Stuck on stupid V: Whiners, ingrates, and opportunists

So the whining continues in Louisiana, that the state isn’t getting its handouts fast enough. After the hurricane disasters we’ve come to expect this from the likes of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her minions such as Economic Development Secretary Michael Olivier, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other local elected officials, but now a portion of the business community has joined in.
I know this is impossible to expect, but before I hear any more moaning about how it’s unfair that, to date, the vast majority of monies coming from the generosity of the American taxpayer to help reconstruct the state have gone to out-of-state employers and their employees, see if any of the following apply to explain why that may be the case:

Did your state government make much of an effort to accomplish anything on its own instead of waiting for the federal government to take care of it and the state? In Mississippi, the state is paying unemployed oystermen to clean up debris – better than having them collect unemployment checks and complain about how out-of-staters were taking all the jobs.

Did you price yourself out of the market? Nagin implies there ought to a minimum wage of sorts around the $10 level. But what if the marketplace supports far less? What if it’s cheaper for the federal government (read, the spender of the American people’s money) to hire concerns who can bring in people cheaper than to pay local workers who insist on higher wages because they have used political clout to gain them?

Did you forget that of the money coming into the state for reconstruction that hardly any of it is yours in the first place? Don’t forget about the Golden Rule: this money is a gift of the American taxpayers, 98.5 percent of whom are not Louisianans, and they, not you, decide how it will be spent. Thus it’s pathetic when Olivier complains that the federal government contracts to feed people with military MREs rather than use local caterers and restaurateurs. Has he bought so quickly and thoroughly into our particular and peculiar Louisiana liberalism/populism’s notion that the state government has first claim on all resources, regardless of who gives them, that he can’t understand that this money isn’t his government’s and, just maybe, the federal government is trying to be as parsimonious as possible with using the American people’s money?

Did you support politicians whose policies have been damaging to business in the state? Populist notions such as “profit equals theft” have sent too many people to the capital eager to pass laws extracting as much as they can from the business community, and to engineer other sweetheart deals where political connections rather than ability and doing the job to specification mattered, making for lazy enterprise. It has created a weaker business environment that frankly needs the help of outsiders in a crisis environment such as this. These attitudes are encapsulated in Blanco’s comment that Louisiana “needs” jobs from the federal spending. No; jobs aren’t given away, they are earned.

All this griping and buck-passing from local and state governments to the federal government just continues to encourage the rest of the nation to think Louisianans enjoy nothing more than looking gift horses in the mouth, biting hands that feed us, and brings to mind any other cliché arguing that we are ingrates and opportunists. Criticism is fine when warranted, but we don’t have a divine right to any of this assistance and we’re lucky we’re getting what we are, and this carping going on conveys the opposite impression. Maybe a little less time spent bellyaching might translate into more time devoted to getting the reconstruction job done.

Stuck on stupid IV: Louisiana looters still don't get it

How long will it take these people to get it? Various Louisiana elected officials of the liberal/populist school of thought bemoan the fact that the state isn’t getting what it “deserves,” when in fact it is they and their way of thinking that discourages the flow of monetary resources into the state.

From the indirect cash grant side, several take issue with winners of federal contracts mostly being from outside the state and that less money than they think should from these rebuilding contracts go into the pockets of Louisiana subcontractors and workers. Part of this has to do with the fact that, given the subpar economic conditions in the state largely created by inferior government policy which penalizes business and the more productive and contributing members of society, that Louisiana disproportionately has smaller firms less capable of winning these larger contracts.

But it also has to do with the greater expectation of a handout with lesser expectation of working epitomized by the power unions have in some industries in the state. We must never forget that the sole purpose of a union is to transfer as much money into the hands of its members in exchange for the least amount of work, regardless of the consequences to others.

It turns out that these contractors find it cheaper to bring in their own employees from out of state than to hire unionized employees in Louisiana to do the same work (and maybe do it better). As federal taxpayers, we must applaud this wise use of our resources.

But some of our elected officials can’t seem to get it through their heads that it’s the peoples’ money at stake, not theirs that they can toss to favored constituencies to get themselves reelected. Thus, you have the likes of Democrat state Rep. Juan LaFonta aghast that these contractors actually try to be efficient in their use of taxpayers’ money instead of spreading it around to those union members who have priced themselves out of the marketplace by their greed.

Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco seems to express this attitude too, asking Pres. George W. Bush to rescind his waiver of the ridiculous, archaic Davis-Bacon prevailing wage law. It only reinforces in the minds of the public and national policy-makers that Louisiana is infested by people who want to grab as much as possible of the nation’s cash to spend how they want to, using the recent disasters as an excuse.

This credibility problem continues with Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon’s companion legislation to Louisiana senators’ pork-laden win-the-lottery reconstruction bill, priced by the Congressional Budget Office at $241 billion. He complains that his Republican colleagues in the state delegation haven’t signed on to the bill, not even his Democrat colleague and looter Rep. William Jefferson.

Melancon shows he doesn’t get it when he moans, “All of a sudden, we have people in Washington who have a conscience about the federal deficit,” seeming to think that is the basis of criticism is the amount of money. If he had a clue, he would know that the problem is the bill to some degree amount to a laundry list of backdoor funding requests that really have nothing to do with the disasters (for example). Again, it makes Louisiana look like a bunch of looters using the catastrophes as an excuse; reconstruction requests to be successful must be realistic and must not tax the goodwill of the rest of the country and their elected representatives.

At least House Republicans from the state seem to understand what’s going on. If only an assortment of state Democrats could understand that you need to drop the attitude that they deserve special advantages, and that through respect of taxpayers rather than through raw redistribution politics is the appropriate way to govern. Maybe the latter has worked in this state all too long, but most of the rest of the country left that behind – and Louisiana – long ago.

No more majority-black congressional districts in Louisiana?

We’re now starting to get an idea of the impact that the recent hurricanes will have on Louisiana, particularly in terms of Congressional representation. It may mean it’s like déjà vu all over again.

Estimates prior to the disasters had the state at the precipice of losing a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after 2010. There’s no more guesswork now – it’s gone. Louisiana had the third weakest population growth of all states from 2000-03, the weakest of the sunbelt states, at 0.6 percent far below America’s 3.3 percent.

However, more importantly is how the partisan balance gets affected by all of this. It looks as if the Democrat base of poor blacks will be disproportionately reduced, as some of the more industrious of the bunch find better opportunity in their new locales, while some of the less motivated will not want to spend resources to return since they can just as easily can live off government assistance, perhaps even more lucratively, where they sit right now.

No doubt this dynamic explains U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson’s prediction that as 2010 approaches New Orleans will only contain a population of 35-40 percent black. At his predicted level of 375,000 in the city, that means he thinks at the high end of his guess that less than half of the roughly 323,000 blacks living in the city will return.

If 173,000 blacks disappear from the area, this has tremendous partisan consequences. That means one-eighth of the state’s black population goes away, and their proportion of the overall population falls to 27 percent. That would be enough to have a majority-black House district, but one that would have to be drawn in a very convoluted fashion. Orleans as a whole could only make up about half such a district, and it would have to draw in about 225,000 other blacks to make the majority black district.

There’s only one way to accomplish that – draw a crazy-looking district that snakes through parts of Orleans Parish, runs up Interstate 10, dipping into certain parts of Jefferson Parish, which then curls around the edges of Baton Rouge to gulp in its northern part, somehow avoiding as many whites as possible. It’s the only way to get a large enough number of blacks.

Yet I’m not sure it can even be done. Recall the Louisiana redistricting cases of the 1990s where the U.S. Supreme Court declared such bizarre-shaped districts drawn almost exclusively to form a majority-minority district were unconstitutional. Almost certainly such a district would run afoul of this jurisprudence, so even a legislature of majority Democrats and/or a Democrat governor may not wish to dare the Court.

That being the case, this means the state would have no majority-black districts – a situation sure to draw immense criticism from blacks and especially Democrats, with blacks spread out among all districts leading to an anticipated Republican sweep of all six remaining House seats. The political firestorm over this will make Katrina and Rita look like nothing.

What BRAC recommendations? Katrina will save Louisiana jobs!

If at first you don't succeed ...

Right before the wicked sisters Katrina and Rita struck, rejoicing all around, from city, state and national elected officials occurred when the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) spared New Orleans part of planned activities (thus jobs) cuts as part of its task to align resources and military needs. But it really didn't serve as that much of a consolation prize for the state.

