Unease in the Miss. Delta as floodwaters spread

Officials in a small town with no local newspaper of TV stations are trying to assure residents they are doing what they can to shore up the levee to protect them from the swollen Mississippi River.

"It's getting scary," said Rita Harris, 43, who lives in a tiny wooden house in the shadow of the levee in Rena Lara, a town of 500. "They won't let you go up there to look at the water."

The uneasiness is being felt all along the poverty-stricken Delta as oozing floodwaters from the Mississippi River and its tributaries spilled across farm fields, cut off churches, washed over roads and forced people from their homes Wednesday.

Some used boats to navigate flooded streets as the crest rolled slowly downstream, bringing misery to low-lying communities. About 600 homes have been flooded in the Delta in the past several days as the water rose toward some of the highest levels on record.

The flood crest is expected to push past the Delta by late next week.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour urged people to get out if they think there is even a chance their homes will flood. He said there is no reason to believe a levee on the Yazoo River would fail, but if it did, 107 feet of water would flow over small towns.

"More than anything else, save your life and don't put at risk other people who might have to come in and save your lives," he said.

Much farther downstream, Louisiana officials were awaiting an Army Corps of Engineers decision on whether to open the Morganza spillway to take the pressure off the levees protecting Baton Rouge and, downstream, New Orleans and the many oil refineries in between.

The Mississippi Delta, with a population of about 465,000, is a leaf-shaped expanse of rich soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, extending about 200 miles from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss. Along the way are towns whose names are familiar to Civil War buffs, aficionados of the blues, and scholars of the civil rights era: Clarksdale, Greenwood, Greenville and Yazoo City.

While some farms in the cotton-, rice- and corn-growing Delta are prosperous, there is also grinding poverty. Nine of the 11 counties that touch the Mississippi River in Mississippi have poverty rates at least double the national average of 13.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The governor said the state is asking local officials to get in touch with people who might have no electricity and phones and thus no way to get word of the flooding.

"It's a tiny number, but we have to find them," Barbour said.

Late Wednesday, President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration for 14 counties in Mississippi because of the flooding. Housing and home repairs will be covered and low-interest loans to cover uninsured damage will be available.

In Greenville, Liz Jones, who is unemployed, lives on the second floor of a housing project and worries what might happen in the event of a levee break. She has no means of transportation.

"I got a baby and my mama. I don't know what we'd do about food and clothes and stuff," she said.

In Hollandale, one of the small rural towns in the Delta the governor warned might flood if the levee breaks, 62-year-old nursing home worker Geraldine Jackson fretted about what to do if she and her husband have to leave their red-brick house, where pieces of the roof have broken off and the white trim is peeling.

"I have relatives, but all my relatives live in the Delta, and the water's going to get them too," she said. "I'm just real messed up."

Swollen by weeks of heavy rain and snowmelt, the Mississippi River has been breaking high-water records that have stood since the 1920s and '30s. It is projected to crest at Vicksburg on May 19 and shatter the mark set there during the cataclysmic Great Flood of 1927. The crest is expected to reach New Orleans on May 23.

Even after the peak passes, water levels will remain high for weeks, and it could take months for flooded homes to dry out.

About 600,000 acres of cultivated row crops could flood, mainly winter wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton and rice, said Andy Prosser, spokesman with the Mississippi Department of Agriculture. Even if the levees hold, the state expects to lose $150 million to $200 million worth of crops, the governor said. Mississippi's catfish farmers could also be wiped out if the Yazoo floods their ponds and washes away their fish.

Many of the victims of the slowly unfolding disaster are poor people living perilously close to the water.

In the Memphis, Tenn., area, where the Mississippi crested Tuesday just inches short of the 1927 record, many of the flooded dwellings were mobile homes and one-story brick or wood buildings in low-lying, working-class neighborhoods unprotected by floodwalls or levees.

Maria Flores, her husband, Pedro Roman, and their four children ended up in a church shelter in south Memphis — some 20 miles from their trailer in the Millington area of Shelby County. They lost a trailer in last year's flood, and it happened to them again this year.

Flores, who works as a baby sitter, and Roman, an unemployed day laborer, did not have disaster insurance and suspect their trailer is a total loss. At the shelter, they were receiving clothing and three meals a day and were sleeping on air mattresses in a room with 20 other people.

Flores said she stopped going to work because it was too far and she could not afford the gas. Roman seemed almost paralyzed by the uncertainty.

"People who have money have a better chance of getting back on their feet than poorer people," Flores said. "That's our problem."

