Just...wow.

So the other day, I sent a text of this picture out to a rather well-known firearms enthusiast.

The reply was as expectwed, along the lines of: "OMFG!! Where did you find it? Did you get it? Ah, I see it has the Bomar sight, but not the extended one...Is the barrel bushing tight as hell?"

Yeah, I knew he'd recognize it. Sadly I did too when I saw it in among a few hundred other firearms this past week. It's a custom-built US Service Pistol Team 1911 in .45, and alas, it's one of the 450-odd small arms in the museum at Jackson Barracks, New Orleans, Louisiana that were caught by the floodwaters following Hurricane Katrina.

Of the 200+ buildings on post when the water came, only about thirty did not have to be rebuilt from scratch. Parts of the post were under 20 feet of water and this water contained sewage and just about every chemical you could imagine in a flooded industrial community.

Like the rest of the collection, this pistol spent about two and a half months submerged in the toxic sludge before it was dried off and roughly stabilized by the curatorial teams, however they all look like this one now--or worse--with finish wear, pitting, ruined stocks, etc. Historic military arms from the 19th century on upwards, including almost a dozen Thompson sub-machine guns, BARs, Springfields, Krags, Reisings, Colts of every flavor, and numerous foreign guns too. (I noticed a beautiful German MP40 that didn't look like it got wet at all...at least on the side I could see.)

The reason I got to see them was because I'd gone in and spoke to the staff about possibly donating some of my collection to replace the ones that they lost due to the flooding. One thing led to another and now it looks like I'll get the chance to volunteer to help fix and preserve some of these guns starting in January. It's a big job that really is just getting started and they need the help. Since I've owned or worked on much of what they have, why not?

And as thought, if any of you do have any period US Military arms that you'd like to see preserved in their brand new public museum and it's soon-to-be awesome "Wall of Weapons" display, please contact me and I can assist with the donation and proper credit to you. Some of mine will surely be going in there and I can't think of a better place for them to be displayed forever.

A message to the people of New Orleans

Hey.

The weather people are saying that Hurricane Isaac could hit you and possibly be as bad as Hurricane Katrina was. That being the case, please allow me to offer you some constructive advice.

1. When The Man tells you to evacuate, for God's sake, go! Don't sit around until the shutters blow off your houses then act all surprised. You were told to go last time and many of you chose not to. That was all on you and not George Bush if you chose not to go. And please--don't tell me that you could not get out in the time they gave you. The rest of us saw all those school buses under water in your city yards. And public transportation notwithstanding, we all know that if there were free Snoop Dog tickets or a couple cartons of cigarettes waiting for you in Lafayette, you'd find a way to get there in a couple of hours.

2. If/when the storm hits, don't come around again demanding free debit cards charged with cash. We all saw how you used the ones we gave you the last time at casinos, Louis Vuitton stores, strip clubs and even on cruise ships afterwards. Shame on you, and shame on us if we let you take advantage again. This time you can just deal with it like everyone else does when bad things happen.

3. If you live on the public dime in Section 8 or public housing and we taxpayers are nice enough to relocate you to other public housing in Texas, STAY THERE! Don't demand transportation back to New Orleans and new project apartments again. If we graciously re-establish you in Houston, you need to remain there unless and until you earn enough money to move yourself back to New Orleans and buy your own place there. And Democrats, don't even think of using federal rebuilding money to bring them all back and install them in new public housing, not even if it means that the next election might result in some entrenched black politicians losing their seats. Contrary to what Ray Nagin said, New Orleans does not have to be a "Chocolate city" at the end of the day. I think that a safe, productive and genuinely diverse city with a majority of people who work for a living would be better.

4. Don't loot. If it's not yours, keep your hands off it. And if you do lot and the police shoot you, well you had it coming.

Bottom line: You saw what happened the last time. We all remember. You were, with few exceptions, the most dependent children of the state that this country has ever seen and you brought shame upon America with the way that you acted. Now many of you are back in the Crescent City again and you may get another dousing like Katrina gave you. I just want to be the first American to let you know that this time, it's all on you. Don't come around me with your hands out and mouths open again, because after they way you all acted the last time, you've got nothing coming.

Oh--and this is directed just at the people in New Orleans. We all know how many thousands of other people on the Gulf got hit, too. But being cut from a better cloth, they picked themselves up, rebuilt their homes and businesses, and went on about their lives without demanding that the rest of us give them new TVs, FEMA trailers, and brand new homes in newly-rebuilt neighborhoods back in the same old flood zones. The rest of you just did what you needed to and you'll have my support this time around if you need it. But New Orleans...you'd better have Ray Nagin and Sean Penn on speed dial, because if you call me again, I'm not answering.

Signed: The taxpayers and working people of America.

"Help us, government man!"

Reading the New Orleans news yesterday, I couldn't help but shake my head at the latest example of the dependency and learned helplessness that welfare create.

