Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

"No longer viewed as just forums for law gossip or associate griping, blogs are becoming a marketing tool for large law firms eager to create a buzz about their practice areas," reports The National Law Journal in a article (reg req'ed) this week.

Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton of Los Angeles, Davis Wright Tremaine of Seattle, McGlinchey Stafford of New Orleans and other big firms have unveiled blogs recently that focus on particular areas of the law or specific statutes. Some blogs include open discussions that allow reader comments, while others are less interactive.

All, however, are geared toward casting specific legal information -- and the firm's name -- into the World Wide Web.

The growing popularity of large-firm blogging represents a kind of evolution in the use of the technology, which up until about a year ago appeared to be largely the domain of individual lawyers and small practices.

Ain't it great that these are also all LexBlog clients. We must be doing something right.

Anthony Rollo, head of McGlinchey Stafford's consumer class action defense group and co-editor with Hunter Twiford of The Class Action Fairness Act Blog said "It's clearly an evolving area within the big firms. CAFA, a law that expanded federal court jurisdiction over class actions, is an ideal blog topic because it is specific to a certain kind of litigation -- class actions -- but one that potentially affects all such cases."

Sheppard Mullin, a 410 attorney firm has launched six different blogs to which lawyers from various practice groups contribute. Vickie Spang, chief marketing officer for the firm highlighted the advantages of blogs for the Journal.

The blogs, which cover antitrust, bankruptcy, securities and other subjects, are more efficient and effective than the electronic newsletters that the firm previously sent to subscribers. The blogs get much more readership than the newsletters received. [She] estimates that the antitrust blog alone receives about 2,200 hits per day... and that convincing the firm's partners to launch the blogs took some effort, but 'they soon saw the light.

The day will soon come when most practice areas, if not most lawyers, in large law firms will be publishing blogs.

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SEOmoz, a search engine optimization resource created to benefit the entire SEO community, has published a detailed list of factors effecting search engine rankings.

Contents include:

• Introduction to Ranking Factors
• In-Document Factors Affecting Ranking
• Site Factors Affecting the Value of Hosted Documents
• Factors Affecting the Value of a Link
• URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors
• Detrimental Ranking Factors

More information than those not doing search engine optimization as part of their business need but you'll get the general lay of the land and may pick up some helpful tips, especially when it comes to writing content.

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The University of Chicago Law School is one of the finest in the country. Starting Monday their law professors will have their own blog.

Source of post: The Volokh Conspiracy

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Online viral marketing is more powerful than the old way of big and expensive marketing campaigns for inferior services and products is the essence of Seth Godin's latest post.

The bottom line is that it's way way easier to start things than it used to be (opening a movie big costs a tenth of a billion dollars, while opening a blog costs about twenty). The natural, user-driven networks that make a product succeed or fail rarely hit all at once. But the snowball effect online is far more powerful than the old-world scream & dream approach.

So, what's it mean to you?

• Make something worth making.
• Sell something worth talking about.
• Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.
• Don't listen to the first people who give you feedback.
• Don't give up. Not for a while, anyway.

Next week, LexBlog takes its next step in the growth of the company. We'll open our Bozeman, Montana office with a heck of a team I'll be introducing soon. LexBlog has attracted such talented folks because we're making something worth making, we believe in what we do, we don't listen to the blog naysayers and we're not going to give up.

Best of all, the growth of this profitable company is the result of this blog and the support of our clients. We don't have offices and cubes filled with marketing, advertising, PR and sales people. I started talking about using blogs for marketing legal services to an audience of one - me - back in November, 2003. Now, almost 1,000 posts later, many of the largest law firms as well as skilled small firm practitioners across the country are using blogs produced by LexBlog.

Now FindLaw, a web developer for lawyers among other things, is selling something that with a long stretch could be described as a blog product. LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, a lawyer directory which foolishly boasts to be the leading client development company for the legal profession, will surely follow with a blog product driven by profits and not quality. Other developers who pooh-poohed blogs earlier this year will jump on the blog bandwagon to keep up with the Joneses.

