We're witnessing the rebirth of the gaming industry on the Gulf Coast. I think these numbers are excellent. They seem to be consistent. I think they're sending out a great message to anyone wanting to invest on the Coast.

You could get on one side of the Gulf Coast and shoot a bullet, and it wouldn't stop until it passed the state line. Nobody was coming.

I'm from the gulf coast of Louisiana.

[The president's many visits to the Gulf Coast seem to have shored up, at least somewhat, his eroded standing. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, his job-approval rating inched up two points, to a still-dismal 40 percent. But, safely back in the White House, he now has to deal with another disaster area: Republican Washington. The list of official inquiries is long and growing, involving issues ranging from arguably excusable bureaucratic mismanagement to insider trading to allegations of lawbreaking that potentially lead to the highest levels of the White House staff.] Look, the Democrats' numbers are just as low as the Republicans' are, ... People see a lot of this stuff just as 'more Washington.' But the danger for Republicans and for Bush is that there are too many things they can't control—and the odds are that all of them aren't going to work out in their favor.

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

It's been like this pretty much all year, ... I don't think anyone on the Gulf Coast could have expected a year like this. There have constantly been things going on, with the storms and then the red tide, keeping us from coming out.