How Much

New Orleans housing could $50 billion buy?

Enough to repatriate the trailer people?

Enough so the exiles could return to the city?

Hasn't he destroyed enough already?

The Market

At least two and maybe three times during the Bush years the market has approached or crested 13,000 only to drop like a rock.

I am starting to wonder if real economic growth can only come if the entire economy -- from the poor to the investor class -- rise together. The hallmark of the Bush years is that the rich get rich. And somehow, their ill-gotten profits come crashing down to the level where everyone else is still sitting in stasis.

Maybe everyone has to gain together for the system to work. Of course, these cretins will never try anything novel like spurring growth from the roots upward.

Your Friday Video

Here it is.

Write you congresscritters one more time. Or go join Jim and march.

[via The Sideshow]

Staying

I recently read a blog entry by a New Orleans resident who plans on staying in the city even if an evacuation is called for again. Now it seems pretty certain to me that one will be called for -- the levees just are not good enough to hold against a direct storm landfall.

OK, this person has a house that survived the last storm. That is probably good. If I were planning to stay, however, I would put a few things in my attic:

1) an axe
2) water -- bottles and gallons and maybe a few huge jugs
3) a Rubbermaid tub of camping food
4) a radio with a windup battery
5) several flashlights with shake-and-light batteries
6) air mattresses
7) an inflatable raft
8* another Rubbermaid tub with soap, utensils, pots, towels -- all that good camping stuff including screwdriver, hammer and pliers.

With all of that, if I planned to rescue my animals I'd have their carriers and another raft. But the sad things is that in a really bad emergency, animals get left behind.

New Orleans was once an enviable place to live. The lack of solid reconstruction where it counts -- the closed hospitals and schools, the failure to build good dams and walls, makes it a tragedy waiting to repeat. Some people will survive, but the city may never come back until there is a serious effort to hold back the water.

Wikipedia

It seems that Wikipedia was being edited by people at the CIA and the Pentagon. Sections edited included one on Guantanamo and one on the Iraq war.

All this does for me is highlight how much Wikipedia incorporates the opinions of people messing with the entries. Wikipedia rejects some true statements. It lets other pass. It rejects at whim, and includes at whim.

Wikipedia is NOT an authoritative source. It's more of a handy online gotcha that perpetuates the opinions of some contributors. It cannot, in all honesty, be used to prove anything. As a source, its methods of inclusion are so suspect that data on it should be double and triple checked with printed and signed material.

Cute. Handy. Full of unfiltered crap.

Yap Yap Yap

Ever since the day the disgraced Don Imus was shoved off the air because of his racist, sexist, gratuitous insults, the MSM has been whining about a "comeback", and they haven't stopped yet.

You know, they could stop any time.

Coming back from a lifetime of insulting garbage that pretends to be humor is something we just don't need on the airwaves.

No one with any decency misses this bag of blather, this insulting, ignorant, sophomoric piece of slime. Really.

O Jeez

Mitt Romney. Idiot.

Straw poll --oh yeah, that is real proof of a lead in the Presidential race for 2008.

:: eye rolling ::

If he is that deluded, you know what I'm thinking.

And besides, he is not in favor of upholding the Constitution.

So he's out.

A Progressive Party

I've had it.

No more Republicans. No more Democrats. It's time to move out.

Why should you trust me? Well, aside from the fact that I would consider stealing anathema, I have been preaching for many solid years here against the destruction of a constitutional, checks and balances form of government. I have urged you over and over to write to congressional representatives. I have given you an 800 number to use to badger your senators.

My senators are a disgrace to God and Country. Their names are Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts. I want whichever one is up for re-election to go down in flaming defeat -- whether by a righteous Republican or a New Democrat doesn't matter. A Libertarian. A Green. Or lo, a Progressive, who bypasses the Republican/Democrat mark of shame and stands up for American values.

Our values don't include perpetual terror and war. Our values don't include leaving veterans to commit suicide or be dumped as mentally unfit just because they need care. Our values don't include recruiting foreigners with the promise of citizenship, only to yank that away.

Our government is a disgrace. It has to stop.

Contribute and I'll put this money toward the defeat of incumbents who voted to let this evil administration expand spying.

I swear it.

Enough and More Than Enough

Go here and tell your congresscritters, Senate and House both, that they took an oath of office to defend the Constitution, and you want them to keep their oath or resign in favor of someone who will do so.

It's time to tell each and every one of these trough-feeders that they have a duty to do what they swore before their own diety they would do. It's time and past time to hold them to it.

[crossposted to Mockingbird's Medley]

Weekend Entertainment

Here is a web site that has night views of almost every major city in Japan. Most of them are beautiful. Many are panoramas or partial panoramas. Just click on the city dot or on the Kanji characters of a city name:

http://ww4.tiki.ne.jp/%7Emmurakami/setoy/map.html

It Finally Happened

The I-35W bridge over the Mississippi collapsed. The 7:12 PM report is on the KSTP Twin Cities web site.

Unless we make serious infrastructure repairs, this is only the first.

Just sayin'.