EckerNet.Com

Finally we\’re pulling out.

Three and a half years later, the National Guard is pulling the last of its troops out this weekend, leaving behind a city still desperate and dangerous.

Residents long distrustful of the city\’s police force are worried they will have to fend for themselves.

\”One of the biggest things we did was keep those places safe so people could rebuild,\” said Sgt. Wayne Lewis, who has been patrolling the streets since January 2007. \”People would put the things to rebuild in their houses and thieves would come along and take them right out again. We stopped a lot of that.\”

No this isn\’t Baghdad.  No it\’s not Kabul.  No it\’s not even a foreign nation.  It\’s New Orleans.  It took three and a half YEARS for us to rebuild the city to the point that we\’re comfortable pulling out our troops.  This is a city already familiar with democracy (at least a corrupt form of it).  This is a city that already possessed semi-modern infrastructure.  This is a city that possessed at least a basic literacy rate.

Yet it still took three and a half years to rebuild a CITY.  We\’re currently in a hurry to pull out of a COUNTRY after six years.

…Cynthia McKinney and the liberals who believe her.  You\’ll remember her, the crazed lunatic from Louisana that thought it was her constitutional right to punch Capitol police officers and waved the race card if someone so much as took her parking spot.

Well she\’s back and this time she\’s got a heck of a story to tell.  Did you know the Department of Defense executed 5000 prisoners during Katrina and dumped them in the Louisana swamps?? You didn\’t??? Oh well then you need to hear Cynthia \”I swear I\’m not crazy\” McKinney tell her story.

Note : You\’ll want to not be drinking anything during this…

Wow.  Not only is she a former Representative, but she\’s also a presidential candidate (Green Party).  It just proves the old saying is true, anyone CAN grow up and be President…..or at least run for President.

So she heard from her friend\’s brother\’s boss\’s cousin\’s former roomate that somebody disposed of lots of executed bodies in a swamp.  And not only have none of those prisoner\’s families asked questions, but none of the soldiers that shot them has spoken out.  And even though people live in and around those swamps, nobody reported finding a single body even though that\’s a body count greater than 9/11.  But don\’t worry some anonymous source in the Red Cross confirmed it!

Now normally this is one of those moments you just laugh at her and then feel guilty because it\’s not nice to laugh at the mentally ill.  But then you start crying because there are people that actually take her, and this claim in particular seriously.

I swung by the Democratic Underground, which is a popular forum for liberals of all strands….and what did they have to say about this \”revelation\” by McKinney???

reggie the dog:

perhaps local whites paniced
and shot a bunch of \”niggers\”, as they probably called them, as soon as they made it to dry ground…..

TheGoldenRule:

Nobody cares about prisoners that\’s why it wasn\’t in the news. Btw, heard anything about the missing in Texas lately?
Probably not.
These guys are good at covering up their crimes. They thrive on confusion and disinfo.

Herdin_Cats:

Whether this is true or not, it makes me literally sick to my stomach.

And my inclination is to trust McKinney. I don\’t think she would lie about something like this. I just don\’t know if I trust those who told her this.

If they were prisoners, it would be easy to tell the families that they drowned and have it be believed, because the families wouldn\’t have seen them before they disappeared, wouldn\’t have known the circumstances.

petgoat:

Most likely is that she\’s right, or that she\’s lost her mind.

Time will tell. Neither of your explanations makes sense.
I don\’t think Cynthia is easily duped, and it would be
insane to lie about something like this for no reason.

Third possibility: she\’s slitting her political throat
because of threats or blackmail.

Granted there are alot of people that think McKinney is crazy as well, but there are also plenty more over there that think it\’s completely believable.

When people are this easily misled and this frigging gullible it explains the popularity of Obama.

Yes, I have returned.  Myself and several other members of the MN Militia just got back from several days of hinting in the NoDak badlands/desert.  We figured it necessary to stage this trip since one of our members is preparing for another deployment (currently to Iraq) and he\’ll probably miss next year\’s trip.  He demonstrated his shooting skills were definitely up to the task.  However, I sincerely hope, and I\’m sure both him and his wife/family agree, that he never has use for them.

But even in it\’s own right it was an enjoyable trip.  Middle of what is essentially a desert shooting at prairie dogs from 300 to 600 yards away with a 30+ mph crosswind.  It seems they\’ve gotten a bit skittish from being shot at all summer so combined with the conditions I won\’t pretend we put much of a dent in their population but it was good fun anyway.  Except for the rattlesnake.

Having returned and finally gotten cleaned up, it\’s time to catch up with the world.

New Orleans is under water again?? You don\’t say.  Who could have seen that coming?  I\’m so glad we spent millions of tax dollars rebuilding a city that was guaranteed to be destroyed again soon and which contributes virtually nothing to the nation with the notable exceptions of copious amounts of most of the seven deadly sins, and a few sins that haven\’t even been invented yet.

