It seemed familiar to me too

Robert Tracinski - An Unnatural Disaster:

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
...
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

Hey! I bet NO Mayor Ray Nagin is a hoot at Mardi Gras!

Update: On a related note - Australian hero of Horrordome:

BRISBANE man Bud Hopes was lauded as a hero for helping save dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city's Superdome deteriorated into a hell-hole.
...
Mr Hopes, 32, from Kangaroo Point, said: "That was the worst place in the universe.

"Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good ? in that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.

"Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns in, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot in there."

Realising that foreigners were being targeted, Mr Hopes and fellow Aussies gathered other tourists into one part of the building.

More on how they managed to survive by following the link. What a complete and utter embarassment. I guess they don't call Ray Nagin, NO Mayor, for nothing. I hope he was comfy in Baton Rouge.

Mayor Ray Nagin breaks out his tinfoil beanie!

One of the posters on FR just spotted him wearing it on CNN:

On CNN just now. New Orleans Mayor Nagin, apparantly stressed out, in interview segment, said he has been yelling at the President and the Governor, and for all he knows, the "CIA could wipe me out". (Paraphrase) Just now.

Turning into a strange, macabre show now. Blame continues, spiraling out of control. Sad. It even raised CNN's eyebrows a bit.(5:57 p.m. Eastern/4:57 p.m. Central)

Ray would be better served to watch out for the constituents that he has served so well.

And now for something completely different

Man Fired for Eating Pizza Wins Contest:

A computer engineer who lost his job because he ate two pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a company meeting has been named the winner of an offbeat Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings.

A panel of Silicon Valley judges assembled by Simply Hired, a Mountain View startup that sponsored the contest, picked Jim Garrison's strange tale from more than 1,000 entries submitted during the past month.
...
The runners-up included these bizarre stories: a furniture mover who got fired after he and a co-worker were caught fencing with some adult sex toys that they found in a customer's bedroom; a worker who misunderstood a manager's instructions to send some sensitive data to microfilm and e-mailed it to a "Michael Finn" instead; and a warehouse worker found doing perverse things with the prosthetics made by his employer.

It made for such fascinating reading that one woman posted an account about how she got fired for spending too much company time scrolling through all the postings on Simplyfired.com.

More by following the link and at Simplyfired.com. This sounds like the everyday equivalent of "Dumb Crook News."

Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool

Original photo here. Via Drudge who asks "WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?..." Bill Hobbs has more.

Update: No Worries for NO Mayor Ray.

Links from all over

More Ideological Looting At The HuffPo

Meanwhile, it is reported that Klingons have seized control of the French Quarter

Aliens Have Invaded the Earth

Somewhere tonight, Al Sharpton is abusing his staff for letting Jackson get from South America to New Orleans before him

Hurricane exploitation - the quotes

Bloggers on Hurricane Katrina (Left vs. Right)

A TALE OF TWO MAYORS: NEW ORLEANS MAYOR RAY NAGIN IS NO RUDY GIULIANI. See also: Mayor Nagin’s “Kate Hale” moment

"It seems that since there was a collapse of all levels of government from municipal through state, the only thing left to do is blame the feds."

"I can survive for some time with little water, no food and highly unsanitary conditions...but if I don't hear some poetic words of comfort and stirring verbal imagery from the president pretty soon, I'm a goner."

And last but not least:

"So it was six people and a large blue turd then?"

Blogging for Katrina victim relief

Glenn Reynolds is coordinating a blogburst for Katrina victims. (See also the TTLB Katrina Relief page.) Only rarely do I make contribution suggestions to my readers, but today please let me urge you to donate to relief for the victims of Katrina. If you don't have a favorite charity, I would also like to recommend the Salvation Army. They have been doing good for 140 years and operate with minimal overhead.

Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina

This just in!

Hugo Chavez took time out today from his busy Bolivarian Revolution schedule to once again declare that he's not gay. He finished off the declaration with an impromptu rendition of "Macho Man."

Time to break out the virgins!

Yep, the moonbats have arrived and no virgin is safe in their desire to appease the angry Weather Gods. Take your pick - you can have the rare Hyannisport Lightweight; the monomaniacal Boston Scribbler, or an elite German Ecowanker. I'm sure there will be more soon! James Glassman applies the requisite spanking.

Update: An observant reader points out that no women are safe when a Kennedy is around. Related: Greg Gutfeld (the only voice of sanity at the Huffington Post) has declared martial law:

YO HUFFIES!

Because of the mass disaster taking place in New Orleans, i feel i must declare martial law on the huffpo. Therefore, posters may be shot with a paint gun on sight:

1) for pretty much ignoring world class tragedy in the gulf coast because it didn't happen in an NPR-approved third world country and therefore cannot be blamed on American indifference.

2) for trying to tie the 'natural' disaster to global warming, the evil bush family or any political opponent, like, say Haley Barbour.

Or not waiting, say, 5 minutes before the bodies are fished out of the water to attempt to make political gain of tragedy. Boldness Points: For a Kennedy issuing blame over an event that involved drowning.

And speaking of old media whores!

Dueling diesels:

Maybe she just can't let Cindy Sheehan drive off with her thunder. Jane Fonda has announced the dates of her new anti-Iraq war bus tour, which was only a nascent rumor in recent weeks.

Miss Fonda plans to tool around the nation aboard a "biodiesel" bus in the company of British politician George Galloway, who was expelled from the Labor Party for pacifist rhetoric, WorldNetDaily.com reported yesterday.

The Brit is quite giddy, calling the upcoming jaunt "fantastic." And of course he's also plugging his new book, "Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington" -- because he is.

The Fonda tour kicks off in Boston Sept. 13 and ends in a rally in Washington on Sept. 24, and include stops in Chicago and Madison, Wis.

Mrs. Sheehan, meanwhile, will leave her Crawford, Texas, anti-war vigil on Sept. 1 and begin her own cross-country bus trip -- which will also wind up in the District on Sept. 24.

Sept. 24 promises to be a harmonic convergence of bozos in DC.

(Hat tip: Sacred Cow Burgers)

One old media whore meets another!

No, not Al Sharpton and Cindy Sheehan. I'm talking Jesse Jackson and Hugo Chavez - Venezuela to sell cut-price heating oil to U.S. poor:

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said on Monday his government plans to sell as much as 66,000 barrels per day of heating fuel from its U.S. Citgo refinery to poor communities in the United States.

The offer, made after populist Chavez held talks with U.S. civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, would represent 10 percent of the 660,000 bpd of refined products processed by Citgo. The deals would cut consumer costs by direct sales.

Venezuela's Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said officials were still working on the details on how the oil would be sold from Citgo, a unit of the state oil firm PDVSA.

"We are going to direct as much as 10 percent of the production, that means 66,000 barrels, without intermediaries, to poor communities, hospitals, religious communities, schools," Chavez told reporters at a press conference.

No intermediaries? How's Jesse going to get his cut? And I wonder if ole Hugo is going to drive the delivery truck himself?