Will Vitter Have to Testify?

The attorney for the "D.C. Madam" asked Friday for a subpoena to force the Louisiana Republican to testify about his involvement in what prosecutors say was a high-priced prostitution ring.

Montgomery Sibley said he had asked the clerk of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to issue a subpoena to Vitter to testify at a Nov. 28 hearing that could spill salacious details of the scandal that has captivated the nation's capital for more than a year.

Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the hearing to determine whether Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, can proceed with her breach-of-contract lawsuit against a woman she once employed as an escort. Palfrey said she signed contracts with all her escorts promising they wouldn't do anything illegal and that Paula Neble broke it by engaging in prostitution.

Is New Orleans' Recovery Money Arriving?

Once about $453 million in state and federal aid, mostly tied to the city's effort to rebuild its shattered infrastructure, is taken out, the 2008 budget for the day-to-day operation of city government is $459.6 million.

That total represents the general fund, the portion of the budget under the city's direct control, which comes from self-generated revenue such as sales and property taxes, service charges, license and permit fees, fines and interest.

Pointing to multiple pools of recovery dollars that are finally within the city's reach, Nagin said he expects to launch between $250 million and $500 million in public works projects in 2008.

"This is the evidence that we are really at the tipping point," he said. "The checks are no longer in the mail."

As examples, Nagin cited a $300 million revolving loan fund approved recently by the state, $117 million in infrastructure money released by the Louisiana Recovery Authority, $75 million in city bonds and $54 million in Federal Highway Administration dollars for improvements to major streets.

After more than a year of planning that includes blueprints for 17 target "recovery zones," Nagin told council members to prepare "for some serious implementation" now that the city can access an unprecedented amount of cash.

"This recovery is poised and ready to move to the next level," he said.

Among the roads scheduled for resurfacing are portions of Tchoupitoulas, Toulouse and Frenchmen streets, Robert E. Lee and MacArthur boulevards, and Harrison Avenue.

Maintaining that "city government is not built for speed," Nagin said he will seek to expedite things with the appointment of a public infrastructure program manager to recruit and oversee an army of architects, engineers and contractors.

To monitor the ambitious brick-and-mortar program, Nagin plans to establish a "project delivery unit" inside City Hall. The unit will serve a dual purpose: to help project managers navigate the city's bureaucratic maze and to guard against waste.

Convicted Felon, Stan "Pampy" Barre Accused of telling lies to lessen his prison sentence

Federal investigators are probing an allegation that Orleans Parish School Board member and state House candidate Una Anderson accepted a cash bribe, delivered to her husband six years ago in exchange for her help steering a School Board trash-collection contract to two local garbage haulers, sources close to the investigation said.

Anderson said she does not believe she is the target of any federal inquiry. If she is, she said, that's because restaurateur and convicted felon Stan "Pampy" Barre is telling investigators anything he can in hopes of reducing his prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges related to a crooked City Hall energy deal. Barre faces sentencing in January.

"If Stan Barre is saying that I took a bribe, he is telling a lie," Anderson said. "I've done nothing unethical or illegal."

Jimmie Woods and Alvin Richard, the respective owners of Metro Disposal Inc. and Richard's Disposal Inc., the two trash-hauling companies that got the work, said through their attorneys that no bribes were paid to anyone.

"I'm aware that allegations may have been made," said Richard's attorney, Robert Glass. He added that Richard is "not a suspect" but that he is "answering questions from the authorities."

"All I can say is my client absolutely denies" paying a bribe, said Herbert Larson, Woods' attorney.

Larson also said: "If you want the real explanation, it is that Stan Barre will do anything, including roll over on Mother Teresa, to get out of 9 1/2 years in jail. He will say anything and do anything."

Larson's comment refers to the prison term Barre potentially faces. In June, one of Barre's co-conspirators, former city property management director Kerry DeCay, was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to the same charges as Barre.

The harsh sentence might have served as a wake-up call to Barre, a gregarious restaurateur, political operative and close ally of former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. Barre, absent a kind word from the feds, seemed destined for a similar stretch in the penitentiary. |Read more|

No Charges Filed In Standoff On Bridge

This revelation come as no surprise. Where is the public outrage?