It'll be a good fight but for the reasons Seth cites, I like LexBlog's chances of remaining the leading provider of professional marketing blogs to the legal profession.

Now I have to get back to playing catch up on serving our existing clients. We're not bringing on more troops for nothing.

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At my suggestion, a lot of you already follow Steve Rubel's blog, Micro Persuasion, for info on marketing with blogs.

Here's a podcast you may want to listen to. Eric Schwartzman from the Spinfluencer podcast and Steve recently sat down to talk about blogs and PR and much more. You can read the full podcast show notes here. (Link to the 50-minute MP3 file)

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Schwartzman & Associates' has produced a Publicist's Guide to Podcasting on MP3. An audio recording is available here. The seminar features Michael Butler of Podshow, Chris McIntyre of Podcast Alley and Eric Rice of Audioblog.com, talking about how organizations are using podcasting to build stronger relationships with their key audiences.

Source of post: B.L. Ochman's weblog

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Bill Gratsch, producer 'Blawg,' the leading directory of lawyer blawgs, continues the discussion on the growth of RSS, whether people know they are using RSS or not.

Bill's thoughts on why RSS will become as much a part of the fabric of Internet use as email and Web sites:

In my mind, the goal should be to make the process of finding and subscribing to an RSS feed as simple as writing and sending an email. As part of this move towards simplification, there has been talk in the press that the acronym RSS is going to be replaced by something more intuitive. For example, there have rumors that Microsoft will start using the term 'web feeds' rather than RSS. Again, if true, I find this to be another positive sign. Big companies with deep pockets investing marketing dollars and funding technology innovations to make the RSS even more simple to understand and utilize, will help push the medium forward to the masses.

Not sure I am in favor of renaming RSS so it becomes named by Microsoft and appears to the masses to have been invented by Microsoft though.

If you haven't checked out Blawg, you ought to do so. Great listing blawgs (lawyer blogs) broken down by categories.

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Steve Matthews, Knowlege Services Director for the BC law firm of Clark Wilson and publisher of the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, recently spoke to the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries about blogs and RSS feeds. His notes and PowerPoint presentation (pdf) provide an outstanding summary of the power of blogs and RSS for law firms and where we're headed.

Matthews is convinced that RSS (real simple syndication) is revolutionary - the most important technology since the World Wide Web. He calls RSS and blogs the future of the Internet.

Source of post: The E-LawLibrary Weblog

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Bob Ambrogi is assembling a list of lawyer blawgs in his home state of Massachusetts. He is asking folks to help identify any lawyer blawg he may be missing. Drop him an email at ambrogi-at-gmail.com.

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The Davis Wright Tremaine LLP Privacy and Security Group has launched the Privacy and Security Law Blog covering breaking news and hot topics in data security law. The blog features over a dozen knowledgeable and talented folks from DWT discussing issues such as security, privacy, trade secrets, VoIP, employer/employee, identity theft, legislation, regulation, spam, encryption, Wi-Fi, the Patriot Act and more.

This is the second blog LexBlog has launched for Davis Wright Tremaine. The firm's Telecom Practice Group provides timely, in-depth reporting on the telecom legal issues via the Telecom Law Blog.

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Reporters without Borders released a PDF
handbook about blogging for dissident bloggers.

Though the title indicates the handbook is tailored for bloggers with a cause (aren't we all) there's some pretty sound information on what makes for a good blog.

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O'Reily, a pretty fine publisher of technology books, has released Podcasting Hacks, self described as the ultimate how-to of podcasting.

Though O'Reily's books can get a little too techie for most folks (me included), this one be worth having on the shelf for aspiring and experienced podcasters as it covers a fair amount.