It seems that the powers-that-be are going to demolish a building to make way for some new development. Now this should be seen as a good thing, as it'll bring jobs, both in construction and in whatever services that the tenants of the building offer. But what do we see in the news? Residents of the nearby Iberville public housing project running around worrying about the dust from the demolition and voicing outrage that no one from the public housing authority has come around to manage this "crisis" for them.

Iberville residents said on Tuesday that the little they knew about the implosion came from news reports, not from the Housing Authority of New Orleans. "I keep saying, 'When are they going to come tell us something?'" said Lanetter Dorsey, 54, who is in poor health and doesn't feel comfortable staying inside her Iberville apartment during the implosion. "I guess they've decided we need to fend for ourselves," she said.

OMG! Those poor people! They might actually have to learn things from the news and make their own decisions, just like everyone else does! How mean! How cruel! Why isn't the government man coming in to tell them what to do and make everything ok? How long after the dust settles can they start filing claims for some sort of cash reimbursement to make up for all of the stress? And the worst that could ever happen to them, in their eyes, is that they have to "fend for themselves". The horror!

This is pathetic. These people are grown. Their votes count as much as mine and yours. (and every one who bothers to cast a ballot will likely do so for Obama...) But here they are, upset and befuddled, with no idea what to do or how to respond to even this simple interruption of their day.

But Iberville residents sitting inside apartments within dark-brick buildings could soon become overheated if the dust takes hours to settle.

So go the F--k outside then! Leave for a few hours! Geez...how hard is that to figure out?

This is a prime example of the culture of dependency that big government has created, and it's what the Obama administration is trying to spread over our country, with one person and seven now receiving food stamps and with the USDA now working with the freaking Mexican government to try to get as many illegal aliens from that country to take our welfare as they can. Because the Obamaites know that people who are dependent on the government will continue to vote for the Democrats that made them dependent and accept further impositions of control over their lives from those Democrats. There's a reason why the Democrat party sends buses by the score into public housing projects around the country on election day...they know that they have a loyal base there and they're working hard to expand it because they know that it may well give them enough votes to allow them to keep control of the country despite objections from those of us who don't want their taxpayer-funded largess.

Now on another tangent, the taxpayers need to be asking why the Iberville housing project is even still around. It was condemned after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina and everyone living there was relocated by the taxpayers and given new apartments, mainly in Texas and other locations where space and local jobs were available. Yet one of the first things that then-Mayor Ray Nagin did was to divert federal money intended to help rebuild the city's infrastructure into programs designed to bring the displaced public housing residents back in time for the next election. Remember Nagin's statement that New Orleans has to remain a "Chocolate city"? He was afraid that a smaller voting pool made up largely of business owners, investors and workers might result in fewer Democrats keeping their jobs, especially after the way that his administration bungled things so badly during and after Katrina's strike. so now we have all-new welfare apartments built up to house a core Democrat constituency on some of the city's most valuable real estate right outside of the French Quarter, and it's housing many of the people who are responsible for much of the crime in the French Quarter. But the criminals, their families and other welfare recipients in the projects can be counted on to vote Dem, and the business owners and tourists in the Quarter who suffer from their presence...well most of them come from outside the city, so the don't rate serious consideration by the one-party (Dem) administration of that city.

As it stands now, that valuable land remains in service as a high-crime hot-spot that serves only to retard and inhibit meaningful economic development of that whole area. I mean, it it were my call, people relying on the taxpayers for a roof over their heads would be housed on old military bases or moved out into the country into the cheapest housing possible and the cities would be encouraged to put prime real estate like that under the Iberville projects to the best economic use on behalf of the taxpayers. But then again, that's probably why I don't get to run things.

Ambulance-chaser gets sued by clients who didn't get rich

It was bound to happen eventually.

Three Metro Detroit men--Ronald C. Moon of Livonia, Jeffrey D. Schmitz of Royal Oak and Louis J. Toth of Northville headed to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, allegedly bringing relief supplies to help devastated residents,

Somehow, when they got to Lake Charles, Louisiana, they did something that brought them to the attention of law enforcement and they were arrested outside a casino by Calcasieu Parish sheriff's deputies. They were locked up and held for five days before posting bond, during which time they complain that they were "verbally abused" and life wasn't fun or pleasant.

They returned to Michigan and immediately sought out an ambulance-chasing lawyer in an attempt to get paid, apparently selecting Birmingham attorney Norman Yatooma due to the publicity surrounding his other high-profile money-grubbing lawsuits. (I guess Geoffrey Fieger wasn't available?) They claim that Yatooma hired a couple of public-relations firms to spin their story and get them media attention, but then did little else and they "only" got a settlement offer of $25,000 in addition to having the charges against them dropped. So now they are suing Yatooma.

Their complaint? They feel that if Yatooma had made more noise and filed more papers against more people, they might have gotten even more money, despite the fact that they can't seem to show how they are entitled to any payout whatsoever.

