More on Hurricane Katrina and it's opportunists.

Found this at Strange Business.com. For those who are fortunate enough to not live in this area, the topic of Katrina and bailing out it's refugees is a hot button issue in these parts. It isn't on a par with illegal immigration or the Cowboys losing a shot at the Super Bowl (again), but it gets a fair amount of discussion going.

Here we are, it's been years since Katrina hit and still former residents of the Big Easy whine about how unfair it is and how they're owed help. If they're not careful all the tears will flood them out of wherever they might be living now. In an earlier post I expressed my own impatience with it. Sure enough, after that a Katrina evacuee personally let the War Department know how much of a butthead I was (she already knew, almost nine years of marriage will do that for ya).

I thought this was pretty much dead on target, I love the nuance and subtlety. Wonder if it might get in the way of him making his point.

Cutting through all the Katrina Krapola-Posted by Vanderleun at January 13, 2008 5:21 PM

"You've got a mouth full of gimme, a hand full of much obliged." -- Bessie Smith, Gulf Coast Blues

I don't know about you but I have had it with the legions of hustlers, grifters, drunks, junkies, pathics and drooling layabouts that keep waddling and teetering up to the public trough from that swamp of puke called New Orleans. The latest of an endless line of calls upon the kindness of strangers by these public-purse pimps is this little bit of chicanery: Katrina victim sues U.S. for $3 quadrillion

Hurricane Katrina's victims have put a price tag on their suffering and it is staggering -- including one plaintiff seeking the unlikely sum of $3 quadrillion.

The total number -- $3,014,170,389,176,410 -- is the dollar figure so far sought from some 489,000 claims filed against the federal government over damage from the failure of levees and flood walls following the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.This chunk of legalized skunk trading may or may not include the Washington con job currently being floated in Swampy Bottom -- "Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number." But it hardly matters.

I've considered the matter of New Orleans carefully.

I've weighed the never-ending, and now maudlin, saccharine suffering of its people against my now limitless cache of compassion fatigue. They have been found wanting.

To be fair and just, here's what I propose we give New Orleans from this day forward. Nothing. Niente. Zip. Zero. Nada. And a full-scale barium enema just for asking for one more thin dime. Did you send money to this barrage of bozos? I did and I want it back. With interest.

The city and its long line of corrupt citizens and politicians have already managed to hoover $127 billion out of the federal government and that, as they say, should be enough for any cluster of crooks. On a per person basis that comes to $425,000 for each of the 300,000 fools still living in that pulsating pustule on the bayou.

Keeping that figure in mind, my policy is that the New Orleaners among us are paid up and paid in full as of today. Boys, girls, bozos, bad jazz musicians, and underemployed drag queens all, take heed. It is over. Take your toothless gums off the public tit. It is time for you all, like some overfed prolapsed Sumos who have double-dipped at the Hometown Buffet dessert table once too often, to belch, break wind, and move on.

Let's get cold-blooded about New Orleans. We've been far too nice to it for far too long. Nature, in the final analysis, may have been trying to do us a favor by flooding it. New Orleans is well past its sell-by date. The harsh truth is that New Orleans is more expendable than any other city of its size in the country.

As a city that is part and parcel of America New Orleans does exactly nothing to better the country and a lot to make it a crappier nation all around. I mean, just what is the big deal about this humid, festering, below-sea-level, rotting and clapped-out town with more STDs per capita than any other burg its size? Anne Rice? Vampire novels? A literary tradition that launched many millions of bad goth tattoos? A few blocks of mouldering and rusting antebellum architecture that oozes the tattered ghosts of slavery and child prostitution? A cuisine composed of liquid pork fat, overweight oysters, and second-string animal parts so vile they have to be soaked in wine and then crusted with chile peppers and charred to a blackened husk? Don't even get me going on taking bad coffee and making it worse by dumping some chicory in it. Sludge has more savor.

Plus when you die of the clap, the booze, the food and the coffee, you can get a colorful marching band of off-key musicians to haul your body into an above ground concrete box so you can come sloshing back out with all the rest of the rotting dead the next time the water rises. The quaintness of it all just exceeds the mind's capacity to boggle.

All of those and more, yes. But the single thing that seems to be valued in New Orleans above all else is the ability to have a large schooner of raw alcohol poured into a plastic cup so that you can.... wait for it... walk outside the bar and onto the sidewalk... and never have to stop drinking.

Wow! That's a quality feeling.

It gets better. When you are out "in the Quarter" (Quaint phrase, that.) on a "normal" night, you can walk around and drink with thousands of other drunks reeling and whooping and practicing their projectile vomiting skills on each other. During Mardi Gras you can do this in an absurd and ever-more obscene costume with hundreds of thousands of others as absurd and obscene as you. Man that's living. That's entertainment!

We've already poured billions over this raw festering sore of a city. The infection is still there and it gets more virulent by the day. And now we find that the denizens of this sewer want us to actually pay billions and trillions more to keep this chancrous old collection of corruption afloat? I don't think so. But con-artists don't stop conning until you stop them.

My suggestion to the Army Corps of Engineers is simple. The next time any of the poor sots of New Orleans come staggering up to the Federal Courts shaking the begging cup, blow all the levees and let the city drown its sorrows in the Mississippi.