogs cuss too much” that often. No more often than he hears the question “Do we do too much cat blogging?” 4Legs, care to comment?

Rude Pundit: It is really fucking stupid to the criticizers to focus on the commenters… I actuall avoid something: I don’t talk about killing people, that is a bad thing. It is better for me to talk about sodomy. I even made a joke about raping, but it involved Ann Coulter…and she deserved it because of something she said. I create cuss words dammit… I create new words for orifices!

Amanda: I like to see just how vulgar I can be before it is considered sexist.

Atrios: Amanda is unique. There is a subculture for which she is the very face of all manhaters. Manhating is an INTERNET TRADITION for Amanda.

Jesse: I made a joke that said the ‘N’ word… but it got noticed only because I mentioned Amanda’s name in the post.

Digby: My limits…I have words I will not say, but I will not mention them. I don’t talk about people’s looks, that’s worse than profanity. For some reason vulgar language has been associated with the Left, and i don’t know how that happened.

Digby: I mean, look at McCain. He cusses like a sailor. He was a sailor. The only solution to this whole thing is to just swear more…

Jesse: We are 31 minutes into Netroots Nation and someone is denigrating McCains military service

Atrios: LEAVE JOHN MCCAIN ALONE!!!!

Jesse: NEXT Question: Have you ever revised anything because people found it offensive?

Digby: No

Rude Pundit: I didn’t do the “I won’t fuck Hillary ” routine, so I changed the bit back to “I won’t fuck Ann Coulter..”

AManda: I sometimes say “blowjob” and make jokes about it. Google doesn’t like the word.

Atrios: WHY DOES GOOGLE HATE BLOWJOBS?

(Battery dying…. moved to the back of the room……)

Jesse: I love Rick Perlstein…. buy his books.

Atrios: I am not that funny… I get much of my material from the people who comment on my website.

(More blowjob talk!!!)

I’m packing up…. more live stuff later maybe.

NN Live 1

I have never liveblogged very well, but I am going to try again.

The first thing I needed after registering.  I also need to send in my ACLU membership renewal…

This is a view of the temp quarters while here.  I am standing on the balcony of Level 4 of the Convention Center.  Not much of a walk is it?  Getting a little outside blogging in before it gets too hot.

Okay, time for conspiracy theory number one.  Look at the below picture:

Okay, same hotel in the background, right?  There is a barrier there, the kind used by road crews.  That went in just this morning!  I just made it across before they put it in.  I wonder… is it a coincidence that they put this in as the Netroots Nation gets going? Hmm….

The chorus of clicking and tapping

The laptop per square foot ratio is incredible around here…

I have chest pain. Look, there’s a hospital!

This is something I have been meaning to write about for a while. See the photo above? I took this on my way out of town to Netroots Nation in Austin, on the evening of Thursday July 17, 2008. However, many Houstonians will know that the River Oaks Hospital closed on June 23, 2008. We are coming up on a month now, right? The hospital just closed on that Monday in June without notice, leaving a lot of employees hanging. Oh yeah, patients were left hanging also. It’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a for-profit entity that decided that the immediate treatment of their bottom line is more important than the treatment of patients they have already sold services to.

Consider that the picture was taken from US Highway 59, a major artery through Houston and one of the busiest highways in Texas. The location is not very far from downtown. Few billboards get this much exposure. It seems pretty damn odd to me that there is still a billboard conveying the message that the hospital is still open. This hospital had a functioning emergency room. Can you imagine the headline:

Infant Chokes While Panicking Mother Drives To Closed Hospital

Ain’t that a hoot?!

A non-profit or community based hospital would never get away with this. Hell, they wouldn’t even think about closing on a moment’s notice while leaving the logo and advertisments laying all over a major public thoroughfare. Absurd and negligent, I say. I do not have any knowledge of any actual cases of people attempting to get treatment after the closing date, but my guess is it has happened more than once. I am not saying we should forbid for-profit hospitals, some of them do good work, but this is a fucked up way of doing business.

So, who wants to sue a bankrupt holding entity? Anyone? Bueler?

Impulsive blogger convention

No, not a convention of impulsive bloggers.  I acted on impulse and registered for Netroots Nation in Austin.  I didn’t have any set accommodations.

I let William Shatner find me a hotel room in Austin again, for the third time.  Ol’ Bill did a really great job this time.  He found me a room at the Downtown Hilton.  The one right next to the Austin Convention Center.  I got to the hotel really late, at about 1100 p.m.  When I walked in, I saw Atrios going into the lounge.  This must be the place.

Just another night

Last night, amongst other very interesting things, I was burping a baby less than 12 hours old.  Less than 30 minutes later I was noting the time a middle-aged John Doe was pronounced dead.  I walk around acting like it was just another night.  Was it?  Just another night?

My new group

A couple of nights ago, I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I am amazed it took me this long to pony up the membership for this group, big geek that I am. It was the FISA fight that finally did it for me.

The ACLU is getting some press for the lawsuits they recently filed challenging the constitutionality of FISA’s assaults on our civil liberties. This is just half the story, as many of you know. The EFF is going to be challenging the new FISA law on the constitutionality of the telecom immunity provisions. We all wish them luck, of course. I am fortunate enough to be able to give them a little turkee for their efforts.

A build-up, I hope

Over the last few weeks, I have developed several posts about various aspects of our uniquely American health care system. I haven’t finished any of them. I am up to my neck in this system, and I need to distance myself a little more than my first drafts have allowed. Some of this is out of the need to protect my job… I like the job well enough, and I actually get to help people. On some things, I have gotten too personal. On other things, I have a hard time believing what I am noticing does not already get enough attention, so much so that there must be something wrong with what I am saying. Some stuff is complex and I need to clarify what I am trying to get across . And, given what I do for a living, I should be more willing to believe I am ahead of the curve on some fairly important stuff.

It’ll work itself out.

I’m still here. Really.

Generation Kill premiers July 13th

- and of course I work that night.

Grrrr…..

Ready for this yet?