So many takaways. So many touchdowns #saints

Yin yang twins

“he sees the field in his mind”, some random commentator on Drew Brees

Has some tickets to White Denim @OneEyedJacks. RT this for a chance to get on the list. They Rock

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/event.php?eid=210128514907&index=1 http://bit.ly/07vfwTs

Blight continues to disappear in New Orleans, report shows

The number of vacant properties in New Orleans has plummeted in the past year — from nearly 70,000 abandoned lots to about 61,000 — while blight in several other major American cities has seen a steady uptick, according to a new report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Using U.S. Postal Service records, researchers found that some 54,000 properties across town remain blighted or have no structure on them, while nearly 7,500 homes are likely habitable but vacant.

The new statistics continue a trend of diminishing blight. The data centerreported in May that New Orleans was home to about 65,900 vacant or unoccupied properties.

Data center director Allison Plyer said the steep drop over the past year “indicates substantial progress in the rebuilding and redevelopment of neighborhoods flooded by the levee failures of 2005.” City officials have estimated that more than half of New Orleans’ 200,000 residential properties were severely damaged in Hurricane Katrina.

The past year’s decline in blight brings the total proportion of abandoned addresses in New Orleans to 29 percent of all residential lots, according to the report. 

While that ratio remains the highest among five other cities with chronic blight problems, those cities — Washington, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Detroit and Flint, Mich. — all saw increases in the number of blighted properties in the past year, the report indicates.

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In New Orleans, Elation Over Katrina Liability Ruling

NEW ORLEANS — Since the first days after Hurricane Katrina, when the streets were still under water, many residents of New Orleans and its surroundings have maintained that the flood that wrecked their lives was the government’s fault, and that the government should pay for it.

On Wednesday night came news that many had hoped for but few had believed would ever actually happen: a federal judge agreed.

“My head is spinning,” said Pam Dashiell, a co-director of the Lower Ninth Ward Sustainability Project and a 20-year resident of the neighborhood. “Maybe things are really breaking for the people.”

The sense of vindication was widespread, but the practical implications were less clear. The morning after Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr.’s decision that the Army Corps of Engineers’ negligent maintenance of a major navigation channel led to major flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and the adjacent St. Bernard Parish, a pleasantly startled New Orleans was still trying to decipher what it meant.

Was it an opening for tens of thousands of lawsuits, or a big class-action lawsuit, that could add up to billions of dollars in compensation for residents? Or was it leverage for negotiating a broader, regionwide settlement with the government? Some experts suggested that it was a welcome but ultimately symbolic ruling that could be overturned on appeal.

Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said that the government was still reviewing the decision.

“We have made no decision as to what the government’s next step will be in this matter,” he said in a statement.

But given the potential of liability, legal experts are expecting the government to appeal.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, where the case would go, has a record of hostility to plaintiffs in environmental cases, said Oliver Houck, a law professor at Tulane University. But, he said, Judge Duval’s decision is so technical and packed with details — it came with a 33-page appendix of graphs, charts and maps — that there are only a few areas where it would be exposed to a reversal.

“For an appellate court to reverse him on the facts is unthinkable,” Professor Houck said.

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New Orleans Saints' Drew Brees, President Obama team up

In support of his United We Serve initiative, President Barack Obama and NFL stars Drew Brees, DeMarcus Ware and Troy Polamalu team up to highlight the importance of fitness for America’s children.

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