"Mississippi Miracle"

The "Blame Louisiana First" crowd (which includes Louisiana Senator David Vitter for some reason) is often to be found holding up Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's success in funding and administering his state's recovery as further evidence of Louisiana's relative backwardness.

Salon takes a "harder look" at the Mississippi recovery and discovers some things we've been screaming about in New Orleans for quite some time now.

Consider the Gulf Coast housing crisis, one of the key issues that has kept nearly half the population of New Orleans from returning to the city since Katrina. More than 75 percent of the housing damage from the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388 million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million.

It's not just housing. Mississippi is also slated to get 38 percent of federal hospital recovery funds, even though it lost just 79 beds compared to 2,600 lost in southern Louisiana, which will get 45 percent of the funds. Mississippi and Louisiana both received $95 million to offset losses in higher education, even though Louisiana was home to 75 percent of displaced students. The states also received $100 million each for K-12 students affected by the storms, despite the fact that 69 percent resided in Louisiana.

The disparity between the states' needs and the funding they received from Washington has been so glaring that even disgraced former FEMA director Michael Brown recently charged that politics played a role. "Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," Brown told students at Metropolitan College of New York in January.

But even so, despite Barbour's superior connections to the G.O.P. and White House lobbying and management skill, the Salon piece goes on to find that even with these superior resources available to Mississippi officials, the recovery for folks in places like Waveland and Bay St Louis looks a lot like it does for folks in NOLA... worse in some respects.

For the residents of Hancock County, Barbour and Mississippi's ability to capture the lion's share of Katrina relief dollars makes the slow progress in their area all the more demoralizing. The county's 911 system still operates out of a trailer. Damaged wastewater and drainage systems frustrate hopes of a return to normalcy; earlier this month in Waveland, 16 miles east of Pearlington, a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator was found swimming in a drainage ditch next to a bus stop at 8 o'clock in the morning. Mayor Tommy Longo says the creatures freely roam throughout devastated residential areas.

Indeed, Hancock County was one of three Gulf Coast areas recently singled out as having "severe problems" by the Rockefeller Institute on Government and the Louisiana Public Affairs Council, with the towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis flat-out "struggling to survive."

That is.. worse if you consider wild boars and rats on crack preferable to 9 foot alligators as urban pests.

Either way, the "Mississippi Miracle" lies in Barbour's ability to do.. about as well as we have (which is to say not well at all).. with disproportionately superior resources. I must say I am impressed.