GOP convention is going on, albeit in a very abbreviated format.  I\’ll be participating, so to speak, for the rest of it.  I hope to relate my experiences here but we\’ll see what I have time for.

Palin has been picked as VP.  I think I\’m damn near required to comment on that but it\’s now old news having been announced as I was on my way out the door.  But we\’ll see.

Other than that the world is pretty much as I left it.  Which is nice that it can survive without me.

Ran across a particularly well written article on the continuing \”victimhood\” status of New Orleans.  The article starts like this

Hurricane Katrina was an interesting tragedy to me.

On one hand, the loss of life was staggering. It was one of the most unexpected natural disasters of our time, and it left thousands upon thousands of people dead, injured, or homeless. But on the other, there were people who didn’t leave – knowing that a Category Four storm was headed their way, to a city below sea level, and thought that they could just ride it out. The local government did nothing to plan for the emergency that was sure to come, leaving low-income residents stranded when they could have used the hundreds and hundreds of buses that were left in bus barns to get those people out. Mayor Nagin did nothing to prepare for the inevitable. And on top of that, the best idea they could come up with for what to do with the surviving residents was to throw them all into the Metro Dome and wait.

And then the insanity really began.

There were conflicting reports from inside the stadium, which itself was badly damaged from Katrina, of rapes and murders and robbery. Journalists said it happened; police investigators concluded there was no evidence of any of this. The levees broke and things got worse. There was looting not seen since the Los Angeles riots in the early 90s. FEMA descended, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, upon New Orleans to start rebuilding. Often they were greeted with violence and threats. And somehow, all of this was of course George Bush’s fault – his attempt to “wipe out” all the underprivileged black people in New Orleans.

And it gets better….worth the read.  Because if you don\’t, you obviously don\’t care about the plight of minorities or something.  I dunno, I\’m not real familiar with how to talk \”victim\”.

Proof that our government has WAY too much money…

After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.

Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.

"It's terrifying: We're doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city's levees.

That's right, the city that is below sea level.  The city that is virtually guaranteed to get destroyed again.  They are rebuilding it.  With your tax dollars.  Not only that but they are even rebuilding the lowest parts.

Half of the residents haven't even returned to the city.  There is plenty of room, they wouldn't even need to rebuilt the low-lying areas.  Take your federal money and rebuild in an area where Spongebob isn't gonna move in next door in a few years.

I'm only slightly disgruntled that I'm paying to rebuild a city that's just going to be destroyed again.  I'm pissed off that isn't even being rebuilt correctly.   It used to be that we built things in this country to last, now we build them just because we can.

Anyone remember what happens when you subsidize something?  That's right, you get more of it.  So now we're subsidizing idiocy.  Guess what morons?  Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about political correctness or diversity.  She's the ultimate unbiased participant.  Of course, she also tends to patterns.  If it flooded once, it's likely to do it again. 

Of course, if they had any sort of leadership down there, we might not have this problem.  Unfortunately, the same idiots that think it's okay to rebuild in the same place also voted in their idiot mayor Nagin.  I suppose one explains the other.  I read recently that New Orleans was slowly sliding into the Gulf.  Any way we can use some of that federal money to speed up the process?

ENOUGH!!

I get it, Katrina was a year ago. Iraq\’s National Assembly also signed the text of their new Constitution a year ago yet I don\’t see anyone broadcasting that 26 hours a day.

New Orleans is still a shithole, I get it. But on the other hand it was before Katrina as well.

It still hasn\’t been rebuilt, I get it. On the other hand when most of the population was shipped to cities that aren\’t corrupt, has jobs, has a functioning police force, and is at least above sea level, well…..why would they want to come back and rebuild??

So please for the sake of what little sanity I have, please please please stop going on and on about New Orleans. It\’s a shithole and the rest of the country barely acknowledges it\’s existence…except during their annual drunken tit-bearing festival, also known as Mardi Gras.

For those of you who absolutely insist on going on about New Orleans. Here are some facts of life.

The primary responsibility of disaster response is at the local level, assisted if necessary by the state. The feds are more for coordinating the cleanup/rescue attempts after the fact.

When you live at, or below sea level you should expect to eventually be flooded out. Crying when it happens is just silly.

Expecting everyone else to foot the bill to rebuild a city that is absolutely guaranteed to undergo the same disaster in the future is even sillier.

If you live in an area that has ever been hit by a hurricane before, you shouldn\’t be surprised when another one arrives. You should be prepared for when that happens. If you are not, this is not my problem.

When you buy insurance, READ THE POLICY. If you don\’t, and then after the fact you realize that what you thought was covered is not, it is not a giant conspiracy against you, your race, your city, your class, your whatever-the-hell-social-group-you-want-to-claim.

When you find insurance for very very cheap, chances are it actually covers very very little.

If you buy insurance for event A but not event B, and event A is frequently accompanied by event B, it\’s probably prudent to also buy the readily available insurance for event B. When you don\’t, it is not the fault of the insurer of event A.

