Ah sorry, ladies an’ genemuns, but enuff be enuff o dis racial crap!

I’ve read liberal “opinions” that Katrina the Bitch was the fault of George W. Bush who, according to these idiots, caused the disaster by refusing to sign off on the Kyoto Assininity, thereby allowing global warming{already bebunked as myth by scientists} to create the devastating hurricane that blew along the gulf coast and caused so much devastation, some going so far, because so many poor blacks were stranded in New Orleans, as to label it a “racist” hurricane{owned, of course, by GWB}.
I’ve read liberal opinions that the poverty that stranded these people was the fault of the Republicans because of our belief in limited government, that we failed them by not awarding them a much larger share of our hard earned tax dollars so they could live a better, if unearned, life, thereby giving them the means to own cars and to drive themselves to safety as Katrina descended.
I’ve read liberal opinions that the sole reason there wasn’t a quicker government response to help in New Orleans was because the victims were poor blacks.
Naturally, all the blame somehow finds its way to Bush, if you take the portside braying of the liberal mainstream media as gospel, which unfortunately millions upon millions of Americans seem to do. It’s not their fault, they are simply folks who don’t know any better than to believe that venues like CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and countless others value the truth more than they do partisan Democrat propaganda. Rarely if ever will you find anything that reports positive accomplishments by the Bush Administration on their news programs or in their newspapers, even the most glaringly obvious positive seems to be subdued to the point of nonexistence while the most picayune trace of the negative becomes a blaring epic.
So now every aspect of the Katrina debacle, from the hurricane’s creation to the breaking of the levee to the “slow” government response is the result of Bush’s “racism.”

I lived in New Orleans some years back and got out quite a bit.

It was always a Democrat city, in fact there was always a black mayor when I lived there, first a father(Dutch Morial), then a son(Marc Morial), and since, the son was ousted by C. Ray Nagin.

The city’s Democrat mayors and other politicians did absolutely nothing to help extract their large, poor black population from poverty, in fact those who did manage to pull themselves up, along with the politicians, always seemed sort of amused at the terrible joke that served for public education and the poorness of the poor. The locals had a reason for keeping these people down: A tradition of poverty among blacks kept available an abundant low paid, underbenefitted pool for staffing the hotel and restaurant kitchens, street cleaning, housekeeping, garbage collecting and other occupational needs of the tourist dependent city.
The only “help” these Democrats ever gave those particular constituents was welfare– enough income to keep them alive and “in their place” so they could continue to breed necessary cheap labor, a continuation of the slavery we abolished in most of the country in the early 1860s, only the postwar “masters” didn’t have to supply room and board out of pocket.

Crack addiction and street crime were rampant among the black population, murders literally a dime a dozen and the city simply shrugged and went about its collective business, as often as not with a humorous grin.
If there was any racism, it came from the collective of the city’s democrat majority.
And the poverty there didn’t just spring into existence when Bush took office, it was an institution, sad to say, going back to the end of the Civil War and the “abolition” of slavery.

Enter Hurricane Katrina, the breaking of the levee(the Levee Board was not comprised by engineers, as you’d expect, but by members of the unbelievably corrupt local old boy network, mostly businessmen who had made significant donations to the right political campaigns) and sheer pandemonium.
The Bush Administration had, at the outset, advised the people of New Orleans to evacuate the city, but had been mostly ignored.
Rescue workers were repelled by roving gangs of local blacks bearing arms, many stolen from looted gun shops and sporting goods stores, others already owned as implements of policy among gangs. Local blacks and even police looted stores like it was a new kind of Christmas and the mayor fled when he could have been using large fleets of school buses to evacuate those who would go. The governor, when offered assistance by Bush, had said she “wasn’t sure,” and needed 24 of what turned out to be crucial hours to decide. This is a governor’s decision to make, as local and state authorities “own” their natural disasters.
Yesterday, George W. Bush took responsibility for the “slow” federal response and the FEMA executive responsible resigned. I see that not as admitting to any fault so much as doing a leader’s job and taking responsibility for something happening on his watch. I have yet to see a Democrat do the same– no, he or she would just blame it on Bush.
The truth is, a whole bunch of Democrats failed to do their jobs– they even failed to implement a documented response plan put together after the last big hurricane that came to town.
The truth is, this whole issue that race is involved may be accurate, but if that’s the case it does not rest in the lap of the Bush administration. It rests in the laps of Nawlins Democrats who gave little priority to blacks except as vassals created for cheap labor.

