Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005, upending the lives of 1.5 million people and putting Black folks’ lack of political and social power front and center for all the world to see.

The storms magnified racial disparities in the U.S., and no place demonstrated this more clearly than New Orleans, where 80% of the city was submerged after Katrina.

It should come as no surprise that someone would leak internal documents showing that Handel was behind the whole Planned Parenthood debacle and defended it to the bitter end, even after it was clear it would seriously damage Komen.

Fixed, says a better writer than I am, is not unbroken.

I went to New Orleans this year for Rising Tide with the memory of the city four years ago fresh in my mind. With the memory of the bravery of its people, with the shell-shock and desperate stretched smiles wide, fresh in my mind. I was prepared for that, for the rage that swept over me at the abandonment of this place to hit me like a wrecking ball again.

And there she was, standing on the lawn.

Sometime today, the US Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza Floodway in Louisiana for the second time in its history. The object is to divert some of the huge flow of water coming down the Mississippi away from the usual path that streams past Baton Rouge and New Orleans into the Mississippi delta, and into a largely agricultural region of Louisiana instead. It’s a Hobson’s choice, where agricultural fields and various small towns will be flooded in order to help save many the lives and livelihoods, and communities of millions of Louisiana residents nearer to the Mississippi’s regular pathways.

This is Katrina in reverse, with the water coming from the north rather than from the Gulf. Let’s hope the lessons learned from flooding in the past that led to the creation of the floodways will help, and that the post-disaster recovery efforts that failed so spectacularly with Katrina have been improved this time around.

When you hear people say that no one is happy with this deal, because everyone had to compromise and every side had to give up something to get there, remember this: Virginia Foxx is plenty happy — she’s happy enough to muscle her way into camera range when the Speaker announces the deal. And the Speaker of the House is plenty happy to have this hateful extremist bigot right there alongside him.

Much of the coverage of the disaster in Japan (including ours at FDL) has been focused on the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. As troubling as those reactors are, however, they are only part of the story. While the Fukushima Fifty and their colleagues work on the reactors, thousands upon thousands of other relief workers are laboring elsewhere — and they’ve got a LOT to do.

We humans find ourselves in an awkward – perhaps fatally awkward – circumstance. We seem unable to safely and morally manage the technologies and systems we are clever enough to invent. From Bhopal to Chernobyl, from Three Mile Island to the Gulf Oil spill, from New Orleans levee failures to the Japan nuclear crisis, we [...]

Well, well, well — look what The Decider says in his ghost writer’s new book.

In case there was any question about the granularity of the honor Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin want to restore, yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial while they besmirched the memory of Martin Luther King Jr on the anniversary of his great speech about his great dream — look no farther than two of Glenn Beck’s [...]

I got a phone call last night from a seminary classmate. An old college friend of hers had just committed suicide. Sadly, calls like this are far too common — whether related to military service, the economy, disasters like the Exxon Valdez or Katrina or the BP spill, or a hundred other causes.

More than ever, tough times call for us to care for one another.