That's right...required for a tort claim is a showing of some actual harm. In othert words, these tools would have to show how they somehow lost they money that they're seeking, or the opportunity to make the money. The point behind a tort claim is to put plaintiffs in the same place where they would have been had the tort not occurred. I'm thinking that in this case, had these guys not been arrested--and had they really been bringing relief supplies (and not looting as the police said that they were), they'd likely have returned home with empty vehicles and nothing but more stories about the things that they saw. Frankly, I don't see how that's worth $2.50, much less $25,000. You're not supposed to get a bucket of cash just because something unpleasant but otherwise not harmful happens to you, and especially not when you are part of the cause of your own misfortune by inserting yourself into an already chaotic situation like these gomers did.

Now I'm torn here. I think that these three jerks definitely have nothing coming, and if they were now suing anyone other than their own parasitical slip-and-fall guy, I'd be even more outraged. You see, I don't want to see these guys make a dime, but I also want to see shysters like Yatooma take a hit in the pocketbook for their role in abusing our nation's legal system to the point where it costs us all more money in higher insurance rates, more regulation and restrictions, and massive delays when we try to bring legitimate cases into court. True Karmic justice would be where these three meet with Yatooma to agree on a final payout only to have a meteorite land on all four of them or a sinkhole to open up beneath their feet.

Yeah, in this case I'm rooting against both sides, because a defeat for all of these people would be a victory for America and real justice.

New Orleans, killed off again.

So New Orleans is once again the murder capital of America.

There was a time when I was sympathetic, but that was back before New Orleans—my adopted hometown and favorite city despite it’s problems—was the recipient of a golden opportunity but threw it away in the name of politics.

New Orleans has had problems for a long time. There never were too many jobs there, and the city was plagued with crime and poverty, particularly the areas around it’s numerous sprawling public-housing complexes, which ranked among the worst in America.

But then Hurricane Katrina came along and wiped out much of the city. And in it’s wake, New Orleans was given a priceless gift—a shot at a new beginning.

To begin with, everyone was evacuated from the city. Nearly every single person was removed. No one was deliberately left behind, including the thousands of useless layabouts and criminals in the public housing complexes. These people were redistributed among thirteen other states—in many cases put up in hotels or placed in local public housing apartments—and the city literally had the chance to start over.

First the clean-up and rebuilding began. For this, workers were needed and gladly accepted. Wages were high, but accommodations were scarce due to the damage that the hurricane had wrought. The city began working to rehabilitate enough residential space to house the workers who were necessary to rebuild the city. Had they just focused on this, they could have done like many of us suggested and simply rebuilt a smaller, more economically-viable city, populated mainly by people who were there to work. But politics soon reared it’s ugly head, and those running the city knew that they stood to lose in the next elections as any smart voter would hold them accountable for their numerous failings during the crisis. Worse—the political losses might even extend far enough up the ladder to affect the balance of power closer to the top of the ticket in this state which was narrowly but consistently controlled by one political party, the Democrats. The democrats knew that they could not win over people who had lost property and livelihoods due to their malfeasance, so they scrambled to dilute the voter base with more tractable, reliable voters. They reached out and called the welfare crowd back, knowing that this group of sheep would vote “Dem” on election day without giving it anything even remotely resembling a thought.

But to bring the welfare voters back, they had to give them someplace to stay. So the orders went out, diverting construction and rehabilitation projects away from market-rate units intended for workers and steering those resources into reopening as much of the old public housing properties as they could, and giving out Section Eight vouchers when that wasn’t sufficient. They ran around the country, trying to coax back every hood rat and Oprah-watcher that they could find, and even as the employers struggled to find enough housing for the workers needed to rebuild, the non-working masses were flooding back in, often getting priority for desirable housing. They weren’t interested in jobs and had no intention of helping rebuild, but they were sick and tired of living in places like Houston--where they were busy jacking up the crime rates just like they'd done in New Orleans--and the Democrats wanted their votes. So the scum were brought back, and the crime rate began to climb again. But what’s a little crime when Ray Nagin’s job was on the line? A little crime was acceptable if it meant that the criminals would vote him and his cronies back into power. And sure enough, they did. Nagin got re-elected, as did William Jefferson. Corruption and incompetency were unacceptable to many of those productive people who were working to restore the city but they did not matter to the criminals and welfare cheats who were brought back just to tip the election back to the Dems. The bad guys won, but now most of the people who had made New Orleans such a cesspool and who had actually been relocated were back again. And the city that almost rose from the dead has cancer again.

Now the city that only a few years ago had so much promise and opportunity for anyone who wanted to work is more violent than many third-world countries. It’s populated by losers like Darrion Scott, the seventeen year old mother of a two and a half year old, who stabs bus drivers just because she doesn’t want to follow simple rules.

NEW ORLEANS—Authorities say a woman who was repeatedly asked to fold up her baby's stroller on a New Orleans city bus refused, then poured milk on the driver before stabbing her in the chest.
New Orleans police and transit officials tell The Times-Picayune newspaper that the veteran Regional Transit Authority driver suffered a 4-inch deep wound but she survived.
Authorities say 17-year-old Darrion Scott boarded the bus with her 2 1/2-year-old baby and was asked to fold up the stroller. Authorities say Scott tore the top off the baby's bottle of milk and poured it on the driver before stabbing her.
She has been charged with aggravated battery.
The driver, Hanella Johnson, was released from the hospital Wednesday. She has been an RTA driver for 18 years.

