I pass this on for your judgment only.

[johndhammer]

I pass this on for your judgment only.

 

 

Beyond the historic architecture, the spice-laden cuisine and the beguiling voodoo underground, live close to 500,000 people, mostly poor (more than a quarter live in poverty), mostly black (more than 66 percent), clustered into 73 distinct neighborhoods.

 

Crime, even before the hurricane, was high. The murder rate has come down in recent years, but remains 10 times the national average. Last year, researchers had police fire 700 blank rounds in a city neighborhood one afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire.

 

Maybe New Orleans should be nicknamed The Big Un-Easy, due to a high violent crime rate and a high unemployment rate. There's also a significant number of suicides and divorces.

 

The city's school system is a shambles. The district almost went broke this past year — teachers nearly missed a paycheck — and 55 of the state's 78 worst schools are in New Orleans.

 

Dozens of school employees are under indictment for corruption. But then, corruption in New Orleans is nothing new — politicians, judges, the police have all been caught.

 

These government failures are not merely a matter of incompetence. Louisiana and New Orleans have a long, well-known reputation for corruption: as former congressman Billy Tauzin once put it, "half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment That's putting it mildly. Adjusted for population size, the state ranks third in the number of elected officials convicted of crimes

(Mississippi is No. 1). Recent scandals include the conviction of 14 state judges and an FBI raid on the business and personal files of a Louisiana congressman.

 

In 1991, a notoriously corrupt Democrat named Edwin Edwards ran for governor against Republican David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. Edwards, whose winning campaign included bumper stickers saying "Elect the Crook," is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for taking bribes from casino owners. Duke recently completed his own prison term for tax fraud.

 

The rot included the New Orleans Police Department, which in the 1990s had the dubious distinction of being the nation's most corrupt police force and the least effective: the city had the highest murder rate in America. More than 50 officers were eventually convicted of crimes including murder, rape and robbery; two are currently on Death Row.

 

Ten billion dollars are about to pass into the sticky hands of politicians in the No. 1 and No. 3 most corrupt states in America. Worried about looting? You ain't seen nothing yet.

 

[Horsefly]

Maybe rebuilding is a good idea if it'll draw the vermon back to the den away from our towns.Strange those stats you have say 66 percent of the population is black,but in the news clips,it looked like 98 percent were black that was doing the looting.The liberal news media has pushed me closer to being a racest than ever.I drove the coast from Slidell Louisiana to the Alabama border last week,and am sick to my stomach that nothing much is being said about all the cities in that 250 mile stretch that aren't there anymore,with people living under salvaged plywood and tarps.They could only wish for a house that has sludge in it,and we're not even hearing them crying on the news camera's asking who's going to take care of them.I've seen the trouble down there with my own eyes,and my view is to hell with New Orleans since it's nasty and muddy,lets help those that are helping themselves.20,000 people in the Super Dome,and they have to ask for volunteers to help feed and distribute food,while they sat on their fat asses fanning themselves in lawn chairs.Raping and murder was suppose to be happening in the Dome,so what kind of men were in there that didn't form groups to keep an eye on the women and children.I think we grouped together the sludge of Americans,got them in a 20,000 people group,filmed the hell out of them,and then showed it all over the world how sorry Americans are.The Democrats are scared to death that the Govt. will do a good job of handling yet another major crisis,so they start pointing fingers at what went wrong and whose fault it is before the wind quit blowing.Jerry