• Find the Best Podcasts: Subscribe to them (without filling up their hard disks), and pass them on to friends
• Listen to Podcasts: Through a browser and a variety of different devices
• Choose the Right Equipment and Software: Produce a podcast with the best sound and the lowest noise
• Format a Great Show: Produce engaging programs that people will want to hear (including tips for interviewing and editing)
• Market a Podcast: Maybe even make some money off of it!
• Tweak a Blog or RSS Feed: Give listeners access to new shows
• Join or Build a Podcast Network
• Get Podcasts on the Radio
• Include Video: Get started with professional-quality videoblogging

Source of post: Hexus.net

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ABC News reports that the Hurricane Rita only heightened the public's awareness of the value of blogs and podcasts.

As Hurricane Rita approached, editors at the Houston Chronicle decided to experiment: They hand-picked about a dozen Web diarists and asked them to post regular dispatches on the newspaper's online blog all without any editorial intervention.

'One of the benefits to blogs is that they tend to be more personal, they tend to provide more the emotional feel of an event,' said Dwight Silverman, the Chronicle's interactive journalism editor. 'In traditional reporting you put on your poker face and do your writing. … It's not supposed to be the writer's emotions.'

........At The Wall Street Journal's Web site, News Tracker summarized the latest developments in a blog format reverse chronological order. The site, re-activated after an initial 12-day Hurricane Katrina run, even links to resources at other news sites something common in blogging but still rare for traditional media.

Must be what is turning Internet users onto lawyer's blogs, as opposed to their Web sites. Blogs, though very professional, are personal and get away from the stock marketing speak one reads on one law firm site after another.

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Shel Hotz reports on the launch of a blog network by blog veterans Jeremy Wright, Duncan Riley and Darren Rowse.

Conventional wisdom suggests only a handful of bloggers can make a living at the craft. Jeremy Wright and two colleagues apparently think otherwise. With the launch of b5media, Wright seems to be saying that compelling content can turn a buck. Along with Duncan Riley and Darren Rowse, Wright has opened the doors on their blogging network on August 30, paying their bloggers 40% of the revenue the blog earns through advertising. The network currently boasts 13 blogs, covering everything from cell phones and movies to to Microsoft and video games.

Portals offering a lot of good content were a tough business in the dotcom days. However, with blog feeds streaming into networks like this, you don't have the challenge of building elaborate publishing systems, paying authors up front and coming up with consistent editorial guidelines. People expect each blogger to have their own style and their posts to be short and snappy. So blog networks are being discussed all around as a new business model.

I am not sure though unless you create a really big network that a network covering a myriad of topics as opposed to a network on one topic, such as fly fishing blogs, will work. Getting the traffic required to make a buck is tough going and Internet users can easily find blogs of their liking without going through a network. But Jason McCabe Calacanis at Weblogs Inc. appears to be having some success.

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Congrats to Henry Abbott, writer for some of the nation's top sports magazines and publisher of TrueHoop, a blog covering teams, players and issues surrounding the National Basketball Association, for having his blog being designated 'Best of the Web' by Forbes.

LexBlog, which has firmly established itself as the market leader in lawyer blogs, is now attracting clients from outside the legal profession. The same things that attracted law firms to LexBlog, a turnkey solution of consulting, custom design, SEO and ongoing tech and marketing support, is leading other top flight blog publishers to the company.

It's an honor for LexBlog to serve these folks.

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MediaWeek reports ABC News has joined CBS and NBC in publishing blogs.

Following the lead of both NBC News and CBS News, ABC News is launching a series of daily blogs on its flagship news site ABCNews.com which will allow users to provide feedback to ABC News journalists, who will in turn publish personalized accounts of their own news coverage.

The blog is similar in nature to the recently launched Public Eye blog on CBSNews.com and NBC News anchor Brian William's blog on MSNBC.com. These new products are expected both to attract a younger audience to network news coverage while also answering critics who accuse mainstream news organizations of harboring biases or lacking transparency.

A year ago I reported all new blog additions like this one. Now there's more major blog launches than I could ever keep up with.

