Thursday. This is the point in the Shitstorm where it begins to rain Presidents. Today the current President is here. His two predecessors will be in town during the weekend.
President Obama just finished speaking a few minutes ago at the Andrew P. Sanchez & Copelin-Byrd Community Center in the Ninth Ward. Here is the video. Obama says our recovery "inspires" him. But he also talks about unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and says there is "more work to be done."
Unfortunately he doesn't have a whole lot new to say about how we're going to do that work. He did mention climate change briefly, more or less as a slap at our stupid Governor. But he didn't dwell very long on how the rising seas and our dissolving coastline combine to imperil everything he was here to celebrate. To have spent too much time on that would draw attention to the fact that he had no new initiative to announce, no solution to offer to our continuing existential crisis. In fact, as The Lens pointed out this week, the President is already moving to defund our insufficient source of relief there.
But hey, thanks for coming. Hope the chicken was good.
The other thing that happens when a President comes to town is traffic gets jammed up for a while. But we're used to that by now. Both because the streets are already impassable due to every construction project imaginable happening simultaneously, and because we can remember when the feds put all sorts of things off limits.
That is another view of the post-Katrina FEMA camp I mentioned in an earlier post today. The photo is from late December 2005. It's one of my favorites from that time. I went back there a few weeks ago to try and recreate the scene. It's less forbidding now.
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