Blacks who march to the false drum of Democrat support need to wake up and realize that they’re victims of a great con by a party whose interests are better served by keeping them poor and keeping racism alive.

A pretty on-point Opinion Journal commentary by Brendan Miniter is here

Yes, I’ve now moved into my new place, though there’s still renovation and redecoration in progress, none of it my own work, but that of the great people I mentioned in my last post: Phin and Sadie, who were responsible for the awesome new look, and Pixy, who hooked me up with Mu.Nu, the ultimate host for any blogger privileged enough to make this elite entity’s acquaintance.
To refer to their efforts as “contributions” would be false, because it would insinuate that they weren’t the collective prime movers in the rebuilding of my blog. My deepest thanks, therefore, go out to this creative trinity, as much for the excellence of their work on my behalf as for their taking the time to do it for me.

Thanks, guys and gal!

I will not be doing any real posting in the next few days, my travel itinerary is on the cusp of becoming busy and brisk and next week I’ll be at a convention in Orlando whose days will be filled with seminars, workshops and exhibits that will require every iota of my attention.

The rescheduling of the rally that brought me here to Washington, D.C. coincides directly with the convention schedule and I have to attend no matter what. If I can, I’ll try to get back up here a little early so as to participate for at least some of it. I had really looked forward to going at it with the LWAGAA (Leftard Wingnuts Against God And America), but the regrettable loss of Chief Justice Rehnquist, rest his soul, resulted in the change of many plans.  

Some great people named Phin, Sadie and Pixy are moving me to a brand new location with a brand new face, and when the dust settles, the new and vastly improved Hard Astarboard’s URL will be

http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/

Ah’ll be bock!  

Saturday was pretty laid back compared to the previous days of my stay here in Chicago, slept in, had a long lunch in Germantown with a friend– we went to a Mexican eatery called Garcia’s that she was raving about, a quiet little neighborhood establishment. The food was good, the neighborhood worth exploring, which we did.

Quaint, a lot of old shops of the type that have been mostly replaced in other areas and cities by newer businesses with only a fraction of the charactar of Germantown’s own. Two traditional delis on the same block, a Greek restaurant with outdoor tables, an old German sausage store, an open plaza with a fountain, shops that sold pewter and glass and really interesting blown glass goods, a couple of German brauhauses my friend, who had lived in the neighborhood for many years, told me were great places to hang out at. So we had a couple of beers at one.

That night, I had some folks here in my suite for drinks and it turned into an all night party, finally ending after sunrise, so I ended up sleeping well into Sunday afternoon and spent yesterday around the hotel recuperating, as it were, then the evening included a hearty room service dinner of penne pasta in a sauce that was abundant with Italian sausage, and molten lava cake for dessert followed by a couple of hours at the bar before going to bed early in order to get up early.

I’m flying to Washington, D.C. today, and I tend to like getting up really early when I have a plane to catch{it’s 5:30 am}.

Tomorrow the counter-rally for Judge Roberts begins, and I’ll be there from start to finish. My first political rally, I’m really looking forward to it, and wondering what surprises there might be due to the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. A lot of the liberal wingnuts are already yelling for a postponement of the confirmation vote, citing both the time proximity of the disaster in the south{they claim it will mean too much on Bush’s plate at one time, but as we have seen, this president and his cabinet are more than capable of extreme multitasking – and George Bush isn’t a senator, he won’t be voting anyway – and what some of them term "irreverence" in timing because of Mr. Rehnquist’s sudden passing}.

Is the latter a hoot, or what? Democrats concerned about irreverence! Here are people who have no problem using dead military personnel, funerals, natural disasters and any other grave circumstances to press their partisan political agendas, and they’ve got the moxi to want us to believe they give a flying f— about irreverence? Gimme a break!

These are people who accuse Bush of failing the people of New Orleans and making a racial issue out of the Katrina horror instead of attaching blame where it belongs, like to the black mayor of New Orleans who let his own people down by not doing his job by adhering to disaster response plans, instead slinking quickly away to safety in Baton Rouge, and the equally useless governor of Louisiana, who was as impotent in her own response as former liberal California Governor Gray Davis was to the exponentially less cataclismic energy crisis we had out there a few years ago.