The original proposal would have closed the Naval Support Activities center in Algiers entirely by taking some things out of state entirely (Navy) and moving other activities (Marines) to the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base. Instead, the Algiers center stays open and the Marines are intended to stay put. Further, the Algiers facility will be reshaped in the hope of attracting new federal clients.

But, when all is said and done, from the state’s perspective it has lost with certainty almost 1,000 “jobs” (actually, military personnel for the most part). In addition, it has given away $92.3 million to have been pumped into the area economy by the expansion that would have occurred at Belle Chasse to suit the transfer of around 1,500 Marines, instead promising to spend in the neighborhood of $65 million in bonds (perhaps up to $100 million) to rebuild the Algiers facility and hoping to find the private sector willing to pitch in around another $100-135 million for the project. If all goes right, that means the state will forgo possibly as much as $200 million to save 200 jobs for sure and to hope to attract a few hundred, maybe a couple of thousand jobs sometime in the next several years.

These million-dollar jobs might turn out to be one-sixth that price if the state can talk the federal government into letting the Navy jobs stay and that actually was part of the state’s request. But only slight hope remains that BRAC would come back and change its mind on that account. Further, none of the “federal city” plan even is certain to happen. BRAC gave the state a Sep. 30, 2008 deadline to have funding in place for the conversion. The state says it will not proceed on the project unless it has tenants lined up. If it doesn’t, the Marine transfer happens anyway.

Economically speaking, the private sector continues to send a loud and clear message by its reluctance to locate in Louisiana in tandem with its showing no compunction to cut back work forces in the state (leading to ferocious spin control from the state), so the only reason we could expect the federal government to be any more bullish on locating activities in the state would be for political reasons. As it is, the “federal city” is in a district held by a Democrat whose state has a Democrat governor. Only its freshman Republican senator could get much in the way of political mileage out of this, but so would its senior Democrat senator (provided she can win reelection in 2008). The only nearby Republican House member also is a freshman.

In short, the facility, even with tens of millions of state dollars pumped into it, may employ only a fraction of the jobs lost. Even with the state putting in as much as $100 million and refusing another almost $100 million shot into the economy, even with a couple of thousand jobs created (making the total loss only a thousand) these are pretty expensive jobs indeed. And, they won’t be coming our way for many years while the thousand gone leave soon.

And all of this was prior to damage of facilities as a result of the hurricanes but, worse, the long-term consequences of which in terms of lost area population and productive capacity and future hurricane risk could doom any relocations to make the concept a reality.

But, wait ... riding to the rescue in both the Republican senator's bill and the Democrat senator's bill (yes, Sens. David Vitter and Mary Landrieu proposed basically the same bill) is the federal government and the generosity of the taxpayers who support it, in the form of giving the state for the porject $160 million! This is pork barreling at its finest. BRAC said the state had to pay to even have a chance at these jobs, and now its senators want to shift the costs away from it entirely and have it ahead $60 million – a nice consolation prize if those jobs don’t show up.

With the project less attractive than ever before, these senators are using Katrina as an excuse to make it happen anyway. And it’s another reason, besides their miserable performance before, during, and after Katrina and Rita’s vicissitudes, why Louisiana politicians’ credibility continues to erode faster than an Orleans Parish levee.

Stuck on stupid III: Landrieu's hypocrisy

One always can count on Sen. Mary Landrieu to try to make the ridiculous look sublime. The trouble is, she generally fails, and does so again in her weak defense of criticism the Louisiana congressional delegation got concerning its over-the-top $250 billion request for hurricane damage reconstruction.

The old injunction that we shouldn’t be “afraid to climb those golden stairs” certainly operates here. If you ask for the sun, moon, and stars, maybe you’ll end up with one out of three which will win you a batting title many years, so a huge request in and of itself does not connote poor political judgment. But consider:

Louisiana’s reputation for honesty in politics doesn’t exactly stand out, and this has suffered even during Hurricane Katrina relief efforts

This compounds the fact that the bill, S. 1765, is larded up with pork barrel and spending items barely related to the disaster – making it look like Katrina is just being used as an excuse to impose on the rest of the country’s goodwill, exacerbating the credibility problem

Aid money flowing into the state in the bill would head to a Louisiana-controlled commission, whose state and local officials haven’t exactly distinguished themselves during the crisis

Into this environment Landrieu attempts to quell critics of the bill with her name attached to it. Her thesis: “It's that an entire region vital to our national energy supply, security and commerce has been devastated,” and thus needs the full weight of the bill.

