Monthly Archives: August 2007

Current events - national, Local politics, Politics, Weather

Will Rita anniversary be ignored?

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From Chad Rogers’ Dead Pelican comes this article:

Will Rita anniversary be ignored?

The nation’s focus this week has been on New Orleans. On Wednesday, the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught, high-ranking public officials visited the Crescent City. Among them were President Bush and candidates who hope to occupy the Oval Office after the upcoming election. They came bearing promises that they will make New Orleans whole again.The national news media flocked to the Big Easy also. Coverage of the still-suffering city was powerful. Hopefully, it will draw the attention of those who can influence the allotment of needed disaster-relief funds.

An Associated Press article by Brian Schwaner, a New Orleans native, says New Orleans is dying. “Despite billions of dollars in aid, recovery programs with catchy names and an outpouring of volunteer effort, New Orleans still is not recovering from Hurricane Katrina,” Schwaner wrote. He cited the fact that entire neighborhoods are in ruins, the business district sags from the shattered economy and thousands of people are homeless.

Of course, this is pretty much a bit of playing fast and easy with the truth. Very few people are actually homeless from Katrina. They are just not where they were before the storm, and they’re doing pretty much the same thing they were doing, living off the government dole, except they’re not in New Orleans.

We hope the president, presidential hopefuls and the national media see the true situation in New Orleans and return to Washington determined to take steps that will salvage the dying city.

New Orleans is NOT dying, even much less so than, say, Tokyo in 1945, after American bombers had turned 90% of the city into a scorched wasteland with firebombs. Tokyo is back. Different, definitely, but back. So is Berlin, and Nuremberg, and London, and those WERE intentional disasters.

New Orleans will be back. Hell, it a lot of places it already is, as businesses go where they need to be to carry on the nation’s commerce and to make money. The question these people are REALLY asking is whether New Orleans will ever be back as a welfare haven and a strong dimmocrat voting block, like it was.

Very shortly, the area struck by Hurricane Rita will be observing the second anniversary of that storm. Sadly, the kind of attention New Orleans received is not expected in areas battered by Rita.

We will not be surprised if the public officials and the media are still suffering from “Rita amnesia.” That’s the phrase coined by U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-Lafayette, last year as he fought to spotlight the coastal area hit by the September 2005 storm.

To tell you the truth, I’d be surprised if any national figures show up in southwest Louisiana or southeast Texas for the Hurricane Rita anniversary. Oh, we’ll likely get a few state-level officials, and likely we’ll see our senators and representatives, but we won’t see Hillary! or Barack or Edwards, because they won’t have the opportunity to stand in front of a crowd of willing welfare ‘activists’ who know all the right chants for the cameras.

I can show you some devastation left over from Hurricane Rita, but I’ll be forced to drive you past new homes, homes under construction, operating businesses and people getting on with being alive to show you that stuff. But, hey!, I could show you the effects of Hurricane Audrey twenty years after she roared through, too.

This corner of Louisiana and neighboring Texas, though, we didn’t have a SuperDome filled with refugees ready to show the world how thin the veneer of civilization lies in some groups. We had a population which came out from under the clouds and got after bringing communites back to life, and we didn’t have a goofy-a**ed mayor ready to stick his foot in his mouth multiple times on national TV. We had local politicians and law enforcement and citizens who knew how life had been built and were ready to rebuild it, and we didn’t need Governor Blank-o over her crying on our behalf.

The New Orleans area received powerful attention from the beginning, but Rita’s victims along the southwest coast have been, to a large degree, forgotten or ignored.

Cameron Parish officials have fought a frustrating battle with a sluggish bureaucracy and with extensive regulations on the release of funds to aid in rebuilding.

But much of Cameron is already rebuilding, despite the red tape and new regulations and building codes. Homes are going up, because people will pretty much do what it takes to get on with life. Businesses are back, because you could make good money off the Gulf of Mexico before this storm, and the Gulf of Mexico is still there, and there’s still good money to be made.

Boustany aptly described the situation. “The progress has been God-awful slow,” he said.

To assess the national media’s coverage of Rita in comparison to that of Katrina, we visited the Web sites of major news agencies. One network Web site offered almost a hundred hurricane stories from 2005. Only two of them focused on Hurricane Rita.

Like I said, looting, shooting, murder pillage, those are STORIES!, and they’re insanely more interesting than a bunch of people cleaning up debris and going back to work, especially when there’re not big groups of the underclass waving signs about how it was all Bush’s fault. We didn’t even get visits from movie stars.