These are people who, because it fits into their political agenda, ignore the fact that responding to the havoc wrought by Katrina was the direct responsibility of those local excuses for political leaders, not Bush. Democrats’ failure resulted in misery and death on a massive scale, and now they want to blame Bush. The left grows more pathetic by the hour, it makes me feel ashamed that these folks are somehow entitled to call themselves Americans.

That said, I’ll post some more from Washington, D.C.   

So Claire took me to a neat Brazilian place for dinner called Fogo de Chao, a dream come true for a carnivore like myself. I mean, they keep bringing on the meats….  That place rates a zillion yum-stars from me and another half million for  themselves.  That is, beyond any iota of doubt, a place to have dinner. Satisfying in an extreme, an eatery to get down on ones knees and be thankful for. Yummmmmmmmmmmm!

We came back to my hotel for a couple of drinks at the bar and a couple more in my suite, then I put her in a cab and sent her home. Many, seeing her, would wipe the drool from their lips and demand to know why "things" didn’t go further, and my answer would be that sometimes friendships are more valuable than intimate relationships.

I learned that the hard way(no pun intended) when I had a fling with a woman I’d grown up with in a near brother-sister relationship. We had a lot of fun and excitement for a couple of weeks, then had differences that cost us our friendship for several years.  Unlike some, I learn from my mistakes.

Tomorrow,{actually, later today} I have some interesting things to do of a casual nature, and will blog on them.

Today started early, since I got to bed earlier than anticipated. Room Service breakfast, pretty good, though they were kind of skimpy on the potatoes, and it was the first time I’ve ever had fresh asparagus spears as a breakfast garnish(unless I was meant to eat ‘em, which I didn’t) and I was out the door around noon.

My friends Carolyn, Patrick, Elaine and I went to the Navy Pier, one of Chicago’s tourist attractions, though a lot of locals also hang out there, there are some good bars and places to eat, plus a lot of good stuff for kids and I actually got to buy and munch on one of my favorite all time snacks, one I haven’t enjoyed since the last time I was on the Atlantic City Boardwalk: A funnel cake!

Funnel cakes aren’t complicated, they’re basically a carnie food of fried dough and powdered sugar, but man, they’re GREAT{even more than Frosted Flakes}!

We went for a 90 minute cruise on a four masted schooner named Windy– I couldn’t resist, had to drag the others along, of course, and I even got to help with the line handling. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards, we had lunch outdoors at Bubba Gump’s, a shrimp restaurant that I found quite good, then it was off to the Water Tower, a mall that isn’t much different from malls anyplace else, except for a glass walled elevator bank wherein you can see all the works and a cute stairstep styled marble fountain between the up and down escalators between the first and second floors that spits water bubbles straight up in the air. While we were at the Water Tower, I opened a T-Mobile Hot Spot account.

Claire, my stock broker friend, has invited me to dinner, but hasn’t told me where, so that should be a nice surprise. She’s not quite the party animal that most of my Chicago friends are, so I’ll have the opportunity to give my liver some quality time.

WELL….. I stand corrected, it appears, much to my surprise and undoubtedly the surprise of many others, that we are not alone where dealing with the New Orleans crisis is concerned, a number of countries have offered to help. I’ve been kind of out of touch with all the gallivanting around I’ve been doing since I got here, and when I got back to my hotel awhile ago, I found a comment by Dan Trabue of pacifist fame, http://www.paynehollow.blogspot.com , in which he informed me of my wrongness. Thank you, Dan. See? You’re not always a royal payne.

My linking icon has gone dim for some reason and the support folks at squarespace gave me a reply that was the laziest excuse for tech support I’ve ever received, maybe they ought to start employing the "Boyz From Bangalore," whom I’m sorry to say kick ass on Squarespace support. While I’m in DC, I’m going to spend at least one evening checking out alternative blog venues, maybe Blogger. Anyone got any suggestions?

More later.  

The friend I expected to visit with me last night called to say he needed to put off our drinking session for a night or two as his boss had stressed him out to the point that he could not be friendly to man nor beast. I respect his decision, because he works for Jimmy Lee, a little Japanese entrepreneur whose only friend is money and who treats, out of pure prejudice, his American employees like slaves. I’ve known Jimmy for awhile. He’s one of those slumlords(he owns a fleabag hotel in what was formerly Chicago’s skid row, a 17 storey building nestled now between a Comfort Inn and a parking lot in the most expensive zip code in this part of the country) who spends much of his time dodging city agencies in court over numerous code violations.