But leopards do not change their spots, and Landrieu’s liberalism and free-spending ways begin to get in the way of this message. Thus, when she writes, “rebuilding this region will take more than just higher levees. We must also build a better education system in the region,” she means the federal government should pick up the tab to improve an abysmal state educational system, one which only recently has gotten serious about improving education, and still makes the mistake of thinking teachers should be rewarded with higher salaries without any direct accountability measures.

And when she writes “We must provide the infrastructure and appropriate incentives [emphasis added] for businesses and industry that are positioned to accept the risk of reopening their doors,” one must ask, is this the same Mary Landrieu who, in the past couple of years, has voted against tax cuts, against tax cuts for investment, to rescind tax cuts, to raise taxes on many business owners, and who supported changing Senate rules to make it harder to cut taxes, interfering with employers ability to negotiate benefits with workers, and hampering employers ability to deal with pay issues, twice. So she suddenly gets religion when it’s convenient with a huge pot of money at stake? A kind of indirect hypocrisy?

But she ventures off into direct hypocrisy when she asserts she and others from the Louisiana delegation had made “years of requests to stem the repeated cuts to our flood and hurricane protection programs.” Louisiana recently has gotten more Army Corps of Engineers dollars than any other state, but only a fraction of which went to flood control. In this time period Landrieu made active efforts to steer money away from more useful flood protection towards more questionable projects.

What the Louisiana delegation needs more now that ever in credibility in their requests and proposed administration of relief monies. S. 1765 lacks that, and Landrieu’s missive does nothing to change it.

"Environmentalists" refuse to accept culpability for disaster

Looking through my postings of the past month, many of them constitute a quest to figure how the fallout from Hurricane Katrina got worsened by ineptitude. Whether it be certain elected officials or governments, we need to understand whose these underperformers are so that we can eject the officeholders from their sinecures as soon as possible, and embark upon the necessary reform of government even more quickly.

Actually, it’s been a bit distasteful of a task for me since usually I am a positive person who likes to see people cooperate rather than combat with each other, and I wish everybody could succeed in the endeavors they desire. Nevertheless, the task I perform (in the process cutting through the usual and predictable uninformed, if not malevolent, analyses that seek to distract us from the truth) is vital, for we cannot move forward unless this mission gets completed satisfactorily.

But into the breach I must go one more time, with the most difficult contributory factor to escalating the disaster of all, most taxing because it is not a person we can remove from power, nor an institution we can alter. It is an ideology which presently brings misery to many worldwide and seeks to increase the power of its believers at the expense of everybody’s freedom.

Political future in doubt, is Blanco slipping into panic or PR mode?

Now that a semblance of control has been established in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the two politicians most tarnished by the whole disaster, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, have gotten heads to start rolling in desperate attempts to give their political careers new life.

New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass without warning announced he was bailing out. The department had met with heavy criticism for its inability to organize and execute after flooding began Aug. 29. Roughly 15 percent of the force, undermanned relative to others, abandoned posts in its aftermath, calling into question the force’s discipline. The force also has suffered an undue amount of corruption within its ranks, reducing its effectiveness and citizens’ willingness to assist it, in the past couple of decades.

However, some of the abandonment was due to officer disgust over Nagin’s refusal at first to crack down on looting. Thus, to deflect from this, it’s likely that Nagin pushed for this resignation, as it would be an extremely odd time for a police chief to just up and leave his officers, after putting in about a quarter century in the department, only a couple of weeks after saying he wanted to stay on for a long time, but just days after Nagin rescinded orders from Compass (that he himself may well have given) about disarming citizens that drew a successful restraining order from the National Rifle Association. That probably was the last straw as Nagin looks for a fall guy to distract from his poor performance after the storm.

Now there's been a report that Compass got the heave-ho because in the polling of the department after the storms, too many phantom officers are being discovered (which may explain why it's so undermanned). If this turns out to be true and Nagin is connected to this, he needs a fall guy to deflect criticism or even prosecution; if not, he was derelict in his duties as mayor to not have discovered this after over two years on the job.

Former Gov. Mike Foster holdover Andy Kopplin fell on his sword for Blanco. Blanco announced her chief of staff in name had been transferred to new duties involving the state’s reconstruction. Translation: he’s been demoted because of the disastrous public relations hits Blanco has taken as a result of her poor performance after the storm and her and her staff’s inability to control the damage to her career (which no doubt will be on display today as she testifies in front on Congress.)

