This isn't new. It's from around September 8, 2005, but it still seemed relevant when I read it this morning, so I bring it to you...

Katrina: account from an EPA rep
via BoingBoing and
Steve's No Direction Home Page

A Boing Boing reader who owns an environmental cleanup services company -- and asks to remain anonymous here -- says,

Thanks for publishing my plea to get involved the other day. Unfortunately nothing has come of that. No one is proceeding at this point. However, plenty of opportunities to help refugees in Atlanta are now available, so that's where my time has gone.

My company cleans up waste industrial gas cylinders and specialty chemicals. As such we are in contact with the EPA regularly and often work for the government. As you might imagine, there is expected to be a large number of cylinders recovered from Katrina, and many will probably be in bad shape, or even unknowns, which can present hazard. Today a consultant who works with us and the EPA came back from the Gulf region. Here are some of the things that he had to report:

* He said that the 30 elderly who died in the nursing home were simply forgotten. They were supposed to be rescued but someone dropped the ball and they died.

* There are now 130,000 people working in the Gulf region, including 60,000 National Guard. Conditions for these workers, especially the contractors, are extremely hard. Many are sleeping in their cars and have to supply their own food and water. There is as yet no infrastructure in place to support this group. 80% of these people have terrible diarrhea and some have been hospitalized.

* Under Homeland Security, FEMA is supposed to be in charge, but they have been marginalized due to their obvious screw ups. The National Guard is now in charge in the region and they have no experience in these matters. This is aggravating a bad situation.

* The plan going forward for New Orleans is to demolish all the houses and burn them. There is nowhere to bury the waste in the region so they will incinerate it all. Before that can go on, they will have to search every house for chemical hazards.

* They have found large numbers of seals in and around the houses in NOLA and no one is clear where they came from. An aquarium?

* They are shooting hundreds of dogs a day to protect search and rescue workers. The Humane Society shelters in the region have over 4000 animals.

* The entire Gulfport region is blocked by National Guard and only authorized contractors can get in. An RV campground has grown up outside the roadblock of 80 or more contractors hoping to get a piece of the action. These people have signs outside saying, "Mold Expert," "Asbestos Contractor," etc. They are having cookouts at their RVs just to try to get people to come and talk to them.

* Cell phone towers are on their way from Germany to get the communication infrastructure back in place. The EPA ordered 40 satellite phones to get their people in contact. Those phones have arrived, but no one ordered SIM cards and these phones are currently useless.

* This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.

* The Navy ship Bataan, which has been widely reported to be available for producing water, can only do desalination, but cannot handle contaminated water.

* All of the Army's good gear, including vehicles and generators are overseas. Humvees and other vehicles in the Gulf region are breaking down frequently.

Certainly I cannot attest to the absolute reliability of all this information, but it is from a reliable source who has been involved with EPA response to hazardous situations for 20 years.

He confirms what everyone else has already said: the clusterfuck down there is beyond all imagining.

And you can bet he wasn't treated well by either one. While he's looking through what's left of his house, a couple goons with M-16s handcuff him for a while to let him know who's boss. Meanwhile, E-bay removes his photos of the wreckage from his website.
Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons

By Jackson Thoreau for OpEdNews.

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.

Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.

When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history...

"I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble's house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.

"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so," Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go."

Here is the full text of the story in case the link goes bad:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jackson__050909_physician_who_told_o.htm

Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina,
Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons

by Jackson Thoreau

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.

Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.

When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history.

As Marble explains, he was driving to his destroyed house Sept. 8 in
Gulfport, Ms., when military police refused to allow him to cross a
barricade that was about 200 feet from his home. They forced him to
drive an extra 20 minutes and spend even more on gasoline.

"Thanks to Dubya Gump and Mr. Cheney, gas is really expensive and
extremely hard to get anywhere Katrina has destroyed," Marble wrote.
"So needless to say, I was extremely aggravated that they wouldn't let
me pass."

Suddenly a long line of dark cars pulled up, and they honked at Marble
to back up to let them through the barricade that supposedly no one
could drive through. That only made Marble madder so he did what most
of us would do ? or at least consider doing.

"I waved a middle finger at the caravan," Marble wrote.