President Obama trades friendly barbs at Gridiron Club dinner

It took three attempts, but the Gridiron Club - a hokey, hallowed vestige of swampland-era Washington - finally got President Obama to show up for its annual dinner Saturday night. And yet, what did the members get? No respect, we tell you - no respect!
The president told the 650 guests at the downtown Renaissance Hotel that they were meeting at a time when "a powerful spirit of change is tearing down old regimes, decaying institutions, remnants of the past."
Pause. "So, look out, Gridiron Club. . . . I mean, look at this get-up. Forget about winning the future. How about entering the present?"
By that point, though, Obama had already been serenaded by a gang of Gridiron members, impersonating the GOP House leadership while dressed as Hells Angels, about how they're "gonna block Barack around the clock," to the tune of the old Bill Haley song.
We're gonna move Obama to the right
We're gonna mock mock mock his election fight
We're gonna talk, gonna talk, and then we might indict!
Yes, America, it's one of those Washington dinners: where leading politicians and media elite dress up in their finest - white tie, in this case - to eat, drink and lob passive-aggressive jokes at one another, in a way that seems pointed and mean but only serves to feed the beyond-the-Beltway suspicion that They Are All in Bed Together.
Such as: Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels joking that he got his duds from "the bearded guy at Men's Wearhouse. Anyone else notice, you never see him and Wolf Blitzer in the same place at the same time?" Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Mitt Romney: "We have more in common than our hairstyles; we both used to think health-care reform would advance our careers." Al Hunt of Bloomberg feigning surprise that the absent Sen. Chuck Schumer would miss a chance to schmooze reporters: "It's like Charlie Sheen missing a hookers' convention."
Only among friends, right? They kid because they love. Right?
In the D.C.-as-high-school metaphor, where the 3,000-person White House Correspondents' Association spring dinner is fondly known as "prom," Gridiron is something like the Student Council Follies. The 126-year-old group is a relatively exclusive cadre of the Washington press corps - limited to 65 active members, most of them well over age 50 - whose preferred method of entertainment in 2011 remains Broadway-style current-events song parodies.
But we confess: Some of it is kinda funny. Worthy of a 12:52 a.m. slot on "Saturday Night Live," even. In the Act 2 finale, "Karl Rove," dressed as a mad scientist, sang to the Johnny Cash tune "I've Been Everywhere": "I've seen every one, man . . ./They all wanna run, man/Egos by the ton, man . . ." (Rove was played by the Marine Band's Kevin Bennear - like many of Gridiron's best voices, not a full member but a ringer enlisted for the occasion.)
And with that, a parade of 20 Gridiron members traipsed across the stage, goofily costumed as the 2012 GOP hopefuls: Romney in a hospital gown, Rick Santorum as an altar boy, Haley Barbour as a Confederate soldier, Michele Bachmann in thigh-high red boots, Rudy Giuliani in a pink ball gown and so on. (Don't get the jokes? Then you're not as politics-consumed as this audience.)
I've seen Huckabee at his weekly weigh-in
Sarah Palin out surveyin'
Eye of Newt and chin of Romney
Guy in drag, that's Giuliani
Mitt, he's drivin' fast and far
With man's best friend strapped to his car
Maybe you had to be there - not that we were. The oddity of this journalist-hosted dinner is that it's on the record yet off-limits to any non-member journalists writing about it - forcing us to beg for details from wine-bleary colleagues inside the room. (We gleaned much of the musical entertainment from a Friday afternoon dress rehearsal.) Once again this year, C-SPAN begged the Gridiron, in the name of "openness and transparency," to admit its cameras into the dinner, and once again it was rebuffed. We get it, though: Would the president have brought the same edge to his routine with cameras there?
Like the one about how before Rahm Emanuel joined him as chief of staff, his approval ratings were above 60 percent and unemployment was below 8 percent - so "Good luck, Chicago!" And how he's grateful for Barbour's support of the first lady's anti-obesity campaign, but "Haley, when Michelle said you need to run, she didn't mean for president!" (Because he's fat - get it?) As for Jon Huntsman, his former ambassador to China who's now pondering his own 2012 Republican bid: "The next GOP nominee for president. Love that guy!" If Huntsman runs, Obama said he'd be the guy in New Hampshire holding the "Honk for Huntsman" signs on the side of the road; if he has an Iowa fish fry, Obama said he'd be there to cook. "He is truly the yin to my yang, and I'm going to make sure every primary voter knows it."
John Boehner jokes were big, of course. The president said he used to think the House speaker was tan, but after seeing him tear up so much, he realized: "That's not a tan - that's rust!" A Gridiron skit had Fake Boehner singing "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to," Lesley Gore-style. ("I'm try'n to show them some leadership here/Some gravitas and some guts/How did I end up in bed/With all these tea party nuts?")
By all accounts, Daniels, the official Republican speaker of the night, slayed the room with a routine that was both self-deprecatory and snarky. On his own presidential prospects, "all this favorable press I've been getting . . . it's hard not to let it go to your head: 'small,' 'stiff,' 'short,' 'pale,' 'unimposing,' 'unassuming,' 'uninspiring.' . . . It's destiny!" About that sling on his right arm: "Rotator cuff surgery was really a cover story. The truth is I broke a rib traveling to last month's governors' conference. I drew a middle seat between Haley Barbour and Chris Christie. . . . I couldn't get up to go to the bathroom. Their tummies were stuck in the full upright and locked position."
Sebelius, the night's Democratic speaker, recommended the president "consider folding the TSA into our department. We could make life a lot easier for the businessman on the go - by allowing him to get a boarding pass and a colonoscopy at the same time."
Ah, good times. Sorry none of us was there for Gridiron's age-old closing ritual, in which all guests linked arms to sing "Auld Lang Syne." A more memorable musical moment may have come when the Marine Band struck up "Hail to the Chief" to welcome the president.
Obama waved them off: "Play that song we talked about," he ordered.
And they did: "Born in the U.S.A."
"Some things just bear repeating," he said.