The visitors who came to New Orleans with their big promises should be reminded that Hurricane Rita was the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico. According to estimates, Rita caused $11.3 billion in damage on the Gulf Coast.

Sept. 24 will mark the second anniversary of Rita’s landfall at Johnson’s Bayou. Will high-powered public officials and presidential candidates be in Cameron Parish or some other coastal area that Rita devastated?

Judging from past history, it seems doubtful. We hope some of them prove us wrong.

My official Cajun advice on the subject? “Don’t hold your breath.”

General

Opportunist

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This guy is an adolescent egret. You know he’s an adolescent, a young bird from this year’s hatch, because his pristine whiteness is tinged by a bit of brown.  Look at the fringe on the back of his head.

These birds are very common in south Louisiana.

egret.jpg

So what’s this guy doing? Well, a huge part of an egret’s diet is insects. Actually, they’ll eat just about anything that moves that they can catch and get down their throats. This one, if you look closely, is on the freshly mown portion of an open field.

Somewhere along the evolutionary scale, egrets learned that mowers will simultaneously stir up, uncover, and stun insects when grass is being cut, and so it’s not unusual to see a big flock of these birds happily stilting along right behind the mower, gorging on easy food.

Current events - national, Weather

Two years…

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Two years ago much of New Orleans was under water and the SuperDome was a scene from one of those apocalyptic sci-fi movies.  Two years later, you  never hear success stories out of New Orleans, except from their tourist bureau.  Everybody else talks about high crime and neighborhoods still in disrepair.

Today I had to go to a manufacturer’s facility in Beaumont, Texas. After I saw what I wanted to see, I decided that it was worth my time to return by way of the road that goes to the southeastern tip of Texas and crosses over into Louisiana, roughly paralleling the cost of the Gulf of Mexico.  My official reason for the trip was to do a visual check on the construction of two newliquid natural gas facilities being build in southwest Louisiana.

This path carried me directly across the place where Hurricane Rita’s eye passed.  We’re talking places where the storm surge was over ten feet and the winds were a hundred and forty MPH, aan area where houses were wiped out, devastated, blown away, washed away by the storm surge, just plain gone.

You wanna know what you see there today?  New houses.  Built high up on pilings or huge mounds of earth, to be above a future storm surge.  constructed to new guidelines that make them much more able to withstand storm winds.  New houses.  Even at Holly Beach, which was scoured flat.  People ARE rebuilding, and they’re mostly doing it on their own, using insurance money and their own reserves, and if anything comes in from the government, well, that’s nice, but hey, you don’t sit on your butt waiting for that, because you have to get on with life.

You know, I’ll tell you something:  The same thing is happening in New Orleans, but it’s being done by people who get up in the morning and go to work and come home, and those people generally aren’t the the professional ‘activists’ who sit around waiting for a new s crew or a protest or a media event so they can get out an pimp for more free money…

People who come out after a storm and start getting their OWN lives back together are NOT likely to be the ones blaming government for their predicament…

Blogging

Diplomad is Back!

After a terribly long hiatus, the blog The Diplomad is back.  I was a frequent reader back a couple of years ago when he was active, and I missed the writing when he was gone.  Now h’s back.

For a sample of good writing, go read “Remembering the Dangerous Old Days“.  A sample:

Toys. I thought of the toys I had and compared them to ones my kids had. Mine were crude, positively dangerous, and absolutely wonderful. I remember when the words Mattel and Hasbro meant something other than Chinese-made junk. They stood for American-made junk, but junk with an edge. I remember most of all my toy guns. They were great!

Go read the whole thing.  I’ve moved him to the Regular blogroll again.

Current events - national, Local politics, Politics

Pandering, pimping and other New Orleans fun…

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So Obama goes to New Orleans… Now, wouldn’t that make a great opening for a joke? Well, it is…

Obama: U.S. can’t fail New Orleans again

By BECKY BOHRER, Associated Press Writer Mon Aug 27, 3:00 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS – Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday the country cannot fail New Orleans again and that as president, he would keep the city in mind every day.

“The words never again cannot be another empty phrase,” he said in front of one of the few rebuilt houses he saw on a brief tour of the city’s Gentilly Woods section. “It cannot become another broken promise.”

As a resident of Louisiana, **I** keep New Orleans in my mind every day, too. I think of the millions of statewide tax dollars collected and dumped into New Orleans, and for what? Record-breaking crime? Corruption of epic proportion?

Obama is the first of several presidential candidates from both parties who are set to visit New Orleans in connection with the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Wednesday. President Bush also is expected to mark the occasion with a trip to the Gulf Coast.