After driving the extra 20 minutes and filming video of destruction
along the way, he made it to his home. Marble overheard a neighbor say
that Cheney was down the street talking to people. That's when he got
the idea to go meet Dr. Evil himself.

"I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons," Marble wrote.
"For those who don't know, Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator
[Pat] Leahy 'go fu** yourself' on the Senate floor. Also, I am not
happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of
FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong
time, i.e. Iraq."

So Marble, who was wearing an old Mr. T "I Pity Da Fool" t-shirt since
he was sifting through the wreckage, asked a couple of police officers
if he and a friend could walk down to Cheney. They told him Cheney was
"looking forwardî to talking to ìthe locals.î

"So we grabbed my Canon digital rebel and my Sony videocamera and
started walking down the street," Marble wrote. "And then right in
front of the destroyed tennis court I used to play on, Dick Cheney was
giving a pep rally, talking to the press. The Secret Service guys
patted us down and waved the wands over us, and then let us pass."

As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some
camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble
suddenly yelled, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you
asshole!"

Hey, at least Marble was polite. After all, he referred to Cheney as
ìMr. Cheney.î

"I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I
noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marbleís
house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two
military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for
someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.

"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so,"
Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so
tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after
getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I
was free to go."

So letís get this straight: A physician with a newborn baby loses most
everything he owns in the hurricane, does what most of us WANT to do and
ìechoesî Cheneyís words he spoke on the Senate floor last year, walks
away harmlessly, mission accomplished, and then once the media cameras
leave, he is treated like a foreign terrorist as Cheneyís goons waving
M-16s handcuff him in front of his destroyed home? Had it not been for
the media cameras filming the initial scene, I doubt Cheneyís goons
would have just let Marble go after 20 minutes.

America, land of the free?

Marble and his family have been in the media spotlight before, including
his wife, Lisa, and baby, Sofia Grace, who was born shortly after the
storm, on CNN. Marble has also been interviewed in art magazines and the
Biloxi Sun Herald about his concert fund-raisers and musical success ó
one of his bands, dR. O, has had at least 20 No. 1 songs on the MP3.com
charts.

"The truth is even with all our losses, we are still luckier than many
people down here because at least we didn't die," Marble wrote. "But I
thought I could try to raise some awareness to the bad policies of the
Dubya Gump administration and also possibly raise some money to replace
the many things we lost, and so I decided I would auction the videotape
my friend shot of the event. I will also grant an interview to the
winner if so desired."

So go to eBay here and place a bid for this important video to help
Marble raise some needed funds. I have done so and was at least at one
time the high bidder.

Marble also has an Internet site with photographs of some damage in his
town at www.HurricaneKatrinaSucked.com. A photo of him is here, and you
can also email Marble at clone9@yahoo.com.

Dr. Ben Marble, you rock. May we all return the favor.

UPDATE: Late Friday, Sept. 9, and again on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, eBay,
which is owned by strong Bush-Cheney supporters, took down Marble's
site.

Marble said it was because he didnít bleep out the first ìfuî of ìfuck,î
which he said in an email to me was ìpretty silly.î I think itís a
bunch of BS - I did some searches on eBay of profanity they allow that
is not even partially bleeped out and found more than 1,250 items on
there with the word "bitch,î more than 400 items on there with the word
"bastard,î more than 60 ìgo to hellî phrases and even two ìgoddamned son
of a bitchî items. Yet, they say they won't even allow "f***.î Thatís
fu****. If you want to complain to an eBay bigwig, email meg@ebay.com.

The bidding on Marbleís second auction was over $1,900 at one time. He
is also considering auctioning off some of his paintings.

More at http://www.opednews.com

I Can't Afford My Gasoline

From AtomFilms

Hey New Yorkers -- just reminding you that if you make it to tomorrow's primary -- put in a vote for Andrew Raseij for Public Advocate. He's running on a platform of free wireless for the whole city.

For more info, check out the NY Times profile of him from last week.

According to his peeps, he's about bringing "a net-centric, bottom-up, transparent politics to life."

Hi gang,

So I'm pulling together as many resources as I can on Music Distribution (traditional) and Digital Distribution (itunes, napster, bittorrent, free mp3s etc.).

