Obama! Obama!

He's our man!

If he can't fix N'awlins

No one can!

Go B.H.O!

Ol' Preacher Barry was on the pulpit in N'awlins telling them that in spite of being a Democratic stronghold in a Democratic state, that it was somehow Bush's responsibility to 'fix' all the ingrained social problems there.

Obama, whose day began at First Emanuel Baptist Church, said that long before Katrina, the nation had failed to lift up New Orleans, a city with persistent struggles such as poverty and poor public schools. He said that cannot happen again and that Americans have a "collective responsibility" to each other.

"Racial discord, poverty, the old divisions of black and white, rich and poor, it's time to leave that to yesterday," he said.

"In rebuilding, we've got an opportunity to do more than put up a foundation that for too long failed the people of New Orleans," he told congregants. Some snapped photos of him at the pulpit with their cell phones.
That's right, it's OUR fault that N'awlins is in the state it's in.

And, naturally he wants to throw our money at the Dem's in charge to 'fix' what they've institutionalized.
He outlined a plan he said would help restore the region by:

_providing grants for community policing in New Orleans, which has struggled with violence since Katrina; Throwing FREE money at corrupt city officials!

_offering incentives such as loan forgiveness programs to try to attract doctors and college students; Yeah, and we can make a show about the quirky residents and call it "southern-exposure"! Too bad no-one thought about it before.

_ensuring displaced residents who want to return have a place to stay; I'm sure most of the cities housing them would like to see them gone, too!

_creating a national catastrophic insurance reserve, which he said would help homeowners struggling with their premiums. Ummm, Allied Van Lines? If they can't afford the insurance, they need to move inland.

At least two other leading Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, also have outlined rebuilding plans and touched on similar themes.
Of course, and it all involves your money being spent on shiftless people supporting the Democrat Socialist lifestyle.

In contrast to the helplessness of ol' Chocolate-boy Nagan and the Democratic controlled statehouse, we have Galveston, Tx's response to the 1900 hurricane...which adjusted to today's money and population, was the most devastating storm in American history.

Despite the unimaginable devastation and what must have been a hard realization that it could happen again, the city immediately began pulling itself out of the mud.

By 10 a.m. Sept. 9, Mayor Walter C. Jones had called emergency city council meetings and by the end of the day had appointed a Central Relief Committee.

Ignoring advice from its sister paper, The Dallas Morning News, that it move temporarily to Houston, The Galveston Daily News continued publishing from the island and never missed an issue. Sept. 9 and 10, 1900, were published together on a single sheet of paper. One side listed the dead. The other reported the devastation of the storm.

In the first week after the storm, according to McComb's book, telegraph and water service were restored. Lines for a new telephone system were being laid by the second.

"In the third week, Houston relief groups went home, the saloons reopened, the electric trolleys began operating and freight began moving through the harbor," McComb wrote.

Residents of Galveston quickly decided that they would rebuild, that the city would survive, and almost as soon, leaders began deciding how it would do so.

The two civil engineering projects leaders decided to pursue - building a seawall and raising the island's elevation - stand today and are almost as great in their scope and effect as the storm itself.

Raising the grade

It's impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten 100 years ago.

Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher.

The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.

Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.

The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb.

The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston's ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes.

Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain.

Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised.

McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising.

The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised.

And how was it paid for you ask?
While Galveston received financial help from the county, state and federal governments, a large portion of the burden had to be carried by the city itself, at the expense of other projects.
mostly by it's self...unlike a certain OTHER city who wants you to pay for everything.