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In another 'you can have a lot of money and so called high powered PR people and still be an idiot' story, Daimler Chrysler has launched a blog for journalists only, locking out bloggers, the true influencers on the net. They define journalists as those who work for a 'known and established media organization.'

According to Toby Bloomberg writing in BusinessBlog Consulting, a very, very well read blog, her registration was turned down with this email explanation:

Thanks for your interest in TheFirehouse.biz, the Chrysler Group's media-only blog. We will issue media registration rights to members of the working press only. A member of the working press is one who is paid as an employee,freelancer who regularly contributes, or representative of a known and established media organization (newspaper, magazine, television, radio, etc.) If you would like to resubmit your registration, we would be happy to reconsider it.

B.L. Ochman, showing she knows a heck lot more about Internet marketing than the clowns doing PR at Daimler Chrysler, puts it well.

Listen up Chrysler: blogs are an established medium, many blogs have more readers than many MSM [Mainstream Media] these days, and guess what: MSM reads bloggers for leads.

Someday companies, who have historically used a particular PR, Web development, or marketing agency, are going to stop listening to such companies who don't have a clue about blogs and use some of the upstart blog companies & consultants to do their work. But gee, it was only a few weeks when I heard about Findlaw's new blog offering to lawyers - an offering that sure showed that FindLaw didn't have a clue when it came to blogs.

Sources: B.L. Ochman's weblog and Adrants

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Ogilvy PR just announced its expanded '360 Degree Digital Influence' offering. Though you need to wade through the PR speak, one can see blogs and the blogosphere are at the heart of this client offering.

The growth of personal media - blogs, wikis, podcasting - combined with the exploding importance of search have kept us busy throughout the year. We actually see these trends as part of an overall shift in digital influence,' said John Bell, creative director of Ogilvy PR and originator of 360 Degree Digital Influence. With our new expanded offering we have a more sophisticated approach to help our clients really connect with a whole new breed of influencer.

Influencer is the key word here. The 'blog contrarians' don't understand that a blog is more than a Web site that's easy to update and which allows comments. To blog means to engage in the Internet conversation with the result being that other people will influence your target audience that you are a reliable and trusted authority in your area of expertise. And experts get work.

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InformationWeek as an interesting article about how businesses are going to places like Yahoo and Google to pick up needed information and away from traditional segment leaders--newspaper companies and business trade publishers.

'News and trade services are two of the most severely impacted markets hit by the dynamo that is the search world,' says Chuck Richard, VP and lead analyst at Outsell, a research and advisory firm.

Revenue for the news and trade market reached $89.5 billion in 2004, up 8.7% from 2003. Outsell predicts growth of perhaps half that in 2005.

While the segment should continue to expand, Outsell's Market View report finds that individual user spending on B-to-B content between 2001 and 2005 fell 15%. 'Users are finding alternatives to paid N&T [news and trade] sources: mostly ad-supported content and user-created content from blogs'.

This is great news for law firms. Large law firms have great content in the form of articles, newsletters and e-alerts. Problem is it's buried in Web sites or not on Web sites at all. When the content is on Web sites, the page it's on is not set up to be indexed properly for the search engines. The result: business clients looking for information cannot find your stuff.

Blogs are an easy solution. It's easy to publish content and the content gets indexed and optimized for the search engines.

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Two of the real leaders in what can be loosely described as the Web 2.0 field (blogs, feeds, content syndication, aggregators) got together in a recent podcast to discuss copyright and syndication issues.

Denise Howell, a leading California intellectual property lawyer and publisher of Bag and Baggage, has been having conversations with PubSub's co-founder and CTO Bob Wyman over the last year about copyright and syndication. The most recent is now up at IT Conversations as an interview for Denise's Sound Policy show.

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The Global PR Blog Week 2.0 running from September 19-23 engages more than 50 influential public relations, marketing and business professionals from around the globe in a discussion about how new communications technologies are changing public relations and business communication. It's free and run in the form of a blog.

