Like Zorro, I'm back!

Greetings, all. All three or four of you! As Shrub would say, this blogging stuff is hard work. My apologies for being persona non appearing for a while...been fighting some strange lingering sinus ailment. I think it may be West Nile swine bird flu with a ptomaine back. Or some such shit.

In any event, I feel good enough now to have a beer or three, rare back, and start bloviating again. And boy howdy! ain't there much to talk about!

I mentioned in my last post my fears about Rita. If it weren't such a dire situation in the south, I would be Highly Amused. Katrina's little sister didn't drown an entire city, but god helpya if you're coastal in the country, from 'Bama to Port Arthur, Texas.

I won't even bother to point out that Houston didn't actually need to be evacuated, and when it was, lots of folks got stranded on the highway trying to do so (okay, so maybe I just did). Does go to show why maybe the gov and mayor over in NOLO waited to the last minute...has something to do with the unpredictable nature of the storms. Bone up on your basic Jimmy Buffett (cain't reason with hurricane season), and quit letting morons in DC tell you what Gulf storms are like.

And then there is the forgotten out in the country. To speak as you would down there, they a lot of people have yet to see a bottle of water, 'cept from folks. Good old folks, doing unsung private work, from somewhat north to across the country, churches and communities have been sending supplies, paperwork be damned.

Little to no federal help. Period. Much attention has been rightly focused on New Orleans (now being busily partioned out to private contractors who, thanks to our lovely president, can pay dirt wages to rebuilders. Why don't they just offer the guys forty acres and a mule? Or a bunk and a taco a day -- guess who's going to do the bulk of the work; we should all be asking Halliburton for a review of their employees' W-9 forms, if only to keep them from screwing Mexican illegals with $2 an hour). The entire Gulf Coast will come back, only through the efforts of the good people of the entire area, and across the nation. But it does lead one to wonder why we pay taxes. Not being a homeowner, I pay mine through a substantial chunk of my take-home pay (fed), and another big chomp in sales taxes (local). I must protest the stupid proposal that the Feds must WAIT until prompted by local authorities to PROVIDE HUMANITARIAN RELIEF in emergencies. Hard fer yer county seat to fax that shit in when it has no ELECTRICITY, or is UNDER WATER. The entire crux of the administration's response, from Bush and Drown at FEMA, was the fact that the feds insisted on sending guns first, food after. Understandably, the locals were less than willing, at first. New Orleans is still under virtual martial law, and since many of the first responders who should have been there are in Iraq (look up how many National Reserve folks are cops, fire department, and ambulance med techs, and you see what a drain that nonsense war is locally), the feds have contracted much 'security' to private firms like Blackwater. If you aren't familiar with them, it's not surprising. The company bills itself as a security company, but it basically operates as a private for-hire army. Excuse me, but when was the last time you saw a security guard toting a machine gun? We're talking First Blood Rent-a-Pigs. And even though the media has moved on, rest assured the smack down of a retired schoolteacher is not just an odd event (exactly who were ALL of those guys punching him? I saw more than three), it's life as normal these days in the Big Easy.

The official death toll in New Orleans (especially) is bogus, as well. Probably off by at least a couple thousand. Why? Because the only official count is bodies found. What happened to those who tried to flee, but were caught on the road? Some who ran out of gas surely tried to walk. What happened to the homeless, not to mention those without family? Like any big city in America, there are plenty of those folks no one will ever even bother to report missing. And face facts, folks, there were bodies sucked into those big drainage pumps. Lake Pontrachain and the Gulf of Mexico are a graveyard for many of the lost.

Then there are the lost that people are looking for. Of the families who were evacuated after the fact (about a week after the fact, if you remember), some were looking for family members who hadn't made it to the Superdome or the Auditorium, and they were further separated from family there when the busing started (busing; there is no end to the irony). Over 2500 children are unaccounted for at this point, and even more disturbing, upwards of 10,000 adults no one can find. Since families have been dispersed across the country, there is a screaming need for a national clearing database, so at least to account for some of these vast numbers. What Bush spent to go down, temporarily light up Jackson Square so he could yak, and fly right back to DC would cover the cost of a dozen computers and folks to run 'em. And as a taxpayer, I say Bush himself owes us the cost of a state of the art server for this, just because the numbnuts spent all that money setting up that disneyesque national address and doesn't even bother to button up his chambrey work shirt right. Pendejo.

The only things even as important enough as this are the ongoing scandals coming to light (or more precisely, to investigation) of the White House, and their sleazy buddies in Congress. I hope for wholesale removal from office....they all deserve serious prison time. I suggest sending these rich elitists to serve their sentences at Angola State Prison, down in Louisiana. And call it poetic justice.