Back in the World

THE INCOMPETENCE OF FEMAAs more and more details emerge about how FEMA handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it becomes clearer and clearer that the agency is a screwed-up mess. It has come out that hundreds of rescue workers, large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina....and they turned it all down. That's nice. The offer came from the Interior Department...which also offered up to 400 law enforcement officers. FEMA took a month to put them to work. It's also being reported that Amtrak offered to carry residents out of New Orleans before the hurricane hit, but thanks to poor planning and coordination, the trains left the station almost empty. Nice. All of this government incompetence was paid for by us....the American taxpayer. This is such a wise investment of our precious resources...not. Yet, this week Congress will have hearings about the problems at FEMA. You will notice that despite all of the shortcomings of FEMA...the wasted money, the missed opportunities and the bungling of the aid effort, many politicians from both parties will conclude that the answer to the problems at FEMA is to give it more money. Isn't that always the answer when government comes up short? It's worked so well for schools, hasn't it?But that isn't it at all. The problem is and was bad management. FEMA has plenty of money. In fact, if anything, their budget should be cut, since they obviously can't handle the task at hand. But it won't play out that way. After all, here we are 5 months removed from the hurricane, and you're still paying to put Katrina "evacuees" up at the Holiday Inn. Is this a great country or what?


Actress Rosanna Arquette is making a movie about PMS.
...and she wants Hillary Clinton to star in it. Insert your own joke here. Will Sen. Hillary Clinton's next role be in a film about women's pre-menstrual syndrome? The answer is yes, if Hollywood's Rosanna Arquette gets her way.

Will New Orleans Be Black Or White?
Research is available that 80% of the African American community may ill not return to New Orleans and approximately 50% of the white community may stay away.


BYGONE ERA

Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat a bite raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper, in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember anybody getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built-in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened, because they tell us how much safer we are
Now....
Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the
National Anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything, and she could even give you an aspirin for a headache or fever.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations
Oh yeah, and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked! Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either, because if we did, we got our butt spanked there, and then we got butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny Reynolds from next-door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof.
It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a "dysfunctional family". How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?


Illegal aliens are complaining that US border policy is racist and that the planned fence along parts of the border will result in more deaths. Of course, not a word is mentioned about their illegal status.

HAPPY STORY

A man who was being robbed at a motel on Airpark Drive got the gun away from the young robber and held it on him until police arrived early Friday morning.Police said the man who was being robbed was shot in the hand during the struggle.A 17-year-old black male was taken into custody.Members of the Chattanooga Police Department’s Burglary/Robbery Division are investigating the incident that occurred a little before 6 a.m. on the parking lot of the Extended Stay Motel at 6240 Airpark Dr.Police said the victim was loading his vehicle when he was approached by the suspect, with a handgun, and he was ordered to give up his money. The victim complied, but the suspect wasn’t satisfied with the amount of cash he had received and began to look through the victim’s pockets.During his search of the victim a struggle ensued and the victim was shot in the hand. The struggle continued and the victim was able to knock the gun out of the suspect’s hand. The victim then retrieved the gun and held the suspect at gunpoint until officers arrived.

School buses may get spy cams

The new transportation director of the Lee County School District wants multiple cameras installed on every bus in the district's 685-vehicle fleet, and he plans to look for money to buy them.

California to try tracking parolees with GPS

SACRAMENTO - Satellite tracking technology, a staple of weather forecasting and military operations for decades, is the latest tool California can use to ease its overburdened parole and probation system under legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Weird News
Using a simple police scanner or ham radio, you can listen to a disembodied spacesuit circling Earth.