Liberty and Justice for All!

I cannot really say alive and “well”.  I mean, after you kill someone, is it really the best idea to go into a Circle K and ask how to get blood stains removed from your clothing? And it seems that she wanted to back out of the KKK. I guess the new motto of the Klan is “once you hate black, you never go back”.

But hey, if the Klan wants to keep itself busy by killing each other off, who am I to get in their way?

The nola.com comments, as always, are good for a laugh.

We all know that Deuce, Will Smith, and Charles Grant are fighting suspensions for taking a diuretic as part of a supplement. Now, according to the article Deuce had been taking a supplement for the last four years. He submitted this supplement to the NFL for testing. And from the claims that have been made, the company allegedly added this substance to the supplements (even though it is not a listed agreement). Furthermore, when the company was notified of the problem, they supposedly did nothing about it. So if this is the case, and that there was no way for these players to have known that the formula changed, then they should not be suspended.

However, the NFL has a zero tolerance policy on supplements. While I have little tolerance for zero tolerance policies, you have to understand that these are the rules of the game. So we must consider the effect that this will have on the team. Can the Saints afford to be without Deuce, Smith, and Grant at the same time? I don’t think so.

The team needs to sit down with those players and work out a schedule of suspensions that least impacts the team. So what I would do is have Will Smith take his suspension for the next four weeks. I would then have Charles Grant take his suspension for the last four weeks. Finally, I would have Deuce wait to take his suspension until Reggie Bush is healthy. This way, you minimize the effect on the Saints overall. Otherwise, you could wind up missing 3 star players at once.

It is 1st and goal and you are inside the 2 yard line. Deuce is standing on the sidelines. You fail. You fail on 2nd and goal as well. Now you have 3rd and goal with inches to go. Still standing on the sidelines is Deuce, the man who can move a pile foward a yard and muscle his way into the endzone. So why not play him?

It is 3rd and 1 with about 2 minutes left to play. You need to make a first down so you can try and get a closer field goal. Deuce still stands on the sidelines. Why?

I like Pierre Thomas, but he was the wrong choice for those plays when you have a tank in Deuce available.

Coach Payton says:

I think we would have been hard pressed to put Deuce in there when he hasn’t carried and say, “go get us a yard.”

Couldn’t have ended up worse than how it did… could it? I mean, getting stopped on 4th and goal and having to settle for a 48 yard field goal when Deuce probably could have stepped up. And if you are not going to put Deuce in, how about running a bootleg or two?

Oh, and I had to say that it seems like the gold pants didn’t work this week and Reggie Bush, even with his giveaway, did a good job with 148 total yards and 2 TD.

I will preface this post by saying that with every storm that Louisiana encounters, we will learn from past mistakes and likely make new ones. This is part of the process of learning how to cope with things that are fairly unpredictable (like hurricanes) and make sure that when we do, we do so to the best of our ability.

The good:

A) Contraflow: Contraflow was awful with Ivan. It took me 8 hours to get to Grammercy from Kenner. Not good. It got better with Katrina, only 13 hours to Houston. With Gustav, I personally encountered no traffic (though I did leave early). I know some traffic existed but I believe it was better than last time. Of course, with landfall on a Monday and people scared of a Katrina like event, some (like me) started evacuating on Friday night because we could. I am unsure how many people would have left as early had the storm come on Wednesday. So kudos to Jindal and everyone else responsible for making that happen.

B) Evacuating: From what I saw, people who wanted to leave got to leave (regardless of their ability to get themselves out). The state even planned for pets to be evacuated as well. The fact that so many people got out was very impressive and while I don’t know when this new busing plan was planned, the implementation of it seemed to go as smoothly as you could expect and again, Kudos to Jindal and everyone else responsible for making it happen.

The bad:

Unemployment: Louisiana’s unemployment system was knocked out after Gustav. This effected both people on unemployment from before the storm and those who do not have work because of it. Part of Jindal’s reorganization of state government moved the Louisiana Department of Labor under the Louisiana Workforce Commission. Now, I am unsure how fault tolerant the system was previously. However, the entire system should not be handicapped by losing the central hub. Individual centers around the state could not process claims manually or otherwise save the information locally so people could process their claims. This seems like awfully poor planning to me. Perhaps Louisiana needs to consider some sort of backup system to be in place for all of its online resources to be available in the case of an emergency. We could either set up different hubs around the state, each having the ability to take over for whatever node goes down. We could also utilize some temporary servers outside Louisiana. Something should be done to make sure that all of Louisiana’s services are up and running so we can have seamless operation after a storm. This is something Jindal needs to work on.

