A minor celebrity like Harry Connick Jr perhaps? ;-)

Good to see Poppagator & family have surfaced. My sister in law was evacuated to Baton Rouge from Xavier/Tulane (along with several hundred others) on Wednesday. It does beg the question: if they could evacuate several hundred people from the university campuses, which are smack dab in the middle of downtown NO, why not others?

Answer: they have middle and upper class advocates outside the region, and the students and staff at the universities aren't perceived as "dangerous and desperate".

Now then, Xavier (where my sister works) is an African American university, and nearly all of the evacuees there were African American. So the only difference between the people there and the people blocks away from them was class. Not race, class.

People need to remember the demographics of the city being 60+% African American, and a country where the poorest urban populations are predominantly African American.

To me, the discrepancies of who is getting evacuated and who isn't has to do with class just as much as it does race. That said, it is impossible not to notice from media coverage that it is African Americans waiving from the rooftops, jammed into the so-called shelters, and frying on the freeway overpasses.

Our family still has a 19 yr old nephew in Biloxi at Keesler Air Force Base who hasn't surfaced yet, so we're a bit nervous about that (though Keesler says there were no injuries on the base).

And we have another nephew and his wife--he is a paramedic, she an EMT--who should be arriving at the New Orleans airport right about now, who signed on to do a two week shift at the makeshift MASH/triage unit there. I shudder to think of what they will see. They will be changed people by the time they come home.

BTW, I don't think I've ever detested Dubya more than I do right now.