Nice People

Via TPM, here's a story designed to spread some Christmas cheer (that's right, CHRISTMAS cheer, I said it O'Reilly!):

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth's Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

City officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring high-speed Internet access for free to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition. Some states have laws prohibiting them.

Cities are going to win this whole free WiFi battle, I mean, politicians can win elections on the single issue of universal access for the next 100 years. And there are more businesses that are for it than the phone company, who's against it.

So stamping your little feet and taking back a donation from a shattered city in the midst of a catastrophe seems a little... shall we say excessive?

Meanwhile, we're learning that the destruction of New Orleans was a man-made disaster, a civil engineering disaster, not a natural disaster that couldn't have been avoided, but the result of major mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers:

The floodwall on the 17th Street Canal levee was destined to fail long before it reached its maximum design load of 14 feet of water because the Army Corps of Engineers underestimated the weak soil layers 10 to 25 feet below the levee, the state's forensic levee investigation team concluded in a report to be released this week.

That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team of engineers from the corps, local firm Eustis Engineering and the national firm Modjeski and Masters could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history.

"It's simply beyond me," said Billy Prochaska, a consulting engineer in the forensic group known as Team Louisiana. "This wasn't a complicated problem. This is something the corps, Eustis, and Modjeski and Masters do all the time. Yet everyone missed it -- everyone from the local offices all the way up to Washington."

This won't be reported that much. Harry Shearer is remembering who's saying it and who isn't. He's also writing about a story that pissed me off in the LA Times this weekend:

Saturday, the LAT did a long piece about the diminishing chances for a comprehensive Louisiana recovery program in Congress, premised partly on Sen. Mary Landrieu's alleged "shrillness" (would a male senator be described that way?) and partly on the state's reputation for political shenanigans. Said Idaho's Republican Senator Larry Craig:

"Louisiana and New Orleans are the most corrupt governments in our country, and they have always been," Craig told a newspaper in his home state.

"Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in Louisiana as well."

Fraud was certainly in the culture of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. I guess they hired a bunch of Louisianans to preside over it. Fuck you very much, Larry Craig.