(In his place comes part of the Lafayette Mafia, Regents employee Jimmy Clarke, an old pal of Blanco’s but particularly of her husband’s from their days at the now-University of Louisiana at Lafayette. With having to give former Louisiana Democratic Party chairman Jim Bernhard the heave-ho because of his leadership of The Shaw Group and the no-bid contract it got for post-Katrina reconstruction – a story totally missed by the mainstream media in its fetish for trying to make the Bush Administration look bad – Blanco needed to get another familiar face on board from her campaign and transition team to right her sinking political ship.)

But most interesting was Blanco’s statements about why she was doing this:

“We’re no longer a typical governor’s office,” Blanco said…. “We don’t know if it’s a permanent new structure or will have to last the rest of my administration …” Blanco has realigned duties in all branches of her administration so that each agency has staff and a new mission focused on Katrina recovery.

This smells of the beginnings of panic, or at least an attempt to try to create a "war-footing" image of Blanco in order to dispel a picture of her as indecisive and crumbling under the pressures of office. Either one can’t be good for the recovery trials and tribulations ahead for Louisiana.

In education, Louisiana turns tables on New York

After all that’s gone wrong in the past month with Louisiana’s disaster preparedness and response, it’s nice to see the state make some good decisions, in contrast to the silliness and corruption in other places whose policies and politicians have been held out as a model for our bumbling lot.

Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education almost got it right when it decided to give a pass to fifth and eighth graders on accountability exams being used to determined whether they are promoted and to ask the federal government to count only students in a school for two years in assessing school accountability. The adjustments became necessary in the widespread displacements following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The disruptions involved would introduce extraneous elements unrelated to education in the data, disrupting any valid measure of accountability and learning.

The only thing BESE could have done better was to waive the requirement only for those students who showed up between the first day of school and the Oct. 1 reporting deadline, meaning those in the classroom from the start would have to pass the LEAP test to be promoted.

Contrast this sensible approach to education delivery to that in New York, where the disaster response to the terrorist bombings of Sept. 11, 2001 has been used to draw comparisons with Louisiana’s to Katrina. Here, you have their Legislature trying to circumvent their BESE-equivalent by politicizing history education.

Perhaps the New York Legislature ought to look into better civics education, particularly emphasizing that corruption is a non-no, instead. That would be appropriate after the co-author of the law to appoint a commission to introduce the politicization, Democrat ex-Assemblyman Clarence Norman, simultaneously was convicted of accepting illegal campaign contributions (which means he loses his office – guess he timed that well).

I’m sad that New Yorkers had to put up with this idiot, but it’s refreshing to see our officials in a position to be used as models compared to those elsewhere.

Broussard's attacks cast bad light on all Louisiana officials

Not helping Louisiana’s case to score big from the federal government with reconstruction funds are wacky comments coming from local officials such as Aaron Broussard. The Democrat ex-Kenner mayor, ex-gubernatorial candidate now fills the shoes of the likes of Joe and Mike Yenni and Tim Coulon as Jefferson Parish President. But only until the end of this term, if that, if he keeps flapping his mouth like this.

Broussard gained national attention when he said the federal bureaucracy had “murder” on its hands for its slow response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But it was later shown that the story that he rpesented on which he used to base the charge, complete with his teary histrionics, deviated from the truth, placing the death of an employee’s mother in St. Rita’s Nursing Home days before it happened, before the storm even hit (for which the operators of it have been indicted for 34 counts of negligent homicide).

Which means one of four things happened:

1. It seems inconceivable that the employee, parish emergency services director Thomas Rodrigue, lied to Broussard. Rodrigue claims he didn’t even see the interview and never told Broussard what Broussard claimed he did.


2. Broussard’s staff was confused about the information when they told him.


3. Broussard, overwhelmed by everything, confused the information in his head and cemented it in there as fact to be repeated later.