Obama, whose day began at First Emanuel Baptist Church, said that long before Katrina, the nation had failed to lift up New Orleans, a city with persistent struggles such as poverty and poor public schools. He said that cannot happen again and that Americans have a “collective responsibility” to each other.

Any time I hear a dimmocrat talking about ‘collective’ anything, I want to start running. I know that as a working American, they’re talking about ‘collecting’ MY hard-earned money and giving it to some piece of society’s trash barrel in exchange for enhanced re-election hopes.

And note that Barack is in a church. If a dimmocrat politician goes into a black church, it’s community outreach. If a republican goes into a white church, he’s white supremacist and there’s what whole ‘separation of church and state’ thing.

“Racial discord, poverty, the old divisions of black and white, rich and poor, it’s time to leave that to yesterday,” he said.

“In rebuilding, we’ve got an opportunity to do more than put up a foundation that for too long failed the people of New Orleans,” he told congregants. Some snapped photos of him at the pulpit with their cell phones.

You know, by any standard, New Orleans should have been paradise on earth. For decades it’s been run exclusively by dimmocrats who’ve had happy access to taxpayer dollars from one dimmocrat administration in Louisiana after another, because New Orleans DELIVERED dimmocrat victories.

The people who failed New Orleans were ALL dimmocrats who lined their pockets with tax dollars siphoned off the billions poured into the city over the years, dispensing pennies to keep the inmates happy in the asylum…

But never accuse a dimmocrat of being bashful about promising. All it takes is a few more of YOUR tax dollars…

“In rebuilding, we’ve got an opportunity to build something better, a foundation that can put up with a lot, upon which the children of New Orleans can build their dreams.”

Yep! MY dollars. Their dreams.

Progress since Katrina has been slow, mired in bureaucracy and marred by fingerpointing among federal, state and local officials. Some small businesses are struggling, houses remain empty in vast sections of the city and people are frustrated.

From several residents, Obama heard about poor infrastructure and the slow pace of home rebuilding grants. He walked past empty lots overgrown with weeds rising above his head and saw Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers and signs advertising services such as mold remediation.

“I just feel like we’ve been forgotten about,” resident JoAnn Fleming Bradley told him.

Some businesses are rolling right along, too…

Contrast New Orleans with my corner of the state which was devastated by Hurricane Rita. We still have some obvious signs of the hurricane here, but even Cameron Parish, almost leveled by the storm surge, is on the way back. I need to drive around there and post some pictures. What’s the difference between New Orleans and Cameron, on opposite corners of the south end of the state? Cameron was filled with WORKERS. New Orleans has workers, too, but they don’t show up at Obama rallies begging for Federal handouts and whoring for the mainstream media…

The Illinois senator criticized Bush for what he said was a lack of urgency in rebuilding the city. “I can promise you this: I will be a president who wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night with the future of this city on my mind,” Obama said.

I lay awake at night worrying that a bozo like this is even considered a legitimate cnadidate for the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth…

He outlined a plan he said would help restore the region by:

_providing grants for community policing in New Orleans, which has struggled with violence since Katrina;

Oh yeah? He’d better get comfortable with showing up at those churches, then, because New Orleans PD is notoriusly corrupt and heavy-handed and the black community leaders’ll be having rallies about how the NOPD is targeting their neighborhoods.

_offering incentives such as loan forgiveness programs to try to attract doctors and college students;

Only in New Orleans do you have to PAY a student to go to a college. In other places, the quality of the college is such that people actually pay them to attend.

And doctors? Reach over and punch John Edwards. He and his ambulance-chasing cohorts have made New Orleans a hell-hole for medical practice, and working a New Orleans hospital puts you daily in contact with people who are just looking ofr the one chance to file that life-altering lawsuit. Plau, if I was a doctor and had to drive through New Orleans to some of those clinics, I’d want a squad of Blackwater security ‘consultants’. Can you get those as part of the incentive package?

_ensuring displaced residents who want to return have a place to stay;

So let me get this straight: You had free housing. It was in an area below sea level, and it flooded, and we hauled you away to safety. And now you want us to go back to that area below sea level, build you NEW free housing, and then haul your sorry ass back? Excuse me if I fail to generate much enthusiasm for that plan…

_creating a national catastrophic insurance reserve, which he said would help homeowners struggling with their premiums.

And I’m supposed to pay so you can get cheap insurance, too.

At least two other leading Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, also have outlined rebuilding plans and touched on similar themes.

Of course they did. They want to buy votes with MY dollars.

“Part of the problem, I’ll be honest with you, I just don’t think there is a sense of urgency in the White House, where the president is cracking the whip, day in, day out, and saying, ‘Why is it that we’re not getting this done?'” Obama said.