In the man’s defense, he does carry good tenants when they fall on hard times, though he tends to make their lives a living hell in the meantime. This is a case of a guy who arrived in the U.S. as a peon and built his own little empire. He’s got a good heart, he just doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Personally, despite his seeming greed, I like the man. He does a good job of hiding his humanity, but it is there. He simply wants to see others bust their asses and succeed like he did, and if they don’t or can’t, he views it as inferiority.

Oh, well.

So I went down to the hotel bar for a drink. Gabriel and Rebecca, the bartenders, were excellent at their job. I had a pint of Pilsner Urquel on draft and a shot or two of Sauza Hornitos. Then I returned to my suite and read the news.

I am distressed beyond belief about some of the things happening in Nawlins, according to the Associated Press.

New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday, as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out and storm survivors battled for seats on the buses that would carry them away from the chaos. The tired and hungry seethed, saying they had been forsaken. “This is a desperate SOS,” mayor Ray Nagin said.

“We are out here like pure animals,” the Rev. Issac Clark said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where he and other evacuees had been waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.

“I’m not sure I’m going to get out of here alive,” said tourist Larry Mitzel of Saskatoon, Canada, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. “I’m scared of riots. I’m scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire.”

I’m having some  technical trouble with links that will change in the near future when I change servers from customer unfriendly Square Space to another forum like Blogger, but here is a link to the story, via the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5249697,00.html

This majorly sucks, but it’s not anything non-understandable where human nature is concerned. These people have been yanked from normal life into an existence not unlike pure horror: Their homes are gone, their entire world has turned into a hell few civilized people can understand and the disruption of communications has cut them off from the money they have in their bank accounts, so they are broke, undomiciled and basically "fucked" for the time being. The despair and the frustration are taking their respective tolls.

I’ve donated money to one relief venue and am going to donate more to another.

We already know that as usual, America is on its own, despite all the help we give other countries in times of disaster, none of those countries nor any of our "allies" will help us.  If you can, please donate whatever you can afford to help the people of New Orleans. If we don’t help our own, they will not be helped, because the rest of the world doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about the United States except when we can do for them.

And I finally get time to post something, yay!

Chicago is an awesome town. I arrived yesterday evening via the Friendly Skies folks, who served me the first meal I’ve ever had on a plane that I could say was truly delicious: Smoked salmon with prosciutto and shiitake ’shrooms(I told that to one of the flight attendants, who laughed and said, "That’s because we didn’t have to cook it").

I decided to go "whole hog" this time out and am ensconced in a suite at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place with a great view of the Chicago skyline from the living room, two full baths, two big TVs, speaker phones all over the place and, most important, high speed internet access. I can also use the Wi-Fi access in a comfortable sitting room off the lobby. When I checked in, I saw all sorts of Cleveland Browns running around the hotel and learned that they were here to play a pre-season game with the Bears. They did, and won 10-0. Boo.

The people here are quick and full of character, but then this is the 2nd City, New York’s inland cousin and as such home of the second best pizza in America. OOOOOPS! Around here, them kin be fightin’ words, almost as bad as making derogatory remarks about the Cubs.

I spent yesterday evening with several friends I hadn’t seen in a long time and there was much imbibing, then I had a casual business meeting with a prospective partner in a small enterprise we’re contemplating. Then there was more libation.

I had intended to post after breakfast today, but two significant factors got in the way:

1. The night became morning before I was alone and I finally hit the rack, so by the time I crawled feebly out of bed it was well past the hour Room Service here serves breakfast, and 

2. As I was performing my first-thing-in-the(I can’t say morning in this case, so)-day’s-period-of-consciousness of checking my email(which includes comments made here at my blog) I was looking at the clock on my computer, forgetting(it had been some night) that it was still set on west coast time, and when I glanced at the face of my faithful Tag, I realized it was two hours later than I’d thought. "Seth," I grumbled, "you be’s a moe-ron."

