Yes, that's Tim Kaine wading through the muck in New Orleans, as "he and [Louisiana] Gov. Kathleen Blanco joined a group of corporate volunteers under the intense afternoon sun to raise and hammer into place a framing wall for a house in a new community in the St. Claude neighborhood called Musicians' Village."According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Tim Kaine called his bus tour of the devastated city "a 'very sobering trip' that gripped him more with each mile of devastation they passed." Kaine was in town for the 72nd annual meeting of the Southern Governors' Assocation, which this year was attended by fewer than half the group's members. What's the deal with THAT, by the way? I don't know, but it seems to me that all the Southern governors should have been there in solidarity with Louisiana, less than one year after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see that Governor Kaine was there, pitching in to help rebuild one community. Not so different from the work he did when he was a Catholic missionary in Honduras, I'd guess. Now, if we could just get the Republican White House and Republican Congress to pay more attention to New Orleans, instead of trying to distract us with every divisive, "wedge issue" under the sun, we'd all be a lot better off.
Only a handful of governors had arrived in New Orleans by Saturday afternoon to take part in the association's 72nd annual meeting, which is being hosted by Blanco, this year's chairwoman of the group. Hurricane Katrina had halted her trip to the 2005 meeting in Greensboro, Ga.:Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour checked in Saturday. Some other governors are expected today, but it appeared that fewer than half of the association's 17 governors will attend the meeting. Upcoming elections caused some to decline their invitations. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley is on an economic development tour of China and Korea.
No paticular pattern that I can see.