I guess George Bush is supposed to mobilize the nation to get over to Houston, find the Katricians sitting there on government dole, pick them up, and hand-carry them back to new tax-payer funded digs in New Orleans and set them up where they can be depended on to vote themselves more goodies from the public coffers. It’s all Bush’s fault…

“I mean, you think about the amount of attention that’s been devoted to Iraq. ‘All hands on deck.’ I don’t get that same sense that there’s a focus on getting this work done,” Obama said.

Somehow, restocking the welfare warrens of New Orleans does not rank as high on my list of priorities as does cutting al Qaeda into little pieces… But then, my name is not Obama…

Current events - national, Politics

Po’ folks…

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Here’s a fantastic article on the state of “poverty” in America. I snagged it off Neal Boortz’s website, which means it’s pure hatefulness, seeing as how he’s one of those nasty right-wing radio guys who’re running America.

Poor Politics
Edwards’s poverty “plague� examined.

By Robert Rector

The Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty in America tomorrow. The report will show, as it has in recent years that around 37 million people live in official poverty. Presidential candidate John Edwards, who hopes to lead the nation in a new crusade against poverty, will, no doubt, seek to reap much publicity from the report.

It always causes me some amusement to see John Edwards, a trial lawyer who made a fortune suing people on the behalf of the poor and downtrodden, and his stance on helping the poor. Hell, trial lawyers are responsible for a LOT of people being poor and down-trodden. You don’t take multiple millions of dollars from businesses without causing repercussions, and one of them is that they have to cut back on staff and services. That means no jobs for the ‘poor’, and services become more expensive for the ‘poor’.

…

If being “poor� means (as Edwards claims it does) a lack of nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, then very few of America’s 37 million official “poor� people can be regarded as actually poor. Some material hardship does exist in the United States, but, in reality, it is quite restricted in scope and severity.
The following are facts about persons defined as “poor� by the Census Bureau, taken from a variety of government reports:

46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

97 percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.

62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

89 percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

I have always maintained, based on personal observation, that America’s ‘poor’ would be upper middle class in many FIRST WORLD countries, not to mention where they’d fit in the socio-economic ladder in some Third-world hell-hole like Zimbabwe. I’ve visited farmhouses in South Korea where families were a just a few steps above subsistence farming, and they were happy and gracious people who thought THEY were rich. An American family of ‘poor’, living in simalr conditions in, say, New Orleans, would be a subject of a national network expose’, a special spread in the New York Times, and three Oprah shows.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR, or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Our politicians and bureaucrats MUST expand the definition of ‘poor’ to save their own predatory lifestyles. If the number of actual ‘poor’ dropped,people might start thinking that just maybe we could start cutting back on the give-away programs that form the life’s work of so many of our politicians and bureaucrats. You don’t keep your cushy-a**ed goivernment job and get the bigger office if you don’t have thousands of ‘clients’ for your bogus programs.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all of the nation’s poor: There is a wide range of living conditions among the poor. A third of “poor� households have both cell and land-line telephones. A third also telephone answering machines. At the other extreme, approximately one-tenth of families in poverty have no phone at all. Similarly, while the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.

I do not deny the need for some sort of safety net for the truly needy. There are real needs out there that cannot be met by the application of initiative and work. But that number is MUCH smaller than the thousands that Edwards and the rest of the dimmocrat horde are promising to lift into nirvana.

…

As noted above, father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three quarters of the nation’s impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

I joke a bit every week when doing The Name Game about all the single moms without baby daddies and the unwed couples who likely are “couples’ only on the baby’s birth certificate, but therein is a root cause of poverty. Oh, sure, you can tell me a rosy story about some single mom who broke out and got her college degree and is now making a six-figure income, raising her kid on her own, but as the saying goes, that’s NOT the safe bet.

The safe bet is that a single mom, no daddy, that’s a kid that will be below the poverty line and in trouble, and in a few short years will add another generation just like the mom, perpetuating the sad life…

Yet, although work and marriage are reliable ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to encourage work and marriage, the nation’s remaining poverty could be reduced.

This is Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” at work. Hillary’s “It Takes a Village”? Wanna see what happens when the “village’ raises a kid? Just visit the inner city neighborhoods of any major metropolis in America. We’ve allowed the weeds to take over the garden…

Don’t expect me to hold my breath waiting for it to change.

Pets

How I spent my summer vacation

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As explained by Miss Kitty, quite possibly the world’s perfect cat:

misskitty.JPG

Note the excellent technique. She has carefully sited herself on the back of the sofa where she is gently warmed by the sun filtering through closed blinds. This is her ‘brisk nap’ routine. She has it perfected.