Good job, Democrats. Thanks, Mayor Nagin. New Orleans was almost free of this sort of stuff before you fought to bring it all back. Post-Katrina, Darrion Scott was somewhere else for a while, and probably would have stayed somewhere else but for you guys working to bring her and thousands more like her back. The decent people who committed to trying to rebuild the city deserved better, but you put your political careers ahead of their lives and safety and you killed off a city that was in the process of being reborn, just because it was easier than trying to make amends for your ineptness or returning to the private sector.


CORRECTION: My first posting of this had former Mayor Marc Morial's name where Ray Nagin's should have been. I don't apologize as much to Morial as I do to New Orleans residents who have every right to at least have the correct mayor held responsible. Thanks to Bigezbear for pointing my error out. Mea Culpa. Or, in the words of Ray Nagin..."My bad".

The difference between Iowa and New Orleans flood victims

Well Cedar Rapids, Iowa and other areas along the Mississippi River are experiencing a 1-in-500-year flood right now. A great cop and fellow blogger who runs the USA Incognito blog is stuck smack in the middle of it all and I know that she'll appreciate your prayers.

It is a mess there by any measure. Whole towns are underwater, tens of thousands of people are homeless, and Iowa officials are now describing this as the "Iowa Katrina" due to the scope of the devastation.

But one thing separates this catastrophe from the one that we saw in the Gulf, particularly in New Orleans, a few years ago. It's what we're NOT seeing.

--We're not seeing hordes of Iowans sitting on their roofs looking stupid and waiting for someone else to come save them.

--We're not seeing Iowans engaging in massive, wholesale looting and theft of luxury items that they don't even need.

--We're not seeing Iowans shooting at police officers and other rescue personnel.

--We're not seeing Iowans demand new housing for free and and then bitching because it's not good enough.

--We're not seeing Iowans demanding $2,000 debit cards from FEMA and then running off to the casinos or Mexican resorts to spend the dough.

--We're not seeing Iowans demand that the rest of us rebuild their old houses for free.

--We're not seeing Iowans blaming everyone except themselves while they sit around watching everyone else clean up their neighborhoods, and then calling us "racists" when we don't just let them move right in to the most desirable brand-new housing for free.

So while this flooding is a horrible tragedy, it's certainly not a Katrina, if only because Iowans are cut from a different--and better--cloth than all those second-hander socialists and life-long welfare recipients in New Orleans.

Oh yeah...And they don't have any national jokes like Ray Nagin as their elected officials.


Bet we're not seeing much of this in Iowa.





Keep the faith, Iowa. you'll pull through this in fine, American form.

No good deed goes unpunished--Katrina refugees destroying the FEMA trailers loaned to them as aid.

Sometimes I wonder why we should even bother.

Here we (the taxpayers) go, buying brand new travel trailers for around $20,000 each and giving them to those who claim to be in need following hurricane Katrina, and apparently a lot of the recipients of this aid program have decided to show their respect and gratitude by destroying the trailers through theft, neglect, or outright vandalism, or else they've stolen the trailers outright--either selling them, dragging them off to hunting leases or turning them into illegal meth labs.

And what is FEMA doing about this? Well it may surprise you (but it probably won't) to find out that FEMA's doing absolutely nothing about it beyond sending letters to the trailer recipients asking them to pay for the damages. And that only in cases where FEMA actually knows who they gave the trailers to, which is not always the case. And since FEMA has no legal authority to prosecute people who have ruined the trailers to the point where they aren't ever usable again, it's just falling on us taxpayers to suck it up and eat the losses while the welfare sponges who got the trailers and wrecked them go off scot-free, no doubt proud of how they've gotten over on the rest of us.
And let me be fair here. It's not just inner-city hoodlums and lifetime welfare recipients from New Orleans this time. Many of those trailers went to rural residents, including homeowners in Arkansas, Mississippi, rural Louisiana and Texas. One would think that at least some of these people still own property which could be attached to cover the costs of the property that they've ruined but apparently FEMA's content to just let them ride because it's easier to stick you and me with the bills. You see, while FEMA might not have a clue as to who they loaned many of these brand new trailers to, they definitely know your billing address and mine.

Related article

Related article

Related article

How much longer will we have to carry them?

This story in the Washington Post today got me piqued. It's about FEMA's famed post-Katrina trailer parks, which us taxpayers are still paying for a year and a half after the storm. FEMA is closing one in particular--Yorkshire--and moving the refugees to other trailer parks, and predictably the people getting the free trailers are upset. Heck, I'm upset that these people still haven't done what they needed to do to run their own lives without me and the rest of us paying their rent. From the story:

"People say we shouldn't still be living in a FEMA park," said one former Yorkshire tenant, a Wal-Mart worker who wanted to be identified only as "P." "But take a look at the rents people have to pay in New Orleans now -- who can afford that?"

