Despite the casinos, things are still tough down on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast two years after Hurricane Katrina. Read my piece, “Hurricane Recovery, Republican Style” today in Salon. My reporting from the Gulf over the past year has been subsidized by a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute. Some of my colleagues in that program have been filing outstanding journalism. Larry Blumenfeld, from New York, has been writing about music and culture in New Orleans; read his beautiful piece, “It Ain’t Easy in the Big Easy,” also in Salon. Over at Mother Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John McQuaid has an amazing three-part series on the “Unlearned Lessons from Katrina.” And radio reporter Tena Rubio of Public Radio Exchange has just posted her documentary, “Two Years After Katrina: Still Weathering the Storm.” Where is Franklin D. Roosevelt when we need him? I want another New Deal, a Works Progress Administration for the victims of Katrina.
