Good Help is Hard to Find

"Hello. This is FEMA Director Mike Brown. Thank you for calling the federal government's disaster hotline. I'm sorry I'm not available at this time, but your call is very important to me. Please make a selection from the following menu and your call will be forwarded to the next available bureaucrat. If you are the incompetent mayor of a city unprepared for a hurricane or flood, and you can't read your city's evacuation plan, please press '1'... If you are the addle-brained governor of a state experiencing a total breakdown of the social order and you don't know how to activate the National Guard troops under your command, please press '2'... If you are a U.S. senator seeking political cover, a scapegoat, a pile of money or a symbolic public apology for a natural disaster, please press '3'... If you are an ordinary citizen experiencing starvation, thirst, violent assault or any imminent catastrophe associated with an ongoing or recent disaster, you're shit-outta-luck. If I were you, I'd head to the nearest Wal-Mart. Thank you, and have a nice day.".... Remember the good old days? Before global warming? When wacky weather never killed people? When we had a President who cared about black people and there was no poverty? Remember when the government was full of competent professionals who took care of us and FEMA ran like a fine Swiss watch? It wasn't that long ago. Let's go back to Jesse Jackson's Chicago in July of 1995. In a span of five sizzling days, 738 mostly-black, mostly-elderly, mostly-poor citizens of Chicago's worst neighborhoods died of heat-related causes because they couldn't afford air-conditioning, couldn't afford the electricity to run their air-conditioners or because they were afraid to open their windows and doors at night for fear of crime. Chicago's Democratic crime machine lost hundreds of supporters (many were buried in mass graves but continue to vote regularly to this day) because 1. they couldn't or wouldn't take responsibility for their own safety; 2. Mayor Daley's plantation is a dangerous place even in mild weather; and 3. the man known as "The First Black President of the United States" was too busy playing hide-the-Cohiba with a portly intern to bother providing some air-conditioners and electricity for the people who put him in the office with the girl under the desk.... Where did Karl Rove hide 9,210 bodies? Howard Dean thinks Karl is harvesting organs for sale on the black market. Why? The death toll from all of Katrina is 790 at this writing... not the 10,000 victims originally-projected for New Orleans alone. And for that we're glad. It could have been much worse, but probably not much better. At the end of the day, we got some surprising help from other countries. But on the ground, it was America's military, private businesses, citizen volunteers and many religious groups that have been the silver lining on this cloud. Not the nanny-state at any level. And that's something you won't read about in The New York Times.... Packing Heat in New Orleans. Actor and Saddam Hussein apologist Sean Penn was so moved by the images of suffering and destruction in Katrina's wake that he immediately flew to New Orleans with a publicist and a photographer in order to be seen doing something even more positive than beating ex-wife Madonna and forcing her head into an oven. (Has anyone checked in on Robin Wright lately?) Penn, featured in The New York Post patrolling the puddles of New Orleans armed with a pump action shotgun, recovered one bloated body that turned out to be fellow filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore was in town working on his latest documentary Bush Killed Everyone Again. The pair had a good laugh and made plans for lunch at The Ivy in Beverly Hills next week. The death toll from Penn's visit has not been released.... In a league of his own on many levels, current Miami Heat and former Louisiana State University basketball star, Shaquille O'Neal was moved by the same images that Sean saw. His roots in the region compelled him to view the damage up close with his own eyes... so he went to New Orleans, too. After two days, he called neither the government nor Penn's photographer. Instead Shaq returned to Miami intent upon doing more for the victims than simply writing a check. Within a week, he and his wife had leased a fleet of 18-wheelers and rallied the Miami community to fill a huge warehouse with donations of everything from refrigerators and furniture to diapers, clothes and 10,000 cases of water. He and his family worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the hot sun with other volunteers to manually load every item into the trailers for shipment to the affected areas. And he's writing checks, too. In addition to the trucks, Shaq has pre-paid the rent on 400 apartments in Dallas for displaced families and is in the process of furnishing them. Why, Shaq? "Because I was raised that way." Big man, indeed....Check out those boobs that we hire and re-hire every election day (some for generations) and you have most of the answer to why "the government" doesn't work in the event of an emergency. Media hysterics and politics aside, the federal response to Katrina was about as timely and as flawed as anyone should expect from a fat, big, dumb and slow bureaucracy overseen by career politicians and populated with civil servants and other slackers who can't be canned for doing a lousy job. We have the government we deserve. We hired 'em and they could and should be a lot better at many things. But "first response" is not one of them. Unless you need to call in an airstrike on a local Wahabbi mosque, the federal government will never be your best first call in any emergency.