Articles and interviews covering the latest breakthroughs in online technology will cover, among other things:

• Challenges of corporate blogging
• Blog relations
• Education for the New PR
• Types of corporate blogs
• Tools, trends, and practices (including blog monitoring, podcasting, wikis, and online media rooms)
• Customer generated marketing
• Transparency & ethics
• Mainstream media and citizen journalism

The content last year was excellent. It's worth checking out and, being that it's run on a blog, you can do it any time of the day.

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The American Bar Association has put together a heck of Web site offering Hurricane Katrina disaster recovery resources.

Not only is there general legal information for the public broken down for Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas but there are also specific sections for:

• Victims & their families
• Lawyers needing disaster help
• Lawyers wanting to volunteer
• Military personnel needing legal help

My guess is Fred Faulkner, who recently became the ABA’s first webmaster, had a lot to do with getting this Web site together. Great job Fred.

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A Web site, entitled Help Katrina Lawyers has been established to benefit lawyers impacted by the hurricane. Volunteers represent legal technology consultants, practice management advisors and vendors of legal products and services across North America.

Assistance can include:

• Guidance regarding restoring backed up data, or recovering data from physically damaged computer systems or media
• Advise about temporarily practicing with either borrowed, rented or purchased new PC and voice systems
• Provide remote access to allow any lawyer who can get online to use well-known legal software to get there work out and contact clients and associates
• Provide sound longer-term focused guidance on replacing destroyed or damaged systems - but doing it the best way at fair prices, avoiding making costly mistakes

LexBlog has volunteered to set up free hurricane relief blogs and provide training so as to facilitate internal and external communications for lawyers and groups involved in the hurricane relief efforts.

Thanks to Ross Kodnor at MicroLaw for setting this Web site up.

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The ABA is totally out of touch with the abilities and needs of solos and small law firms, so says Carolyn Elefant at her My Shingle blog. Carolyn's comments were prompted by an article titled 'Solos Lead the Wireless Way' in the ABA Journal (September 2005). 

I find it appalling that the ABA isn't aware that solos have been in the forefront of legal advancements including technological ones since the beginning of time.  Just a few months ago, an article discussed in this post reported that solos were way out in front in capitalizing on the blogging trend.  And I've discussed in my opening post how solo and small firm lawyers have been first movers in use of email and websites.   In fact, I can't think of a single trend, be it advertising, marketing, web communications or paperless offices where a large firm has been ahead of solos.

Solo's and small firms need to use technology effectively to remain competitive, their very survival and the needs of their families depend on it. I started my own firm 9 years ago and learned Internet marketing by the seat of my pants. Everyone in the firm got very good at it because our survival depended on it.

At the end of my one year non-compete with LexisNexis, I became fascinated with the legal blogs being published by lawyers, mostly solos or in small firms. I saw blogs as an effective way for lawyers to share their intellectual capital so as to market themselves. The result was the birth of Lexblog, now helping large and small firms across the country market themselves effectively on the Internet.

Talented marketing and IT professionals at large firms are understandably handicapped by the red tape of getting things done. The ability of solos and small firms to make a decision and move now gives them a real head start when it comes to innovative technology.

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The Wall Street Journal has a nice story (sub. req'ed) summarizing the lawsuit brought against a blog publisher as a result of comments left on his blog.

Traffic-Power.com sued Aaron Wall, publisher a blog on search engine optimization – tactics companies use to get themselves to appear higher in searches at Google, Yahoo and elsewhere – alleging defamation and publication of trade secrets. At issue are comments left by a reader in the comments section of his blog.

Traditionally, courts have held operators of computer message boards and mailing lists cannot be held liable for statements posted by other people. It's kind of like being a phone company - you can't be liable for what people say over your phone line. I expect blogs will be viewed the same.