An Orleans Parish grand jury refused to indict a Gretna police officer Wednesday for firing a shotgun into the air as evacuees fleeing the post-Katrina chaos tried to cross the Crescent City Connection. The decision essentially closes the criminal case in New Orleans.

Officer Lawrence Vaughn, who could have faced a charge of illegal use of a firearm, was cleared of wrongdoing in the Sept. 1, 2005, incident spawned when authorities from Gretna, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection decided to shut down the bridge to pedestrians.

Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson said the decision also exonerates his department, which has been lambasted as racist for its part in the decision to shut down the bridge and keep desperate New Orleanians, most of them black, from leaving the city. Lawson and others have said police were forced to block the bridge to evacuees because no help was available on the West Bank. In addition, authorities were battling a fire at Oakwood Center mall in Terrytown, set by looters earlier on the day Vaughn fired the shotgun.

New Orleans D.A. Eddie Jordan Resigns

Reading the Times Picayune article on D.A. Eddie Jordan's resignation, made me reflect upon the terms discrimination and cronyism as how it relates to city and state government in Louisiana.

Racial discrimination is based on unfairness, bias and bigotry. Cronyism is partiality to friends that result in appointing them to positions in one's administration. Since I have lived in New Orleans for a very long time, cronyism has always existed in State and Local government. Although I believe that Congressman Jefferson is guilty of the charges he is facing, I do agree with the following statement he made as a result of D.A. Eddie Jordan's resignation:

As the first African American District Attorney, Mr. Jordan was overwhelmingly supported by the African American community. The staff of the out-going D.A. was overwhelmingly white. Mr. Jordan's effort to hire qualified people whom he knew or who were supportive of his campaign naturally meant that the pool of such applicants would overwhelmingly be African Americans. Every D.A. has been accorded the right to let go the prior D.A.'s personnel and hire his own. It is unfortunate that in this case Mr. Jordan's effort to follow this well-established practice ended with the appearance that he was discriminating against a segment of the population. I did not believe then, and I do not believe now that this was ever his intention."

The lawsuit against Eddie Jordan leaves me to conclude that: When a black newly elected official brings in his/her new administration, race matters. When a white elected official brings in his/her new administration, do what you want. The only thing you may be accused of is cronyism. Being accused of cronyism will result in less publicized scrutiny and no civil penalty.
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VIDEO OF EDDIE JORDAN'S RESIGNATION

New Orleans Recovery Director, Ed Blakely speaks out about Recovery Plans

Um...Slimy Mac-P smells money in Louisiana. Watch out recovery plan; Slimy Mac-P is figuring out how his family can dip into the cookie jar. Can a pending federal prison sentence stop him?

Beginning early next year, New Orleans police officers should begin to move out of the cramped trailers they've been using since Hurricane Katrina and into more comfortable surroundings, recovery director Ed Blakely said Monday.


Buoyed by $200 million in state-issued bonds earmarked for repairs to the city's storm-damaged infrastructure, Blakely said he hopes to reopen police headquarters on Broad Street around Jan. 1 and get the rank-and-file into permanent buildings by next spring.

Is Your Husband Cheating?

If you know he just bought a mercedes for a female, shouldn't that tell you something?

Wake up Barbie: Although you are 62 years old, you can still find someone else. Have a little faith in yourself.

California Wildfires cannot be compared to Hurricane Katrina

The response to the California wildfires -- the country's biggest disaster since Katrina -- has earned praise from officials nationwide.

President Bush, on a visit to the charred region on Thursday, lauded the efforts of local responders and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow Republican.

"It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead," Bush said, in an apparent dig at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat.

Bush was way off base with that statement. There is a very distinct difference between the two disasters.

Perhaps the one universal connection, however, is emotion: Traumatized residents forced to leave their homes while wondering what, if anything, they might find upon their return. And, certainly, an out-of-control fire steadily devouring a large area is as frightening as rising floodwaters inundating a major city.

By Friday, the fires had burned about a half-million acres, an area twice the size of New York City. Much of the burned area was forest, but the Californians who lost homes -- at least 1,700 and counting -- are as devastated as the Katrina victims left homeless by the flood.

Katrina's scale of devastation and its impact on humanity, however, was far greater. The number of homes destroyed or still threatened in California is about 10 percent of the roughly 200,000 left uninhabitable by Katrina and the often overlooked Hurricane Rita, which struck three weeks later.