Please email me at lisa@lisarein.com with any you can recommend.

I'm looking for background stuff as well as current/recent articles on trends.

more on this soon!

lisa

In the NY Times:
Osama and Katrina

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S.
infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the
guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fThomas%20L%20Friedman

Op-Ed Columnist

Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 7, 2005

On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli
TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up
to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered:
"Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they
know how to pull the trigger."

It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the
right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as
a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from
9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used
that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a
radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells,
the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before
9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11
distorted our politics and society.

Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be
the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put
the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right
guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with
Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at
home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so
much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much
better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing
it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of
energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word
"conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already
denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national
policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for
price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the
government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that
we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and
fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the
government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly
selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want
to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I
can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't
have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person
about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New
Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax
dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy
drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had
to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one
underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just
spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day,
but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that
someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his
watch.

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with
India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S.
infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the
guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a
gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy
day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy;
its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40
million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when
that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal
with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush
team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."

Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he
has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and
relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but
helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as
usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a
city and a presidency.

Continuing in his great tradition of being the only one to have the cahunas to say in plain english what needs to be said, Keith Olbermann had a few important words to say about the New Orleans situation -- and Bush's utter failure in dealing with it.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely
by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country
to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and
defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even
keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure
collapse in New Orleans even though the government had heard all the
"chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers
and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern...
a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror
government. It promised protection or at least amelioration against
all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8514671/#050905a

September 5, 2005 | 8:58 p.m. ET

The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all,
starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city
that is largely underwater..."

Well there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a
crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their
insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that mightíve saved
New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was
on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away
from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus,
to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of
these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in
terms of relief they couldíve brought last Monday and Tuesday like the
President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted
to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever
be symbolized by one gaffe by the head of what is ironically called "The
Department of Homeland Security": "Louisiana is a city."

Politician after politician Republican and Democrat alike has
paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in
their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how
devastated they were congenitally incapable of telling the difference
between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted
editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the
stranded even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to
telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural...and
government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in
Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not
the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week
or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial
silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas,
nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord
knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee
improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of
trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely
by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country
to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and
defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even
keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure
collapse in New Orleans even though the government had heard all the
"chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers
and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern...
a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror
government. It promised protection or at least amelioration against
all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the
response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which
"we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the
administration, although we still don't know where some of them are.
Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time
last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

I don't know which 'WE' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been as we were
taught in Social Studies it should always be whether or not I voted
for this President he is still my President. I suspect anybody who
had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I
suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how
they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his
government our government "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame in all senses of the word. A few changes of
pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st
Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not
satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind
phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered
Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of
government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety
is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object
for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage
itself it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is
in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region
are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot
longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the
last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug
up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and
toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's
credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

My first
Songs From The Commons show is up. Check it out.

Everything in the show (music and spoken word) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

I'm trying to cover just the most basics of Copyright Law in these first two shows...Then we'll start talking about cases...

Hope you like it.

Andrew Raseij is running for Public Advocate in New York City on a platform of free wireless for all -- as a public service. Nice progressive thinking.

The NY Times just profiled him too.

For Mr. Rasiej (pronounced ra-SHAY), being public advocate - the person who succeeds the mayor if he or she is incapacitated - is not just about triaging complaints from the public. It is also about fostering a revolution in the way people and government exchange information.

"The traditional model is that we elect a public official and they're going to solve all our problems," said Mr. Rasiej, 47. "I don't believe that model works anymore. I don't believe that one politician can solve the problems of eight million New Yorkers. I do believe that eight million New Yorkers can solve their own problems."

He thinks that the Internet can help people organize and share ideas, and that the public advocate should make it possible for New Yorkers to use it. He has ideas aplenty about how that high-speed Wi-Fi could look.

For instance, Mr. Rasiej has begun a Web site (www.wefixnyc.com) where people can e-mail pictures of potholes with their locations, which become part of a photographic map.