Well it would seem to me that you need to go out and get a better job, or failing that, a second job. And if you can't afford to live in New Orleans now, you go live somewhere else. It's not up to the rest of us to pay your rent indefinitely until an apartment opens up in your price range right where you want to live. The rest of us have to work and manage our own money to buy housing in choice areas, and I have to wonder why this woman and the others haven't been able to set aside thousands of dollars over the last year and a half since they haven't had to make any rent payments? BUt of course it's not their fault. If you ask them, it's ours.

The tenants said the sense of rootlessness that comes with the trailer life is affecting their children.

"I'm tired of tossing my kids around like a bouncing ball," LaFrance said. "And I hate waking up every day wondering what's going to happen next."

I winder if it ever occurred to her that her kids wouldn't get bounced around from welfare trailer to welfare trailer if she'd just use her own money to rent an actual apartment where her and her kids could actually set down some roots?

Nah. Sadly, the welfare crowd never seems to make that leap from dependency to self-sufficency and security. And what's even worse if that the Democrats who keep them in poverty to mine them for votes wouldn't have it any other way.

The second-handers are at it again.

They can't get jobs and support themselves, but they sure can find lawyers.

I'm talking of course about the chronic welfare recipients who were flushed out of the housing projects in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina last year. Every single one of them was transported away from the city by the taxpayers and given new housing somewhere, again at taxpayer expense. I'm sure that some of them used this new start to find jobs and earn enough money to support themselves, but a large number of them have now drifted back to New Orleans. (We had to carry them out because they "couldn't afford to leave" but they sure found the money to get back, didn't they?)
Now they are protesting and demanding that the city and the feds rebuild and repoen the projects because they want to live there again. It does not matter that we already provided a roof over their heads elsewhere. I reported earlier that some were upset about public housing in places like Dallas and Houston because the police "harrassed" them for silly things like sitting on the complex porches drinking beer. So now they insist that we--the working people of America who actually pay taxes--owe them new apartments in New Orleans again according to this story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

During the two-hour meeting, residents and advocates rose to uniformly condemn the demolition and ask how the thousands of families who once lived in the complexes will find new homes in New Orleans.

Well they could always get jobs and EARN the money like most of the rest of us do. Bwahahahaha! That's a good one, isn't it?

And typically, race-baiting politicians and ambulance-chasing lawyers are all over it on their behalf, warning the city not to try to replace the ruined projects with mixed-development housing or anything but other projects:

"I'm against any demolition of any development," said state Rep. Charmaine Marchand, D-New Orleans, who gave [Donald Babers, the federal housing official appointed after the storm as HANO's one-man board of commissioners] a message for [HUD Secretary Alphonso] Jackson. "Tell him he needs to remember what color he is. The people he is putting out are the same color he is. They and he all answer to the same god."

And of course a socialist lawyer joins in the discussion:

Laura Tuggle, an attorney at the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corp., said the public housing complexes belong to those who lived there.

Wrong, bitch. It belongs to the people who PAY for it, and that's the taxpaying citizens who have been paying for so long to house all of these parasites who won't go out and work for their rent like everyone else has to. If the local government wants to knock it down and put in market-rate units to alleviate the housing shortage for working people who are actually trying to rebuild the city, that's their perogative and their fiduciary duty. The city has to make a choice. They can offer housing to workers who pay taxes and contribute to the local economy,or they can give new houses to layabouts and criminals. I hope that they make the right choice, but since they re-elected Ray Nagin after his bungling of the Hurricane last year, I'm not holding my breath.

On illegals, welfare whiners and a great idea.

A happy story that I read today involved ICE and local officials in Colorado snatching up busloads of illegals from a construction site on an Air Force base in Colorado:
120 Illegal Aliens Arrested
Happily, the illegals were put on buses and driven to the US/Mexico border. (I know...they'll all be back in a week or two, tanned and rested, but it's a start.)
Predictably, the presumably illegal relatives of the deported illegals cry to the newspapers about how "unfair" this was and one tearfully admits that they came into this country to get free medical care for one of their kids. If we were really serious about the illegal problem, these relatives would have been snapped up too. But they weren't. One other good thing is that the government is looking to prosecute the employer of these illegals and I want to cheer for the people who made that call. It's well past time and it'll do more to stem the illegal alien invasion than simply catching a few and giving them half of round-trip to Mexico. Put the risk on employers and watch them think twice about undercutting legal American labor.

Also of interest in the story was one of the contractors who claimed that now there were no workers to do the work. My first thought was that you get what you pay for, and if they'd paid enough money to attract and keep American workers, they'd be in business now. But then I had another great idea. (I get these a lot.)