So I had to kind of scramble to shower, shave and get out to meet still another amigo for a cold one, then get to my bank here to withdraw some cash– It’s good to carry some cash when you travel, it comes in handy in any number of ways– then off to the Nike store as I’d neglected to pack my sneakers before I left S.F. For those of you who have never been to Chicago, Michigan Avenue, in the Loop, can be a financial death trap: It’s too damn easy to spend too much money without even making any effort to do so, there’s something in the atmosphere of the place, the facades and the presentation of the window displays, that can instantly slam even the most miserly curmudgeon into shopping mode. Having walked past and viewed the window at Johnston & Murphy, after I bought a pair of Nikes I went back and bought a pair of $200.00 loafers. $200.00, cripes! Now I suppose I’ll need to go out and buy a picture frame for them, or something. I feel like "The son of Imelda Marcos."

Back to the hotel briefly, to answer emails and my two blog comments, then out to dinner with a trio of friends at the Tavern On Rush. I had blackened Cajun shrimp and a magnificent filet mignon with crab meat, asparagus and hollandaise sauce, an interesting deviation from my usual beef-and-potato simplicity, easily rating 5 yum-stars. And more libations were enjoyed by all. I would highly recommend Tavern On Rush as not only a superb place to eat and drink, but also as part of a good Chicago experience.

It’s a good thing that most of the people I know in DC are moderate, family types, or by the end of next week I’d be dead from cirrhosis.

The biggest topic of conversation by far, among all my friends here, has been the destructive assault on New Orleans by Katrina the Bitch. Having lived there in years past, I know a lot of people in New Orleans and wonder how they’re making out, as it’s impossible to contact any of them. Imagine the scene, whole neighborhoods ripped apart, floods dominating the city, looters, including a few of "Nawlins’ finest," rampaging in an orgy of opportunistic assholicism, families and individuals who just last week were going about their ordinary lives now homeless, scared and tragic like refugees from a wartorn country. It breaks my heart to think of friends I can’t even contact being in the midst of such a nightmare.

Powerful thunderstorms are an almost daily occurrence during the summer in New Orleans, and one year when I was there, such a storm caused heavy flooding, more than three feet deep, which destroyed the ground floors of tens of thousands of houses and carried away moveable objects such as garbage cans, bicycles and so forth, but that wasn’t even a significant fraction of that which has been unleashed by Katrina.

My prayers go out to the people of New Orleans.

****************

Ongoing rescue operations, reparation of the immense damage and the rebuilding of the Crescent City are going to present an obscenely high cost in terms of money, manpower, food, shelter, psychological counselling, building materials and sanitary venues.

That leads to an interesting question: After the tsunami that obliterated a large chunk of Asia, while the U.S. was contributing more to relief efforts than any other country, Koffi & Kompany were berating us for not giving enough. 

Now that parts of Mississippi and Louisiana are suffering from a similar disaster, will those same Kountries offer their help? Or will this be "The Americans’ problem" as usual?

****************

Tomorrow will probably be another late riser for me, as I have a friend coming over for drinks(the bar in my suite is down to one ridiculously large bottle of Johnny Walker Black and most of another, equally ridiculously large bottle of Sauza Hornitos tequila, all sorts of mixers, lime slices and assorted Sam Adams and Heinekens) when he gets off work at 11:00, but I intend to spend a good part of tomorrow and most of Saturday taking in some of the more wholesome samplings of Chicago.

I haven’t posted the last few days due to a mad scramble to get my affairs in order as I’m leaving on a lengthy, multistate trip tomorrow morning, my itinerary including, among other places, Washington DC, 6 - 9 September, to support Judge Roberts at a rally/counter rally(left wingnuts and other undesirables vs Right Thinkers).

Here’s how we handle these things on the right:                

The left, however, is more inclined to do battle thus:   

Anyone wanting to know details about the rally should go to http://rightmarch.com/

I’ll be posting again as of tomorrow night or the following morning from Chicago.

If there was ever a reason for a government to indulge in what the KGB used to call mokri dela(wet affairs), the Israelis need to arrange an “accident” for this son of a bitch before he gets comfortable in the Gaza Strip.

He confers often with terrorist groups and regimes and called the attacks of September 11, 2001, “a lesson to the U.S.” saying it “was the first time that Arabic names entered every American household.”

The PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel was reportedly amended in 1996, but on an appearance on ANB TV on April 25, 2005, Mr. Qaddumi said that he “does not accept any amendment.” Furthermore, in an interview with an Israeli-Arab weekly on January 3, 2003, he openly stated that there is no difference between Hamas and the PLO vis-a-vis calling for the destruction of Israel. He said, “strategically we are no different from it.”

The Israelis definitely don’t need an asshat like that coming to town.