Electricity: Really? That many people lost power for that long? Really? At one point only 2 Louisiana Parishes had 0 power loss. Even today there are parishes that are still mostly without power. When I pay as much as I do for power, I expect them to have the capability to respond to outages must faster than what they are doing. Their “fuel surcharge” costs are criminal as it is. The fact that there are so many people without power now is just pathetic and something needs to be done.

The ugly:

A) Shelters. This is where Bobby Jindal really dropped the ball. It is great that people got out. But when they got there, to have the deplorable conditions that existed at some of these shelters is inexcusable. Why wouldn’t all shelters have generators? Why would you choose shelters that had no avaiable showers and inadequate toilet space? And what really bothers me is quotes like this:

“If you’re gonna help, help me. Don’t send me to a place like this,” Brown said Tuesday, his eyes sunken in the industrial lights that stay on around the clock for security reasons. “I would rather ride it out without power at home. I’m only taking a few more days of this. I don’t care if I have to walk the highway back.”

So you know what this means? Because of the awful conditions in the shelters, this will make people less likely to evacuate in the future. Jindal should have made sure that the places people went to had better conditions. This is something that was not learned by our government after Katrina. We all remember the faces of people at the convention center. And while I am sure the conditions at the shelters were not that bad, they were still bad.

Premature un-evacuation: The Governor should have found alternate places to house the evacuees once he saw the problem. Instead, we started bringing people home when there was another major storm entering the gulf. How does that make any sense? I understand people being upset at the conditions the Government put them in but it was irresponsible to bring them back when there was a chance they would have to evacuate again. Chances are they would not have evacuated. So this was another poor decision by our Government. And while we may be escaping Ike, it was still not worth the risk.

Overall, I give Jindal a C. He passed, he got people out, and he learned from some past experiences. However, there are still many things that could have done better and had the storm been worse (or had Ike taken a turn northward)  I think we would have some serious problems.

With Ike heading toward the opening of the Gulf as a very powerful storm, why didn’t we wait to see what it would do before bringing everyone back?

Just sayin…

President Bush was on the news today and was discussing why he felt the response to Gustav so far has been good. He said that it was the communication between the Republican Governors that caused it to happen.

Perhaps it wasn’t the communication between Republican Governors that is the catalyst of the response. Perhaps it is the fact that during Katrina, Louisiana had a Democrat in the Governors office and President Bush was incapable of working with a Democrat.

Maybe, just maybe, had Bush been more competent, hired competent people, and actually gotten things like ice and water to New Orleans in time, Blanco wouldn’t have been so overwhelmed.

And maybe, just maybe, the states that Gustav threatened learned that they cannot rely on the idiot George W. Bush to get things done, learned from the mistakes of the past hurricane, and changed the way they dealt with things.

But no, to Bush, it is because the Republican Governors “communicated”. Pathetic.

George Bush makes me sick and I cannot wait for him to go away.

I didn’t evacuate for Georges. I saw the storm coming due North, right for New Orleans, but figured it would make a turn East. Nash Roberts came on later and said the same thing. Bob Breck called him an old coot. It did turn East. .

When I saw Ivan doing the same thing I told my girlfriend at the time and her mother that since it was coming straight for us (again, due North). I figured it would do the same thing as well. However, they wanted to leave so we left. Ivan also turned East.

Katrina scared me. It was coming at us from the southeast and I knew it could hurt us. As we watched the storm I told everyone “look, it is going to turn East right here” and go towards Mississippi at the last second. It did.

So now we have Gustav coming at us from the Southeast. It is supposed to hit Cocodrie. But with what has happened with every other major storm that has threatened the New Orleans area in the last 5 years, I also expect this storm to make a last second turn East. So instead of Cocodrie it would come right at us. This is why the storm scares me. Because the weather-people never take into consideration that very last  minute the storms all take a turn east and when it does, it will directly hit us.

I hope I am wrong. But I am 3 for 3 so far. So please, if you can leave do so now. And if they call for you to leave, don’t be stubborn and watch out for yourselves. Our most treasured resource down here is the people. We cannot lose anymore because of storms.