After he found himself the sole person to testify at a City Council public hearing on education early this year, he created a new way for people to submit testimony over the Internet that produced about 700 submissions to a Council commission on school reform, said Melorra Sochet, the commission's deputy director. Mr. Rasiej said that as public advocate, he would encourage people to submit testimony and view hearings over the Web.

Here is the entire text in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/nyregion/metrocampaigns/02lives.html?oref=login
A Man With a Vision for Getting New York Wired

By ROBIN SHULMAN
Published: September 2, 2005

A recent steaming Tuesday found Andrew Rasiej at the 74th Street-Broadway stop of the No. 7 train in Jackson Heights, damp across the brow at 8 a.m. A novice politician running for public advocate - a kind of ombudsman for New Yorkers - he was proselytizing his faith in citywide wireless access to the Internet.

"I don't believe that one politician can solve the problems of eight million New Yorkers." Andrew Rasiej

"It's about connecting the knowledge with the need!" he yelled to a reporter as the train sped into the station; then, as passengers rushed off the train, he offered them his fliers and his too-genuine-for-a-politician smile.

For Mr. Rasiej (pronounced ra-SHAY), being public advocate - the person who succeeds the mayor if he or she is incapacitated - is not just about triaging complaints from the public. It is also about fostering a revolution in the way people and government exchange information.

"The traditional model is that we elect a public official and they're going to solve all our problems," said Mr. Rasiej, 47. "I don't believe that model works anymore. I don't believe that one politician can solve the problems of eight million New Yorkers. I do believe that eight million New Yorkers can solve their own problems."

He thinks that the Internet can help people organize and share ideas, and that the public advocate should make it possible for New Yorkers to use it. He has ideas aplenty about how that high-speed Wi-Fi could look.

For instance, Mr. Rasiej has begun a Web site (www.wefixnyc.com) where people can e-mail pictures of potholes with their locations, which become part of a photographic map.

After he found himself the sole person to testify at a City Council public hearing on education early this year, he created a new way for people to submit testimony over the Internet that produced about 700 submissions to a Council commission on school reform, said Melorra Sochet, the commission's deputy director. Mr. Rasiej said that as public advocate, he would encourage people to submit testimony and view hearings over the Web.

Mr. Rasiej also says that more civic uses should be found for Web sites like Meetup.com that connect people to others nearby interested in the same issue. For instance, a mother in the Bronx who is frustrated because emergency rooms in local hospitals lack equipment to handle asthma cases should be able to go to a Web site to connect with a mother in Brooklyn fighting for the same thing, he says.

But Mr. Rasiej faces an uphill fight in his effort to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Betsy Gotbaum, in the primary, since she enjoys wide support among the city's most powerful politicians. And even if Mr. Rasiej were elected, his ambitious plans could prove hard to turn into reality, particularly given the limited powers of the public advocate's job.

MR. RASIEJ, unmarried and with a girlfriend, lives in Manhattan at Spring and Lafayette Streets. He was raised in Bogota, N.J., by Polish immigrant parents; his father is a retired electrical engineer, his mother a homemaker. He attended Fordham Preparatory School, then - feeling guilty because his father had paid for his high school education - applied to a tuition-free arts, engineering and architecture college, Cooper Union, without ever having taken an art course. His undergraduate study of art and architecture taught him to be creative, he said.

He spent some time working in real estate, then got into the nightclub business. He owned Irving Plaza, the small concert hall near Union Square, and founded and directed the New York Nightlife Association.

But then he found technology, and became his own kind of public advocate. In recent years he has nominated himself to respond to problems - terrorism, miscommunication, a shortage of computer expertise in New York City schools - with innovations for the use of technology.

In 1997, he started the Mouse program that trains students to fix computers in New York City schools and administer the networks. After 9/11, he organized technology experts to volunteer to help small businesses in Lower Manhattan get back into operation.

Soon after that, he lobbied for the technology equivalent of a National Guard, a cadre of fiber-optic cable installers, network administrators and others to repair downed communications systems in an emergency and create new ones. A federal National Emergency Technology Guard, or NET Guard initiative, folded into a Homeland Security bill, was passed in 2002 but has yet to be carried out.

He also recently invested in Mideastwire.com, a new service that translates Arabic and Farsi news and opinion pieces into English to improve understanding of the Middle East.