But the Journal reports we may be in some 'grey area' (legal phrase of all time) on this one:

Legal analysts said the suit could be a test case for determining what protections bloggers have or don't have for allegedly defamatory material posted by others. At issue would be the court's application of the federal Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that, broadly, protects providers of computer services from being held liable for content posted by others.

In a key decision in 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the operator of a Web site can post material from others without liability for the content. 'I think there's a strong case to be made that [the Decency Act] applies to bloggers,' said Marc S. Martin, a lawyer with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP in Washington, D.C., who specializes in technology law. It 'was written very broadly, and the Ninth Circuit interpreted it broadly.'

But Mr. Martin and other legal analysts said it was less clear how a court would view the accusation of misappropriation of trade secrets. The Decency Act doesn't provide protection when intellectual property is posted, and a court may rule that trade secrets fall under the definition of intellectual property. State law, rather than federal law, generally applies to trade secrets.

And possibly in the 'lawyers get paid to be creative' category it looks like the door may be open to law suits when one is a competitor and starts taking too many pot shots at the competition.

Daniel Perry, an Orlando, Fla., lawyer who has closely followed Mr. Wall's case online, said Mr. Wall may have taken on liability by posting negative comments about Traffic-Power.com himself. Another problem, he said: Mr. Wall could be viewed as a commercial competitor to Traffic-Power.com. Mr. Wall's blog is so named because he wrote a guide called SEO Book, about search engine marketing, and he promotes the book on his site.

"To be candid, he sort of moved into this moving propeller," said Mr. Perry, a former Orange County judge. He said courts would likely focus on how Mr. Wall responded to requests to remove material from his site, and Mr. Wall's criticism of Traffic-Power.com. "The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."

Hell, my blog is a full of opinions about my competitors and it's my frank, politically incorrect speech about providers of legal marketing services and solutions that brings LexBlog a lot of work. I have tremendous respect for lawyers and the good work they do but for blogs to be an effective exercise of free speech, the blog publisher cannot be afraid of law suits.

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In response to the natural disaster that has befallen the gulf coast region, LexBlog would like to help by making our services available for free to both those law firms impacted by the hurricane and the various groups and agencies lawyers are supporting through their volunteer efforts.

We understand that right now may not be business as usual and in response Lexblog would like to help by providing a free blog that can be used by your office for external and/or internal communication. These sites can be open to the public or secured behind password protection. Our staff will train you in how to use this tool to help restore lines of communication.

We are also becoming more aware of law firms who are focusing their resources and attention to assist in the aid and relief efforts. For these groups Lexblog would like to extend the same offer of a free blog to create a place to aid in managing communication. I also expect their will be other non-lawyer groups who could use blog support. We'll help wherever we can, but LexBlog, being a start-up, needs to continue to serve our existing clients.

For law firms, blogs can be a central location for communications, to be later searched and navigated, rather than disjointed personal emails. Posts to the blog may then be automatically distributed to those subscribing. Blogs also permit the ability the upload files.

Possible uses of support group blogs, and I am sure there are many more, include:

• Posting alerts and resources.
• Posting communications to co-volunteers rather than using extended email lists.
• Posting alerts to refugees as they will increasingly get access to online resources or they will have people who go online for them.
• Posting requests for more resources - what, how much, what form, who do they deliver it to.
• Posting requests for help - need more people - doing what, where do they come and when.
• Getting messages up for media - post request/message and then let TV station, newspaper, radio and other Web sites know of blog site.
• People can add resources, offers of help and ask questions via comments - all of which are moderated.

Training will include posting content to a blog, disseminating the content to your target audience and getting the word out about your blog.

If there is anyone you think we can help, drop me an email or give me a call, 206 855 0988. Please feel free to forward this message onto any state or local bar association or other appropriate group.

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The Washington Post reports blogs are now providing storm evacuees with valuable information.