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

Not since Huey Long caught a .32 with his kidney in 1935 has America paid as much attention to the corruption, incompetence and potential for danger in the cajun-crayfish-boil of Louisiana politics as we are right now. A Democrat presidential candidate, political grifter and world-class class-warrior, "The Kingfish" built a career, made a fortune and set-the- tone-in-the-state by preaching the political poison of victimology, resentment, social dependence and lack of personal responsibility. His success inspired generations of cynical successors in local and state government and it warped the world-view of citizens yet-to-be-born. Former corrupt Louisiana Congressman (and current corrupt lobbyist) Billy Tauzin is reported to have once joked, "Half of Louisiana is under water, the other half is under indictment." Tauzin's joke ceased to be funny this week as the sorry state of the sorry state's politics, and its power over a dependent-by-design citizenry, killed a yet-to-be-known number of people who just plain never knew not to trust the government with their lives.... Who's in charge here? Despite warnings from the Feds, the National Hurricane Center and scientists from the state's universities, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin chose NOT to follow his city's own published evacuation plan that told him to utilize the hundreds of city and school buses to move the citizens who couldn't or wouldn't move themselves. And because neither the Mayor nor anyone else told them what to do when the city flooded last week... and because they didn't feel personally responsible for their own lives... some combination of hundreds or thousands of citizens of New Orleans died of stupidity, dependence and/or helplessness. Back to the buses: One erstwhile blogger counted 255 buses in an aerial photo of just one city parking lot. At 66 seats per bus, a single run would have safely transported 16,830 people the ninety miles to Baton Rouge in a couple of hours. So, why didn't Mayor Nagin fire up his fleet instead of his crack-pipe? Those buses weren't good enough. Taking a page from the Marion Berry playbook, he called the media, played the race card and demanded President Bush send to New Orleans Greyhound's entire fleet of luxury coaches, currently scattered across the country. He said they would be more fitting transportation for his displaced constituents than the big yellow buses sitting in rising water within two miles of the Superdome. Apparently, Nagin was never taught to seek high ground in a flood. And every time he opened his mouth this week, it all got a little deeper for everyone. The no-good Mayor told at least one reporter the CIA is out to get him for criticizing the President. When last heard, the unhinged city executive was busy rotating his overworked police force to well-deserved week-long family vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta... to rest at taxpayer expense. Seems his cops are tired, stressed and running out of ammo "protecting and serving" the citizens of New Orleans. No one in city government has yet explained how the police department of a major city can run out of ammo in six days. Run out of ammo? Not even the poor city of Mogadishu runs out of ammo. And if you think the N.O. Mayor is a bad joke, don't bother turning to the Governor of the state for leadership. She's M.I.A. Mrs. Blanco was last seen crying like George Voinovich on the Larry King Show.... Gibson for Mayor... and Governor! Wednesday morning, while the Governor blubbered and the Mayor was unbundling his undies, 20-year old Jabbar Gibson calmly walked into a bus garage, took a set of keys to a school bus and made his way out of the city. Along the way he stopped to pick up "about 70 passengers" before hitting the road for the 13-hour trip to Houston. The passengers kicked in for gas and Jabbar's bus arrived at the Houston Astrodome even before the price of unleaded jumped seventy cents a gallon on news of Katrina. They pulled in to the stadium at 10 p.m., just about the time Mayor Nagin's now-famous Greyhound Emancipation Proclamation was first aired on CNN. I'm thinking this Jabbar kid is an Independent and a difference-maker. And he is at least one good reason to believe New Orleans is worth rebuilding.... Forget the levee, plug that pie-hole! While people are still drowning and dying, Hillary Clinton announced that she has written the President requesting a 9/11-like "Katrina Commission." She got wind that someone stole a school bus in New Orleans and she wants to make some political hay by investigating the crime and making a public example of the thief. But nobody except the politicians really seemed to care what Hillary said. Thinking people are more concerned with what real people are really facing right now in the Big Easy. I'm guessing if you're reading this, you've already sent a donation, or you're going to. You've got it and they need it. Send a check to the Red Cross or The Salvation Army. They'll make a difference with your money. But be careful. There are a lot of sketchy charities that crop up in times of trouble. Don't be duped into a donation to the "Michael Jackson Neverland Shelter for Flood Boys" or the "Ted Kennedy Mardi Gras Memorial".... R.I.P., Chief Justice Rehnquist. His death came as no surprise, given his long, public fight with cancer, but it's always a bad day when you lose a great leader. Rehnquist made a positive difference in our history during his tenure on the bench. We should appreciate him for many things. But mostly because it was his court that had the wisdom and courage to stop Al Gore from stealing an election. It's not that we're always so glad to have George Bush; he's certainly not perfect. But we should thank William Rehnquist and his court every day that we won't ever have Al Gore driving the peoples' bus. To Houston or anywhere else.