I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

pornos gratuites

-Abraham Lincoln

I sure hope my friends who feel so very differently today will eventually come to recognize that the better angels of our nature have indeed touched us this day.

The main issue is that Labruzzo is, apparently, butt dumb.  He’s too dumb to even realize how dumb, racist, and ludicrous this “idea” is.  He  hasn’t even attempted to think his magical “idea” through.  Varg at the Chicory, has done the job for him in brilliant fashion. I’d like to hear him talk to fellow Republican and VP candidate Sarah Palin about this since she recently had a Down’s syndrome child that will ultimately require some government-provided social services.

Maybe we should require the CEOs of the big financial firms to get vasectomies since we are now proposing $700Bn of welfare for them.

All this reminds me of the Dead Kennedys classic, Kill the Poor. I don’t think Labruzzo would grasp the irony:

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the neutron bomb
Its nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at homeThe sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Gonna
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rates gone
Feel free again
O lifes a dream with you, miss lily white
Jane fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals its okay
So lets get dressed and dance away the night

While they
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

And I thought, “Oh, man, they got the X’s.”  Just reading that front page felt so familiar and looking through photos like the one above is just eerie.  I know there’s a lot going on with the financial market disasters and political theater, but there’s a helluva lot going on down in South LA and TX.

Florida is just kinda out there like a sitting duck. I’m not a geographical, hydrological, meteorological or any other kinda expert but it’s pretty obvious when you look at a map.  It’s going to happen one day.  And it’s going to be really expensive. Why should the rest of us pay to clean up what we know is inevitable? All those “snow birds” need to stop expecting the rest of us hard-working taxpayers to bail them out. It’s time to cut our losses.

Clearly Florida is way too risky. The insurance industry sure thinks so:

Industry actuaries say the problem is simple: Florida’s insurance rates, high as they may be, are not high enough for a state with an estimated 25% of America’s high-risk property.

And as an added bonus, no more “hanging chads” messing with our electoral college.

This is in response to the inevitable post-Gustav, post-Katrina editorials I recently read but will not link to.  I will, however, link to this excellent Louisiana Weekly rebuttal:

The timing of Gustav was just too eerie, too unsettling, too close. But, as my wife said, this time we cleaned the house before we left. You don’t clean a house you don’t think you’re coming back too. When we bailed our mid-city house for Katrina, we didn’t waste time trying clean before screwing down that last piece of plywood.

So the wife went to our friends home near Jackson, MS and I went to work in Little Rock, AR. Neither one of us liked the idea of being separated at such a stressful time. For me it was a case of hurry-up and wait. I rushed to Little Rock and then we just watched and waited to see if anything bad would happen forcing our hand and requiring action. Managers would come up with various doomsday scenarios and we’d answer their questions and return to our temporary cubespace and track the storm’s progress.

I made the mistake of looking at CNN. I had forgotten how incredibly bad cable news is. Not just Fox. All of it. Absolute garbage. But twitter, on the other hand provided real news. And via twitter we found a link that aggregated all the local TV news stations so we could get decent, straightforward reporting. This and of course WWL 870 radio. So while CNN and the like were reporting “OHMIGOD the levees going to break and flood the lower 9!”, WWL’s Lee Zurik was standing directly in front of the supposedly broken floodwall with a Corp official — on the upper 9th ward side.

Still weary, a little worse for the wear, but also blessed and thankful. Because while Gustav mostly spared us, it did great damage to our Terrebonne and Lafourche neighbors that you likely won’t hear about on any national news report.

Linky-loo:

• Social Media Proves Itself as Emergency Tool – a bit more on Twitter, etc.
• How the Internet is Changing Natural Disaster Reporting
• The eye of the storm : Leaving new Orleans is not an easy choice – Blogger Maitri on the reality of evacuating.
• Maitri on her trip to the devastated Isle de St Jean “Their loss is our loss, and every bit of aid helps.” Their fate is our fate, the same refrain….
• Karen Gadbois on the same trip
• My flickr page has some Gustav evac and return photos

We have tons of tools for modeling wind and direction of storms and those all help us make our plans. But having these additional models describing surge potential would be a good tool for the public to have to increase awareness and understanding.

Of course, watching changes in the spaghetti models of Gustav has us worrying about pretty much the same thing.