But still frustrated by the relatively poor flow of information in New York City, he decided to run for public advocate. The wireless platform came out of Mr. Rasiej's sense that access to the Internet is a basic civil right.

In New York, citywide wireless access would cost $80 million, Mr. Rasiej said, and while as public advocate he could not finance it, he said he would push for legislation for the City Council to do so.

"If you create a wireless network, a whole host of things will happen that I can't control," he said.

Emergency medical workers could have instant information on the patient they are treating, he said. Firefighters could glance at the floor plans of buildings on their way to a fire. Police officers could look up license plate numbers and gain access to databases from any location.

Of his race for the advocate's office, Mr. Rasiej said: "It's the perfect office in that it has the most potential to be reinvented. It's so poorly defined."

"I can't live in a society where the political process is so dysfunctional," he said, "that collecting information to make the city function better is a politicized thing."

This is from the September 4, 2005 program.

MP3 - Part One

MP3 - Part Two

MP3 - Parts One and Two

Video Part One

Video Part Two

Video Parts One and Two

Here's Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana on Meet the Press from yesterday morning, September 4, 2005.

Here's an article about it in the Kansas City Star.

Video (Crooks and Liars)

My archive of this video

Tim Russert: First Mr. President Broussard. Let me start with you. You just heard the Director of Homeland Security's explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?

Aaron Broussard: "The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonment of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history."

Here are some clips from CNN that ran this afternoon (September 4, 2005).

(Hopefully I'll get some more up tonight, but now I want to get 60 min and meet the press up first, now that these are up.)

1. The Mayor of New Orleans blaming the Bush Administration for not providing proper assistance.
(video, MP3)

2. A rescuer explaining how he doesn't even really consider what he's doing "a real rescue," because he's "just moving people languishing on their roofs to languishing on the expressway."
(video, MP3)

3. A general overview of the situation down there. (But note that today's 60 Minutes program** challenges the allegation that the levees broke, giving the alternative explanation that it was two or more of the city's 2 feet thick floodwalls that actually gave way.
(video, MP3)

(**This 60 minutes includes in interview with Al Naomi, who manages Flood Control for the Army Core of Engineers.)
(video, MP3)

Okay I fished around and found an update from Veterans for Peace explaining how they have been helping the Red Cross in Covington, LA.

There is also a petition you can sign to endorse that vacant military bases be used to house hurricane victims.

Here's the url to give money to the Red Cross

Damn. How'd dat happen?

Oh well, too late now. But I'm back for real this time (a likely story).

I'm at home working on some of my graduate projects, when I couldn't help but turn on CNN to check in on whatever the hell is going on in New Orleans.

The result of which is a series of video clips that I'm about to put up here, that I would love it if you helped me follow up on, as my time is limited today and tomorrow, but, you know, timing's a bitch :-)

I'm trying to determine what is actually going on over there so I can determine how I can best help out. I read an article questioning the effectiveness of giving money to the Red Cross (like a "they're not going to actually be there helping out, so don't give them money" story) -- that also contributed to my apprehension about just throwing money at the problem (my first response).

Yippie. The first review is in, and it's a goodin' I don't think the online version is up yet, so here it is:

BPM - September 2005

"Dissent is back with their forth long player, Primal Deconstruction. If you enjoyed their last journey through emotion and sound this'll surely treat you right. Gregory Howe, the brainchild behind the blunted, sonic landscape (who also happens to serve as el jefe for the label), delivers the sort of musical variety that makes a lasting impression. Between the brushed drums, loose horn arrangements, syrupy jazz licks, guitar strums and memorable beats, many arenas are dabbled in - it's one big harmonius nuptial. But, without Howe's clear vision and passion, the album would, no doubt, come off as yet another generic broken beat excursion. Thankfully that's not the case-spectrum of sound serves as a sonic narrative, but the message is fully realized through the hauntingly sultry voice of Nathalie Sanchez. Highlights include the rhythmically adventurous uptempo jam "Native Time" and "Pouvez-Vous Voir Le Soleil," which serves as a low-key coda to an elegant album." (Jackie Chiles)