Evacuees who didn't have Internet or phone access just after the Aug. 29 hurricane are slowly regaining the ability to check in on the familiar places they left behind. They report on what happened to the local school, grocery store, church or neighbor's home. Some online dispatches include digital photos from the scene, and some feature maps superimposed on recent aerial photos of the area, such as those available on Google Earth. The Internet continues to teem with pleas for information about missing children, family members and friends.

Ernest Svenson, a New Orleans lawyer who evacuated to Houston with his family after the storm and publisher of the Ernie the Attorney, first posted parts of e-mails from friends and co-workers who'd gone back to New Orleans reporting on what they have found, including specifics by neighborhood. That prompted pleas for more information. Svenson told The Post "People got scattered and are using [the Internet] as a virtual rally point."

Way to go Ernie, you are giving lawyers a good name.

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This is the link to the audio of the WWL interview I listened to that moved me to post earlier call to action on behalf of New Orleans. I felt so gosh darn helpless I had to post something.

Listen until the end where Mayor Nagin and the interviewer are moved to tears. I have not heard a more compelling interview with an elected official.

Thanks for the audio link Dave. I agree it's a must-listen-to interview. If you feel the same afterwards you're not human.

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Your fellow American citizens need your help this morning. They need it before the money we are going to give is ever going to reach them. The situation in New Orleans is worse today than it was yesterday and is going to be worse tomorrow.

All it takes is for you, and others you can reach by email or blog, to contact your two senators and congressperson and demand immediate action as begged for by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. When Mayor Nagin was asked how we can help, he said contact your Senators and Congressperson now. Here is a site you can just click on your state or put in your zip code to reach a link for a form email to go to your Senators and Congressperson. If you do not have time to do an email, use the one I give you below.

Why act immediately? Listen to Mayor Ray Nagin’s passionate and at at times profanity filled plea for immediate federal government action in a WWL radio interview of last night that is playing periodically on CNN this morning. Mayor Nagin said say the feds "don't have a clue what's going on." He added, "Excuse my French _ everybody in America _ but I am pissed." The mayor says he needs troops and hundreds of buses to get refugees out. Nagin accused state and federal officials of "playing games" and "spinning for the cameras." He says he keeps hearing that help is coming, but "there's no beef."

Hundreds of people, including children, are dying each day waiting to be picked up by buses that are not coming. Hundreds of people in hospitals before the hurricane are trapped because snipers shoot at boats trying to evacuate them and the airport is not equipped to handle them. My God, don’t the oldest, sickest and frail in our country deserve at least the help we would give people overseas and in war zones? Nurses and doctors have gone from panic in trying to save lives to resignation in watching people die. Most of these people had no means to leave New Orleans before the hurricane.

Chaos is reigning. Fires are burning but firemen, who can pump water onto them, are afraid to go out. 60% of New Orleans police officers have turned in their badges or are not showing up for shifts – they are trying to save their own and their family’s lives. Policemen are on the roof of the police station trying to defend it from snipers.

The President is traveling in the gulf area today. He is going to end the day in and around New Orleans. No matter your politics, he, like all of us, cares about people. If his traveling contingency starts hearing from Senators and Congress people today to please act, maybe we can speed up federal action in troops, food and medical support by a day or two. Doing so we can save thousands of our fellow American’s lives.

Please take 5 minutes:

• Email your two Senators and your Congressperson.
• What to say? Use your own words or cut and paste this: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin needs the federal government's help today. He has told me through the media that people are dieing by the hundreds, his police are being overrun and that he needs troops & lots of them, he needs busses (500 or more), he needs healthcare support and he needs water and food. Things in New Orleans are worse today than yesterday. The President is traveling to the gulf today and ending his day in New Orleans. Please contact him and tell him he, with your support, needs to act today to help Mayor Nagen and the people of New Orleans.
• Tell the White House directly at: comments@whitehouse.gov .
• Spread the word by email or blog; pass on this message (don’t need to say it came from me).

Screw politics – national or office wise, just please help these people today. Thanks & God Bless.

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