Two good things
p.s. -- a big, bad thing

Two good things happened yesterday: Hurricane/Tropical Storm Ophelia finally headed east and out to sea, away from Florida, and Michael Brown was removed as director of FEMA's Hurricane Katrina response effort.

Both have qualifiers.

Here in Central Florida, we still have to keep an eye on the fickle Ophelia, to see which direction she'll go when she loops back. The predictions are she might hit the Carolinas, but the weather people have been very unsure in predicting her movements. Maybe she'll fizzle out in the Atlantic -- the best-case scenario.

Michael Brown still heads FEMA, just not the Hurricane Katrina response. I caught him on the news saying he didn't understand why he was pulled off Katrina. I guess he ain't no rocket scientist. There's been so much ill will toward him, I don't see how he could work with any of the people or groups in the Gulf Coast. I'm sure Bush had no option but to remove him.

He should be removed from FEMA, but the prez is just too much into cronyism. Look at "Know-Nothing" Chertoff, head of Homeland Security. With all the vast resources at his command, he said he didn't know about the levee breaking and New Orleans flooding until fully a day later, when he read it in the newspaper.

With this kind of intelligence gathering, no wonder we can't find Osama bin Laden.

POSTSCRIPT:

Oh my God. I just read an e-mail from one of my ultraconservative acquaintances. It appears that the horror in New Orleans wasn't because of lack of action by the Bush administration. No, what was really going on in New Orleans was that the people who didn't leave when told to evacuate were the shiftless types in the projects, along with crimiinals the police just let out of jail, because they couldn't evacuate them. But the criminals all came from the projects, so they're really all the same people, the e-mail explains.


These "thugs," as they're described in the e-mail, are compared to the good-for-nothing towel heads in Iraq who shouted obscenities at the U.S. soldiers who came to save them. These "thugs" or "parasites" spent the time of crisis in New Orleans raping, looting, murdering and thugging.

The situation was caused by 40 years of "welfare state," not by inaction and incompetence on the part of bushie and his henchmen/political appointees. No, the e-mail says, "The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains
and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
> has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting."

I think I'm going to be sick. Excuse me for a minute.

This e-mail is being sent all over the place, and I got it many generations from its origin. I know where it came from, though.

We're going to be lied to about the body count, also. They're only reporting 154 bodies found in Louisiana so far. Of course, the bushie government is controlling the morgues and the body counts that come out of the search operations. 154? That's a big fat lie. The body count will be minimized, just like the casualty count was in Viet Nam. And it's going on in Iraq, too, certainly for the civilian count.

This blame the victim -- they deserved it anyway -- tactic is totally beyond the pale. I'm more convinced than ever that a bunch of Nazis and their goons run our government.