First off we need to bus ALL the illegals out of here. And we need to tattoo or microchip each one so that if they ever come back we'll know and then we can punish them severely just as their governments would do to you or me if we were caught illegally in their countries. And after that, why not simply take some of the thousands of alleged Katrina victims who are still sitting around unemployed over a year later and bus THEM to this and other construction sites that require labor? It seems like every few days there's a story coming out of New Orleans about all the people who can't seem to find jobs. Many if not most of these people can't find jobs of course because they're not doing much more than sitting on a stoop someplace drinking malt liquor and grousing about how slow the local government has been in regards to taking money from working people and using it to rebuild what was once considered the worst public housing in the country with brand new units that these non-workers could then move into, paying little or no rent, of course.

This plan would give jobs to people who needs jobs and then they'd have enough money that they could afford to rent or buy their own homes instead of sponging them off of the rest of us productive people. They'd learn skills and discipline and they'd be doing the jobs legally that the illegals are presently doing very illegally. And if the illegals can't get jobs because they're all being filled with welfare recipients or other unemployed Americans, many if not most of them might just stay home and not cross our borders in violation of our laws and national sovereignty.

Seriously, you people need to write MY name in on the 2008 Presidential ballots. Give me the job and I'll come up with all sorts of great ideas like this to solve many of our nation's problems.

And Lagniappe would love to be First Dog.

The second-handers are angry again

Another meeting of the New Orleans City Council turned ugly as a couple dozen of the helpless welfare recipients who could not even get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina after being given several days' notice have now managed to get to yet another government meeting to demand more free stuff from that taxpayers who actually work for a living.

Full story



Dozens of public housing residents Thursday protested the federal government's plan to demolish four complexes in New Orleans, saying they are left without homes in a city where rentals are nearly impossible to find.

One day after U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced that New Orleans would lose housing complexes but gain a "renaissance" of better low-income housing, some of the families who called St. Bernard, Lafitte, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper home cried foul at a City Council hearing.

"By tearing down developments you're not giving me the choice to come back home to New Orleans, where I was forced to leave," said Cherlynn Gaynor, 42, who grew up in the Lafitte complex and was raising her 11 year-old daughter there before the levee failures during Katrina drowned the city. "I pay taxes and I work. Why would you shut us out from where our culture is?"

Well apparently Gaynor doesn't work hard enough to afford her own apartment. Perhaps if she actually took on a full-time 40-hour-per-week job, she could afford to move back to New Orleans. Until then, she needs to be grateful for any public housing that the rest of us provide for her, whether in's in Houston, Anchorage Alaska, or the middle of the Arizona desert. Like my momma always used to say: "Beggars can't be choosers".

Gaynor was joined by about two dozen residents who said they are hurt and frustrated by the plan to tear down complexes with the promise to redevelop them in three years.

"I just need somewhere to stay," said Patricia Thomas, who lost her apartment at Lafitte to the flooding but has lived at Iberville, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper over the years.

Fine. Stay in Houston or wherever else HUD put you. If you want choice housing, get off your butt and get a job.

New Orleans' public housing was among the worst in the nation. In fact it was so bad that the federal government stepped in and took control away from the city due to drugs, gang problems, and chronic neglect and corruption. It never really improved though, and Katrina was seen as a blessing by many New Orleans residents because it brought about the removal of many of these people who tended to be responsible for a disproportionate share of the city's crime. However HUD has announced plans to rebuilt many of these projects and repopulate them with the same deadbeats and trouble-makers that blighted the city originally. (If this alone isn't a good reason to disband HUD< I don't know what is.)

"It's important to see everyone be able to come back," said Scott Keller, deputy chief of staff for HUD, who spoke in place of Jackson, who had to return to Washington, D.C., for a meeting. "We don't want gangs. We don't want unsafe conditions. We want single moms to be safe, and their children."

The problem is that it won't just be single moms with their kids and elderly people living there. Anyone who has ever driven through these projects couldn't have helped but notice all of the young males loitering around all day and all night, shooting basketballs at hoops and drinking beer on the stoops. Most of those single moms have taken up with some other guy and most of those guys have either moved into the apartments with them (in violation of federal public housing regulations) or just hang out there all day. Most of them don't work either and to guys like that, a welfare mom with a cheap or free apartment and food stamps is a gold mine. And many of the elderly also wind up with their kids or grandkids living in their units as well. Sadly, to a large segment of our society, working is something that saps and suckers do, and sponging off of someone who is already on charity is seen as acceptable and even admirable.

If the projects are re-opened and given back to the same no-job-having baby-factory mommas that used to live there, you can bet that their boyfriends will all be back in there too, rolling their drugs and shooting each other when not scarfing down WIC food and lounging in the comfort of the air conditioners that we taxpayers put in every unit.

HUD and the city need to back off and just let the market handle housing in the city. Jobs will bring people in to work and working people can afford market-rate housing. The city doesn't need welfare lay-abouts and it's stupid to import thousands of them just because they used to live there once and are now clamoring for new apartments and help moving back. Keep the freeloaders wherever they're at now and turn that land over to private developers who can build housing for working people to buy or retail shops that will benefit everyone.