When you live in an area run by inept and corrupt local officials, you should probably not be surprised when even when they received plenty of warning of a disaster they do nothing except complain, cry, make extravagant claims/excuses and point fingers afterwards. This is not MY problem….YOU elected them….again.

Insurance companies do not cover stupidity on the part of the government. Such coverage is impossible as such stupidity is never ending and in some places rampant.

The fact that there is still no reconstruction plan, much less progress on reconstruction, should highlight the problem. If you can\’t at least create a plan, should you really be in charge??

For example, the town of Fargo, ND manages to rebuild itself every year just in time for the Red River to overflow and wash it away again. If they can manage that on the permafrost of North Dakota, surely you can manage it in the Gulf.

Playing the victim card is discouraged. This is America. We didn\’t whine that colonial rule was unfair, we did something about it. We didn\’t fret over the dangers of the frontier, we conquered it. We didn\’t complain that the west coast was too far away, we built a fucking railroad. You got a little water….fine, open a water park or something.

Well Mayor Ray \”Chocolate City\” Nagin has finally admitted he has a problem….after only 53 murders. Which is surprising considering he acted so quickly when Hurricane Katrina was headed for his city. In this case he asked for help from the National Guard almost as fast as he used those buses to evacuate the city. Quite a man of action that Nagin is.

But that got me to thinking…53 murders…in a city that used to have 480,000 residents…although it\’s a fraction of that now, last number I heard was 100,000 in January. So let\’s say population-wise it\’s comparable to Minneapolis. Now granted infratstructure-wise it\’s not comparable for fun let\’s look at the numbers.

Number of murders in Minneapolis so far?? 27. Cheer up Minneapolis, you\’re more than half way there, and then Pawlenty can send in the guard to clean up Klobuchar\’s mess. We can even have R.T. Rybak out there in the streets talking about bringing back a \”hotdish\” city or something. It\’s nothing any less intelligent than he normally says.

So we\’ve already been told that not only were blacks not disproportionally affected by Hurricane Katrina but now it wasn\’t even the poor that were disproportionally affected.

For example, a comparison of locations where 874 bodies were recovered with U.S. Census tract data indicates that the victims weren\’t disproportionately poor. Another database, compiled by Knight Ridder of 486 Katrina victims from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, suggests they also weren\’t disproportionately African-American.

Wow….so not only does Bush hate blacks and the poor but he\’s also not very good at controlling the weather and killing them all. I mean seriously, what good is miraculously causing global warming in the span of five years if you can\’t even control the absolutely normal bad weather.

Lack of transportation was assumed to be a key reason that many people stayed behind and died, but at many addresses where the dead were found, their cars remained in their driveways, flood-ruined symbols of fatal miscalculation.

Hmmm, so even though Bush obviously hates blacks, the poor, and anyone that isn\’t a stockholder of Halliburton, it wouldn\’t have mattered if a certain governor of the year and hero mayor had planned their evacuation better? Interesting….wonder why we never heard that theory previously? I guess the media was too busy reporting none-existant cannibalism and mass rioting to get around to that part.

*sigh*

In an attempt to boost its stalled economy, the hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans is starting the nation\’s first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city.

Just a thought, but how about you work on building a city, before you try to build an economy for it. I mean I know you need something to buy with all those FEMA credit cards (read: my tax dollars) but how about a levee or a dam or a roof or something instead.

Don\’t get me wrong. I\’m a blogger, I snack on bandwidth. Got a bit of a sweet tooth for it you might say. When on the road I love scanning for unprotected wireless networks I can use.

At the same time I\’m not calling for a wireless network in my home town which was NOT recently washed away in a hurricane. I mean they can\’t even open a textbook without raising my taxes, so wireless internet is a bit lower on the priority list than say….oh, drinkable water, for instance.

That will be slowed once the state of emergency is over – that date has not been determined – to 128 kps in accordance with state law, which restricts government-owned Internet service.

Yup, nothing improves quality like government regulation.

Hmmm, two big hurricanes. Two amazingly different results

Mass looting vs minimal isolated looting resulting in arrests
Ten thousandHundreds of deaths vs 2 deaths (so far)
Mass panic vs annoying inconveniences
Lawlessness vs relative peace

Damn, now what would explain the differences???

I mean in Texas we had state and local officials cooperating to organize a mass evacuation including using local resources available to them. They had a plan, they followed it the best they could, and other than a traffic jam, Texas appears to have weathered the storm pretty well.

In Louisana, we had state and local officials bickering until the last minute at which point they united just long enough to blame the feds for not recognizing their incompetence fast enough to save their people. Cue the crying and screaming for help. They had a plan, it was ignored. They had resources, they were left to soak.

There has to be a difference there….but hell if I can spot it. Damn it, I hate when that happens.

I guess it\’s one of those things we\’ll never know. Ranks right up there with who won the 2000 election and who killed OJ\’s wife. Another eternal mystery to add to the books.