Disaster Relief

WASHINGTON — Morgan E. O'Brien is used to jolting the wireless industry. Now the Nextel co-founder is back in the start-up business and again aiming to shake up the airwaves...This time, the 62-year-old entrepreneur is pitching a controversial plan to transform public safety communications while also extending high-speed wireless Internet service to hard-to-reach rural areas. His attempt to gain federal approval for his idea may be his biggest challenge yet. Supporters laud him as a visionary.… more

After watching first responder communications systems fail on 9/11 and after Hurricane Katrina, with tragic results, the vital importance of spectrum management for public safety communications has taken center stage in recent years. Congress recently passed legislation to reallocate 24 MHz of prime spectrum from TV to public safety in 2009, as part of America’s transition from analog to digital television. Currently, this new spectrum is set to be managed under the same assumptions and orthodoxies as current public safety… more

Generally speaking, you don’t want a crowbar or a wheelbarrow to feature prominently in your vacation photos. Or rubble. Or poverty (unless, perhaps, it is the exotic kind -- a shoeless boy with oil-black hair; a woman carrying vegetables to the market). But that is just the kind of experience Daniel Johnson sought out earlier this year when he organized a trip to coastal Mississippi with a few dozen officemates from Credit Suisse New York. "All along Route 10, from… more

If the Democrats and their allies in the media have their way, 8/29 will become another 9/11.

This left-leaning alliance isn’t there yet, in terms of making the sale to the country -- Hurricane Katrina as the domestic doppelganger of 9/11 -- but they are working on it.

And so Republicans have no choice, of course, but to play the Katrina blame game, too. Which is to say, Katrina is now "in play" as a political football. And on the whole, that’s… more

Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, media attention remains riveted on the rebuilding of New Orleans. But what happened to the estimated 1.5 million people who fled their flooded and destroyed homes in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana?

The Katrina-spawned diaspora is arguably the largest in U.S. history. Federal statistics suggest that about 1 million evacuees from the hurricane-damaged areas have returned to their homes. That leaves a diaspora population of about half a million people.

Where did they… more

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What words does one use to describe the story of a Christian lesbian Air Force pilot-turned-journalist-turned-Katrina-relief-activist -- a story with a distinctly faith-based "thousand points of light"-y voluntaristic orientation? Two words leap to mind: "Cholene Espinoza." I can say that after reading her fascinating and thought-provoking memoir, Through the Eye of the Storm: A Book Dedicated to Rebuilding What Katrina Washed Away

Espinoza grew up in New Mexico and graduated from the US Air Force… more

Last September's tragedy in New Orleans revealed, in the starkest manner, the soft underbelly of America's cities. After all the 1990s rhetoric insisting that "Cities are back!" we got a glimpse behind the facades of a major urban center and tourist mecca which revealed many utterly dependent and disorganized residents, looking more like Third Worlders than denizens of a modern metropolis. In the process, the urban liberalism that has dominated city administration for the last generation was unmasked.

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to beat back the sun, give way to communities screened by oak and cypress trees. One of the loveliest neighborhoods is Bayou Black. There are thoroughbreds on lawns there, and an alligator farm. The week's sole rush hour begins Saturday… more

The New America Foundation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and the Committee for Economic Development convened a forum on the budget deficit in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Entitled "Paying for Katrina: Specifics for Closing the Fiscal Gap," and covered live by C-SPAN 2 on Monday, November 14, 2005, the forum featured experts from a diversity of ideological perspectives.

Despite this diversity, there was a surprising degree of consensus among the panelists, who expressed universal alarm with our… more