How's that foot taste, Ray?

If Ray Nagin, soon-to-be outgoing Mayor of New Orleans (Oh, please God...) had any friends left in the world, they'd have put duct tape over his mouth by now. I mean he just keeps saying dumb stuff and proving to everyone that he's not the man to represent all of the residents and businesses of the Crescent City.

His latest gaffe was minor compared to some of his earlier ones but it still showed us all how he thinks. Addressing a crowd of ex-New Orleans residents in Houston and trying to give them a reason to vote for him. (Someone tell me again why people who aren't living in the city are being allowed to vote?) As he spoke to this crowd, rather than tell them why he's the best man for the job, or lay out his plans to undo the damage caused by his previous screw-ups before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, he tried to scare them into voting for him by pointing out that most of the people now running against him aren't black.
Nagin noted that 23 candidates entered the mayoral fray before the registration deadline last week. "Very few of them look like us," he told the crowd of black ex-residents who had gathered at an NAACP meeting to hear him.

So in Nagin's mind, he obviously thinks that his best chance to get re-elected is to forget about his track-record of ineptitude, including the Superdome, the Convention Center and all of those submerged school buses that could have prevented that horror and just raise the specter of some white guy running the city.

Does Nagin really hate white people that much? Or does he just think that black people are really that stupid that he can scare them into giving him another chance just by making some racist statements? Either way, he's clearly got no business in office. The city needs someone who can be inclusive, not divisice. Someone who will unite the people who are left, not divide them or use the people who aren't even there any more to try to keep the real residents from voting him out of office.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said Friday that it wasn't his fault city school buses weren't mobilized to facilitate the Hurricane Katrina evacuation he ordered.

Appearing on NBC's "Dateline," Nagin was asked by host Stone Phillips: "What was mobilized? Were buses ready to take people away?"

"No. None of that," the Big Easy mayor replied.

"Why is that?" an incredulous Phillips asked.

Nagin replied: "I dont know. That is question for somebody else."

Once more Ray Nagin shows why he's not fit to be the Mayor of New Orleans

OK, as a former resident of New Orleans and someone who hopes to move back someday, I confess that I was an early supporter of Ray Nagin when he first ran for Mayor of New Orleans back in May of 2002. As a former vice president of Cox Communications, he appeared to have business sense and the ability to make decisions and transcend the race-card-playing, partisan mudslinging that has been the hallmark of Louisiana politics for as long as anyone can remember. At last, I thought, New Orleans is on it's way back up. I'd hoped the city could finally recover from the mess left by former Mayor Marc Morial and his cronies.

And I thought he was doing pretty well, right up until Hurricane Katrina hit.

First he ignored the danger until it was too late. Everyone knew that a hurricane of that magnitude could and would someday hit the Crescent City and cause exactly the damage that Katrina did. Contingency plans had been drawn up decades ago and revised frequently. The plans were up to date and available but when crunch time came, Nagin didn't implement them. Instead he just contemplated the inside of his own rectum. (That's a polite was of saying he stood around with his head stuck up his ass.)
The floodwaters came and threatened thousands while 500 buses that could have evacuated most of them were left in low-lying lots to be destroyed by the advancing waters. His excuse for that travesty? A public comment about how hard it was to get city workers to come in even on a good day. That's right--he blamed the bus drivers even though records show that his administration never even bothered to try to call them in for this emergency.

Then he criticized the Bush administration for not stepping in fast enough, even though the primary responsibility for New Orleans lay with him and Governor Kathleen Blanco (A Democrat elected solely due to the powerful Democratic machine in New Orleans Parish--the rest of the state voted for her more experienced Republican opponent.)

Next, in the face of universal criticism by the voters of New Orleans, Nagin called on Blanco to postpone the February election because he is up for re-election and he knew that the voters would have held him responsible for his failings and elected anyone other than him. And to her disgrace, Blanco postponed the election until April, giving Nagin more time to try to rehabilitate his image. Nagin couldn't survive the February election that the law calls for but law and proceedure never really matter much to Democrats when one of their own is threatened.

Now Nagin's putting his feet back in his mouth again. In a Martin Luther King Day speech that sounded like it was co-written by Whitney Houston and Marion Barry during a crack-smoking binge, he claims to be a prophet of God. Nagin says that the Hurricane came because "God is mad at America over the Iraq war". He then says that God wants New Orleans to become "a chocolate city" again, meaning that it has to be rebuilt as a majority black city.

The areas hardest hit by the storm were some the poorest, most crime-ridden areas (like the lower 9th Ward) and as a result of the storm, most of the people who have been committing the majority of the crimes while laying around on welfare in the massive public housing projects and low-income rental neighborhoods were relocated all over the country by FEMA and in effect given one-way tickets out of town. This was an inordinate benefit to New Orleans and it created a chance for a smaller, safer, more prosperous city to rise from the ruins--a city of educated working people who would actually contribute to the culture of the city. But the second-handers and poverty pimps have been out in force ever since, screaming that racism caused the flood, racism caused the slow response (Ironicaly the biggest failings were Nagin's and he's black), and now racism is supposedly the reason why the federal government isn't shelling out more money to bring all the poor black people back to New Orleans.