4. Broussard lied to achieve maximal dramatic effect.

Again, #1 seems unlikely to have happened, and Broussard does not think Rodrigue was lying (why should he lie about his mother’s death; that’s the last think most people who think to do in such a situation). Were it #2, Broussard would have to explain the staff misinformed him and, wracked by the crisis, he did not think critically through their information and took it as fact even if it makes him look unaware and confused. If it were #3, then Broussard should explain that he was overwrought and confused in that time of crisis. While this becomes instant fodder to be used against him the next time he runs for office, showing his judgment questionable and his temperament maybe unsuitable for the holder of public responsibilities, at least his honesty would have been refreshing, perhaps even redeeming for a future political career.

But if it is scenario #4, the most logical thing to do to hide this would be to attack the questioner – which is exactly what Broussard did. The only other reason to explain his behavior would be that #2 or #3 were the case but Broussard figured the admission that goes along with it was too politically risky to allow out.

And as if shooting the messenger wasn’t enough, Broussard accused questioners of bad faith:

Somebody better wake up. You want to come and live in this community and see the tragedy we're living in? Are you sitting there having your coffee, you're in a place where toilets flush and lights go on and everything's a dream and you pick up your paper and you want to battle ideology and political chess games? Man, get out of my face. Whoever wants to do that, get out of my face.

But what’s interesting is that, even as Broussard paints a picture of misery in the parish, life there is getting back to normal for most, at least in its metropolitan part. They’re having coffee, flushing toilets, and turning on lights for the most part now in Jefferson and thus, I suppose, just as likely to “battle … political chess games” as the next guy.

As a result, Broussard either is a liar who makes reckless charges based on nothing or he lacks good judgment in times of stress, either hurricane- or media glare-induced, and doesn’t have the courage to admit it. These are qualities that probably ensure that you won’t see any buildings, roads, or stadiums named after him any time soon, and makes him the poster child for limiting the amount of money that Louisiana gets for reconstruction from the federal government, with lots of strings attached.

If the ranting Broussard symbolizes the politicians who will be getting money to reconstruct Louisiana, instead of $250 billion out of the federal government, we’ll be lucky to get $250.

Stuck on stupid II: The Golden Rule

We sure know how to win friends and influence enemies in Louisiana. After our Democrat political leaders, joined by Republican Sen. David Vitter, criticize the federal government for a month, they then ask the federal government for $250 billion for reconstruction, of which $40 billion is for Army Corps of Engineers projects – waiving any state matching requirement.

To put this into perspective:

The $250 billion is not far behind the $350 billion estimated spent on the military aspects and their aftermath of the war of terror since Sep. 11, 2001 – which means in reconstruction terms (leaving out the actual war-making expenses), Louisiana actually is asking for more than countries with 10 times its population which face far more damage.

The $40 billion is ten times the annual Corps budget, and 100 times the annual amount typically received by Louisiana which gets more such funding than any other state.

Also, it is nearly three times the size of the entire request for coastal restoration efforts in the state.

Finally, it is over 13 times the present annual state budget, and around 125 times the present annual capital outlay budget.

Making matters worse is the pork-laden nature of the request, including such favorites as the project which Sen. Mary Landrieu intervened with which potentially took money away from flood protection for New Orleans and the boondoggle, unnecessary Industrial Canal lock. (Worse, it seems that one of the contributors to the flooding was having the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet channel open, where opponents of the lock’s rebuilding have argued that the Port of New Orleans has deliberately kept the channel open as a bargaining chip for the lock’s rebuilding. The proposal neglects to mandate this closure.)

In addition, $50 billion of it would being the form of open-ended grants, while $13 billion would go to roads (does that have anything to do with the fact that, over 15 years later, the state still hasn’t finished most road projects it promised to do with a special gasoline tax? Nice, confidence-inspiring track record.) And more extraneous requests are in there – and this does not include the extra social benefits already being paid out by the federal government to displaced people.

And who would control the disbursement of this money? It seems the nine-person panel would have a Louisiana majority.

So, let’s get this straight. Louisiana, from some of her federal officials through some state officials all they way down to city and other local governments, countenanced negligence from benign to irresponsible in ensuring proper flood protection and in dealing with hurricanes. And now these same people have formulated a plan wanting the country to pay an incredible sum of money to the state controlled by people from the state to deal with the aftereffects and, apparently, Louisiana’s past inability to utilize our resources efficiently in other areas?

The rest of the country is going to look at this and think we’re still stuck on stupid. A little realism, where we look less like unreformed junkies asking for fix because of problems in part we helped to create in our own lives, would be in order in such a request. Remember, after all, the golden rule.