In New Orleans alone, 140 of 180 square miles flooded, -- rendering uninhabitable a residential zone seven times the size of Manhattan. Across the region, its winds and rains wreaked havoc to a 90,000-square-mile swath of the Gulf Coast, an area twice the size of the entire state of New York.

And while the federal government response has been swift in California, it was unorganized and late in Louisiana, problems that cannot be blamed on state government. Indeed, a commander with the Arkansas National Guard who helped secure Convention Center Boulevard told reporters he did not even receive an order to go to New Orleans until two days after the hurricane.

Financial losses from the fires based on initial estimates are about 2 percent of the damage caused by Katrina and Rita, which so far stands at $91 billion. While damage estimates are still climbing in California, initial estimates are about $2 billion.

Katrina forced the evacuation of 1.2 million people -- 500,000 remained displaced after four months. Almost 2,000 people died in Katrina.

The death toll from the fires stood at seven as of Saturday.

"These fires are not the same disaster that we had in Katrina," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said this week. "There's so many differences."

Infrastructure still in place

Another major difference: The fires did not wipe out every remnant of infrastructure. Many California evacuees drove to shelters on roads unaffected by the disaster. Katrina and the subsequent flood obliterated power, water systems and nearly all traditional forms of communication -- cell phone towers, phone company switching centers and 911 call centers. The almost complete loss of communication for several days resulted in deadly consequences for many storm victims and first responders.

While the wildfires destroyed dozens of cell phone towers and land lines in California, causing service outages in isolated areas, companies have compensated with the use of mobile transmission equipment. Cell service and land-line use in San Diego, Anaheim and Los Angeles remain largely unaffected.

Once the levees failed in New Orleans, floodwaters swamped nearly every major road in and out of the city. Louis Armstrong International Airport shut down. Ground access into the city was largely limited to U.S. 90 from the West Bank and River Road on the east bank. Many supplies and support personnel had to be airlifted into the city by military aircraft, many of which did not arrive until well after the disaster.

The situation is more manageable in California. Most of the blazes are burning in sparsely populated areas. While the fires continue to pose some challenges to getting around in greater San Diego, the infrastructure of the city remained largely unfazed. Some highways have been closed, but the city's main interstate arteries and airport have remained open. The main San Diego airport is operating normally. Amtrak and regional commuter train service was restored on Thursday.

"There's a big difference - we have a functioning city," said Kevin McCoy, a crisis counselor from the Harbison Canyon Community Resource Center, who was among the hundreds of volunteers at Qualcomm Stadium this week. "When you walk out of this stadium you aren't stepping into 4 feet of water."

California evacuation

Both events forced massive evacuations. About 1.2 million people fled the New Orleans metro area ahead of Katrina, according to a Louisiana State University study.

Probably fewer than half that many southern California residents were displaced from their homes by the wildfires. According to a Los Angeles Times report Thursday, the number of evacuees at any one time in the region was significantly less than the 800,000 widely reported by officials earlier this week. Many residents began returning to their homes on Wednesday.

More reliable estimates of the number of people instructed to leave their homes put the number at between 350,000 and 500,000, which is still the largest evacuation in California history. A statement earlier in the week by the San Diego Sheriff's Office that more people had been evacuated in southern California than left in advance of Katrina has been dismissed as greatly exaggerated.

"It's unfair for a comparison to be drawn between the two," said Ken Higginbotham, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency operation at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego's largest shelter for wildfire evacuees. "Both were catastrophic events that affected a large number of people. That's where the similarities end. This is a different time, a different period, a different scenario."

Katrina's lessons learned

What's more, officials and first responders in California have applied lessons learned from Katrina relief efforts. For example, Menshek said the San Miguel Fire Department rewrote and updated its strategic disaster plan in the wake of Katrina. He said the city also re-evaluated its evacuation shelters and designated new ones.

In addition, Katrina spurred an overhaul at FEMA. In stark contrast to Katrina, when only a handful of agency representatives were on the ground in the first hours after the storm, blue-shirted FEMA officials descended on relief shelters in droves almost immediately after the fires broke out last weekend.

At the Qualcomm Stadium shelter, more than two dozen workers buzzed around tents and offered aid to anyone in need for much of the week. There were so many FEMA representatives that many appeared to have little to do, passing time by watching TV or monitoring the Internet.