And now Nagin's jumped on that bandwagon big time. As quoted in a CNN article,

"I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day," Nagin said in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech. "This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."

I'd like to ask God about that. My money says God would say that Nagin's a liar and a fool.

But that's not all. Nagin also claims to talk regularly with the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr. Now I'm not even going to bother with that one because that's just too whack for words. It's right up there with Hillary Clinton's claim that she channels the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.

New Orleans deserves better than Nagin. I'm sorry Ray, but you've lost my support for good. I hope that the voters turn you out in April or whenever it is that the Democrats decide to let them vote again. And I call on New Orleans boosters and residents to resist the demands from the paid hustlers who are exploiting the poor for personal profit. New Orleans doesn't need any public housing rebuilt in flood-prone areas and if some people want to live on the backs of the taxpayers no matter what color or race they are, they can stay in Houston or even Anchorage, Alaska if that's where the government puts them and they can be grateful.

New Orleans will always be a diverse city. Many of the well-to-do in that city are black and asian as well as white. The claims made by Nagin and others that all the blacks are impoverished ward of the state who are entitled to homes in New Orleans but won't be able to live there unless someone else pays for their house and moving expenses is an insult to every hard-working, successful black man and woman who lives there, even the ones who live in that Uptown area that Nagin disparages.

People who need to "Shut the hell up" #1--Katrina whiners

This would be all the people from New Orleans who received disaster aid following hurricanes Katrina and Rita who are now whining about our government "not doing enough" for them or not doing whatever "fast enough".

Shut the hell up.

First of all, it's not the federal government's job to support you forever just because something bad happened to you. It's regrettable that many people lost their homes and possessions but this is why responsible people buy insurance. The sad fact is that every day since the beginning of time, someone somewhere has suffered a personaly loss. But until recently no one ever expected the government (the other taxpaying Americans) to give the suffers money in order to somehow make it better. This is BS. When cities are leveled by tornadoes or when homes are lost to fires, floods or earthquakes, no one demands that the other American citizens pony up to buy new stuff for the people who got wiped out. At least not until you Katrina whiners going going.

You all decided to live below sea level in an area prone to hurricanes. I know this because I once made that choice too when I lived there. I made the choice freely because I wanted to be in New Orleans despite the risks. So did every one of you. I also had the option to buy insurance to cover my home, car and property. Every one of you could have and should have done this too. Many did but many more did not, and now you seem to think that somehow the rest of us should reimburse you for the cost of your poor decision? Sorry, but the charity that you got from the Red Cross and other aid groups is about it as far as I'm concerned. I never agreed to underwrite everything all of you own so that you could save your money for more imporatn things like beer and fast food. I didn't mind helping for the short term to keep you alive, but replacing all your stuff is your problem.

Now as to the time line here. You people got washed out back in August. Even though your local and state governments failed you, the federal government and several charities stepped in and relocated you, clothed you, fed you and gave you money no questions asked so that you could get back on your feet. Some of you did the right thing and set down new roots in the communities you were moved to. You got jobs and got on with life all across the country. But it's been five months now and others are still sitting jobless in housing that they did not pay for, whining about how they don't want to either start paying rent or get evicted. Some of you blew that FEMA cash at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores and you haven't even begun to seriously look for work. Now you're in the news demanding that the federal government(the US taxpayers) clean and rebuild New Orleans, build you a new house there and pay to move you back into it immediately. Give me a break!!!

As a former New Orleans resident who loves that city, my heart broke when I witnessed the destruction and the loss. I sent what aid I could and I wished that I could have done more. But the fact is that both Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco dropped the ball when they didn't use the assets or plans that were in place to help you, but they are Democrats who were elected solely due to machine politics so no one really expected them to be competent and as it turned out, they weren't.

It's their fault--not George Bush's--but it's also yours because you let these people get elected andeven now instead of holding them accountable you seem to be blaming the FEDERAL government for some reason. The federal government (and the rest of us taxpayers) didn't owe you anything. You had local and state governments for just this reason and you're the ones who let political hacks have those important seats. Now you're paying the price for not electing competent people.

Bottom line, Katrina "victims", is that nature and your own choices caused your predicament. Despite that you still got an incredible amount of help from the rest of us which was designed to put you back on your feet. I applaud those of you who got jobs, put their kids in school and otherwise transitioned into your new communities.
BUt as for the rest of you--the whiny greedy ungrateful minority who still keep demanding more handouts, suing the government to keep the free rent and cheese flowing and calling my president "racist" and "uncaring", it's time for you to shut the hell up. I didn't object to charity to help you but some of you are really abusing it now and I'm done paying for theb ones who still aren't trying. Get jobs and get out of my pocket now, and I pray that FEMA turns off the rent subsidies for you lazy holdouts ASAP.