Watching KVille

I have noticed New Orleans has been in the headlines. I guess Watching K-Ville is now Watching “K-Ville.”

Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards, a great candidate in my estimation, has bowed out of the running, after finding himself in a Ralph Nader-like spot between two stronger(?) candidates. When Edwards announced he was running for the rather thankless job of picking up George Dubya’s mess, he did it in the Ninth Ward.

And then Edwards chose the same spot to announce he was no longer pursuing the presidential problem. To again draw attention to the slow work in New Orleans, and/or to bring everything back full-circle. Was Edwards being cheeky or poetic? Bold, either way, as Edwards has been criticized for working at a hedge fund after 2004’s failed VP bid that included investments in companies that foreclosed on Katrina victims. Either way, he and his family spent the rest of the New Orleans afternoon building houses.

Although the Times-Picayune did offer the following correction to the Edwards campaign rhetoric.

Although Edwards was fond of saying that his campaign started in the Lower 9th Ward, a poor, mostly black area that became a national symbol of the post-hurricane flooding, he neither started it nor ended it there. Edwards launched his campaign from eastern New Orleans and closed it in the Bywater neighborhood, both of which are in the 9th Ward but not the Lower 9th Ward. — Times Picayune

Another blow to the “working class” came at the pounding of a gavel in New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers, so fond of building crappy canals, cannot be held responsible for any damages that resulted to property as a result of the levees breaking during Katrina. The Times-Picayune reported this today.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers is immune under federal law from responsibility for damages resulting from the failure of drainage canal walls in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

The action apparently shields the agency from a portion of nearly 500,000 claims filed by New Orleans area homeowners, businesses and city agencies, many of whom navigated traffic jams around the corps’ Uptown headquarters or waited in long lines to beat a deadline for filing the claims, totaling more than $3 quadrillion.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled that the Flood Control Act of 1928 provides immunity to the corps and other federal agencies involved in building flood projects. He relied on 1986 and 2001 Supreme Court rulings that found the law “provides immunity where, as here, a flood control project fails to control floodwaters because of the failure of the flood control project itself.” –Times-Picayune

K-Ville, New Orleans, John Edwards, Ralph Nader, George Bush, Ninth Ward, Katrina, Times-Picayune, Army Corps of Engineers, Flood Control