The Name Game

The Name Game #110

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See if you’ve heard this one before: Summer morning in southwest Louisiana. Overnight low of 78 degrees. Patchy light clouds, lots of sun, high this afternoon expected to be in the low to mid 90’s, with a 20% coverage of afternoon thundershowers. Yep! Our summer weather pattern.

I look through the Sunday paper this morning and find that two of the local hospitals are reporting births from July 27 to August 15, a total of 56 new denizens of our corner of the state. eighteen of the babies have a mommy and daddy who either chose to keep their last names, or more likely just didn’t get around to getting married, you know, that ol’ “our love doesn’t need a piece of paper to make it real” song and dance. Three of the new mommies couldn’t get a baby daddy to show up at all…

Let’s start our journey with that group of folks who like a name, but they don’t want their kid’s name spelled like everyone else’s:

Miss Octavia S. has a baby boy she tagged with Dwayne Isiah. Oh, gee, HOW do you spell that middle name? Oh, I don’t know… how about looking it up in that big ook your granny keeps. You know.. the BIBLE? Where that name was spelled “Isaiah” for hundreds of years before?

Phillip A & Kamecia T. have a girl baby they named Kamill Lynnette. So is that supposed to be pronounced like “camel” or like “Camille”, you know, “Kuh-meel”, and if it’s the second, why did you come up with the goofy version?

Brady & Melissa B. present their new baby girl, little Londyn Gabrielle. Ntice the “y” in “Londyn”? That’s so you won’t think that they chose baby names by pointing to a map of Europe…

Corey & Brittney D. have a new son, little Kanin Reed. Now that’s a start for a kid, named after a field artillery piece and a blade of marsh vegetation.

Mr. & Mrs. Shawn N. Need to borrow a Bible too, because they tagged their baby boy with Noah Eligh… Of course, EVERYBODY knows that the key to a successful life is a name with extra letters, so they tied the “gh” onto Eli…

And you have to give it to Mr. & Mrs. Melvin M. when they tagged their baby girl with Chellbi Gene. I guess that’s how all the really sophisticated people are spelling “Shelby” this season…

After all those hilarities, let’s look at people who seem to possess the ability to rattle a bag of Scrabble tiles and roll out a wonderful name:

Randy & Allyson J. have a new son. They present us with Davyn Jace. Sounds like the warm-up act for a country-western concert…

Jorie R & Myrtese B. give their new son a winning ticket in life’s lottery with Jorien Myrkeise. Give’em points for taking their two contrived names and further butchering them to hang on their baby…

Damien H. & Brittany C. present their new baby girl, little Aleiah Nicole. Almost tame, isn’t it?

Cleotha & Theresa S. have a new daughter, Cierra Elyse. They spelled it with a “C” so you wouldn’t foolishly think they named their kid after a car…

Jerome and DaLavon G. named their new baby girl Amber Paige. “Amber Paige”? Isn’t that what you get when you’re paper-training your new puppy? Nah… and no smart-mouthed little brat on the playground will ever come up with that, either…

We do have us a couple of triples, people who a) thought their baby needed an extra name to fulfil destiny or b) couldn’t make everybody in the family happy with just two names:

Kelly H. & Meagan C. present their new daughter, Brylee Elizabeth-Ann.

Paula P. & Alvin F. give theri new son Kethan Paul Jynel…  And extra points for making up two out of his three names.

Finally we come to the subject of punctuation:  Just the thing if you’re building sentences, but a little goofy if you’re naming kids:

Michael O. & Marlissa F. tag their daughter with Ma’Laja Lanae.

Miss Ruby S. has a new son, little Tre’Veon Mark.  Remember that village that Hillary! wrote about?  That’s who’s gonna raise this one:  no daddy listed.

Morgan D. & DePaul T. spread bright futures ahead of their new daughter by naming her Ari’L D’Ziner.  “D’Ziner”?  Oh, you know him…  does clothes and stuff, yah know, like “D’Ziner Jeans”…

Okay, that’s pretty much it for this week…  Now go ou and be a sunbeam in somebody’s life…

Blogging

Where’s that?

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Every now and then I check the sitemeter to see where folks come from who visit this site.

This one is a bit unexpected.  Andorra’s one of those little places in Europe that pop up in trivia quizzes from time to time, stuck there in between Spain and France in the mountains of the border region.  It’s got a population of a bit over seventy thousand, less than the parish I live in here in southwest Louisiana, and one of those people visited my blog…

andorra.gif

I feel privileged…