Romney seeks to address health care woes

Call it an attempt to address an obvious political vulnerability.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Saturday derided President Barack Obama's health care law — modeled in some ways after one the ex-governor signed in Massachusetts — as a misguided and egregious effort to seize more power for Washington.

"Obamacare is bad law, bad policy, and it is bad for America's families," Romney declared. "And that's the reason why President Obama will be a one-term president." He vowed to repeal it if he were ever in a position to do so, and drew hearty cheers from his Republican Party audience.

Then, raising the Massachusetts law, Romney argued that the solution for the unique problems of one state isn't the right prescription for the nation as a whole, and he acknowledged: "Our experiment wasn't perfect — some things worked, some didn't, and some things I'd change."

"One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover," Romney said, again earning applause. "The federal government isn't the answer for running health care any more than it's the answer for running Amtrak or the post office."

With that, he used his first appearance before New Hampshire Republicans since the midterm elections to start addressing head-on the issue that's certain to be a hurdle in his all-but-certain presidential campaign.

Romney's states-rights pitch is one that GOP primary voters are likely to hear over the next year as he tries to persuade them to overlook his flaws because he alone is the strongest Republican to challenge Obama on the country's top issue — the economy.

The failed candidate of 2008 is expected to formally announce a second candidacy later this spring. Campaign signs posted along the road leading to the hotel where he was speaking may have gotten a bit ahead of him. They said "Mitt Romney for President" and suggested that the theme would be "True Strength for America's Future."

Romney and his aides insisted they were old signs.

Among Romney's biggest challenges: explaining to GOP primary voters why he signed a law that became the foundation for Obama's national overhaul. Passed by Congress last year, Obama's health care law has enraged conservatives who view it as a costly government expansion and intrusion into their lives because it mandates insurance for most Americans.

Romney all but ignored the topic in his last major public appearance last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

But, since then, the similarities with Romney's 2006 law in Massachusetts have increasingly been dogging him.

Obama praised the efforts in Massachusetts during a meeting with governors at the White House, saying: "I agree with Mitt Romney, who recently said he's proud of what he accomplished on health care by giving states the power to determine their own health care solutions. He's right."

Also, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, an Obama friend, said Romney deserves a lot of credit on health care. "One of the best things he did was to be the co-author of our health care reform, which has been a model for national health care reform," he said.

The praise from Democrats provides fodder for Romney's Republican primary opponents; some are already heaping on the criticism.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says in his new book: "If our goal in health care reform is better care at lower cost, then we should take a lesson from RomneyCare, which shows that socialized medicine does not work." It was a play on the word that conservative critics use to describe the national law: Obamacare.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who is likely to run for president against Romney, took a shot at Romney when he testified before a House committee reviewing Obama's health care overhaul. He lumped Romney in with a late liberal icon and an Obama friend in saying: "Senator (Edward M.) Kennedy and Governor Romney and then Governor Patrick, if that's what Massachusetts wants, we're happy for them. We don't want that. That's not good for us."

A GOP rising star, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., also weighed in, saying of Romney's law: "It's not that dissimilar to Obamacare. And you probably know I'm not a big fan of Obamacare."

All that was the backdrop as Romney took the stage at the Carroll County Lincoln Day Dinner at the Attitash Grand Summit Hotel in northern New Hampshire.

First, he poked fun at the criticism that seems to be coming from all sides, saying "you may have noticed that the president and his people spend more time talking about me and Massachusetts health care than Entertainment Tonight spends talking about Charlie Sheen."

Then he turned serious and provided an explanation, emphasizing states' rights to a crowd from the "Live Free Or Die" state.

His coming candidacy may hinge on whether they buy it.