louisiana

Dear people of New Orleans:

Right now Isaac is still a tropical storm. But we all know how fickle these Atlantic cyclone systems can be. It could still draw enough strength from the warm waters of the Gulf to intensify into a major hurricane. And at the moment most of the computer models have it following the same track that Katrina did seven years ago.

I blogged a lot about Katrina and its aftermath in 2005. Most of it had to do with the failures of government at various levels, from the mayor’s office on up. I don’t want to do that again in 2012.

So let’s be blunt…

Ray Nagin is not mayor of New Orleans anymore.

Kathleen Blanco is not governor of Louisiana anymore.

George W. Bush is not President of the United States anymore.

You folks still have time. My advice is to play it safe, take ...

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Five years ago tonight was when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore and beat the city of New Orleans to within an inch of its life. The photo is a now-famous one taken of the storm surge as Katrina made landfall.

Katrina started out life on August 23rd, 2005 as a tropical system in the southeastern Bahamas. It did substantial damage and caused a number of deaths as it went across the Florida peninsula. And then Katrina entered the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico… where it became the monster that would ultimately cause the worst natural disaster in American history.

Five years later and Katrina is being debated as hotly as ever. I thought at the time that the situation became one of the worst clusterf-cks ever for government at all levels (and both major parties, mind ya).

But there were also quite a lot of stories about the positive ...

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What a year for weird crime. Back in February it was a robber armed with a Klingon sword holding up 7-Elevens in Denver. But the story out of Zachary, Louisiana is even more bizarre…

Lisa Newsome (shown in the surveillance camera still on the right) has been arrested for theft. The crime she has confessed to police: stealing a 12-pack case of Miller Lite beer from Crossroads Grocery and attempting to leave the store with it… by carrying the beer between her legs and hidden under her oversized house coat!

If you look carefully at the photo you can clearly see the crate of Miller Lite protruding from… well, under her attire.

Police in Zachary are reporting that Newsome “attempted to show us how she did it, but we told her not to pull her pants down.”

I wonder how far she got walking away with that thing?...

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