a dog's life, or you think you have troubles

You think you have troubles? Wait until you hear the story of a guy I work with and his fiancé. A few weeks ago he came into work and told us his fiancé had been at the local dog pound and a guy came in with a German shepherd and said he couldn’t keep it. He said he had to get rid of the dog and the guy’s fiancé said she’d take it. The dog pound people said they would have to go somewhere else to do their business so they left the pound and did a deal for the dog. The guy said where he was living he couldn’t have a dog and so now it belongs to the guy I work with and his lady. The guy brought in some pictures of this really skinny dog and said they didn’t believe it had been fed properly and they were feeding it and taking care of it.

Last week, the guy who gave up the dog decided he wanted it back, so he called and asked for them to give it back to him. The story I hear is that they weren’t sure the guy would take care of the dog and feed him and they had become attached to the mutt, so they said no.

The former owner went to the local media with his sad story and now the entire city wants to take apart the guy I work with and his lady. Here is a link to one of the local TV stations, which is taking an advocacy role in trying to get the dog returned to its original owner.

http://www.kctv5.com/Global/category.asp?C=70755

If you want to see the video, you’ll have to wade through a commercial or two. If this video doesn’t bring you to tears, then you just have no heart. Either that or you can separate hokey rat-vomit from the truth.

By the way, they don't pay shit where I work, so their turning down the two yards offered for the dog tells me a little something.

Having been somewhat on the periphery from the beginning of this story, I have a perspective that may be different than the one being purveyed by the mass media. Somewhere between truth and fiction is this “news” story. It is very interesting that the news media play up the fact that the man is a refugee from Katrina; that he is disabled and that his dog is an “assistance” dog. They aren’t very specific on what “assistance” the dog gives. I’m told the dog doesn’t appear to be trained, but I can’t speak for that.

What I can speak for is someone is going out of their way to make someone look bad. I can say that it has led to harassment and people protesting in front of their house. I can also say that when one takes an advocacy position, and exposes private citizens to public scorn, when they have no legal or moral right to do it, they better be absolutely certain of their “facts.”

When a local radio show and its listeners debated the issue for a couple of hours this morning I could tell the bias had been cemented firmly. The highlight was the guy who called and said he had sold his ’68 charger a number of years ago and he was having remorse and now he wanted to see if the radio station could help him get it back.

As the guy I work with says, “I just hope this goes away soon.”

We hope he is right here in Jimbo’s world.

on the bubble

In the late 1990s I was making money hand over fist. My investments in the stock market were winners more often than losers and the value of my 401(k) skyrocketed. I felt like the market was getting over priced and, one Friday in March of 2000 I transferred all of my retirement assets into cash. I would have done the same with my personal trading portfolio, except the tax obligation on the gains would have eaten me alive, so I didn’t liquidate those assets. Because my retirement account gains were not subject to taxation at the time of sale, it allowed me to liquidate without penalty. It turns out my timing was almost perfect and I sold the market at an all time high. It also turns out that had I sold off my trading portfolio and taken the tax bite, I would have ended up way ahead.

My problem was that I recognized a bubble in the stock market, but I didn’t realize the height of the bubble and when the market sold off more than ten percent, I was back in and buying. By doing so I was able to erode some of my spectacular gains. I also managed to piddle away a lot of the value of my personal portfolio by holding on while the market continued to fall. Because of that experience, I was able to recognize the height and breadth of the market bubble.

Tonight at chez Jimbo’s girlfriend, we were watching HGTV and a program about how much house one could buy in various cities around the country for varying degrees of financial commitment. While I was impressed how nice some of the $500,000 and $750,000 homes were, I found myself wondering what kind of people could afford these half-million, three-quarter-million and one-million dollar houses? I also asked myself what kinds of jobs allow these people to pay $6000 per month house payments?

The program cited various stories of people who had purchased houses a year or two ago whose value had appreciated by six figures in less than two years’ time. I distinctly remember one homeowner who advised us all to get off the sidelines and take a chance on housing because there are gains to be made.

Somewhere, in my thoughts about how nice it would be to have a house like some of them that were presented, I saw the shadow of that bubble begin to rise in the background. It was like déjà vu, as Yogi Berra used to say, all over again. Once it becomes so easy to shave one hundred large off a quick flip of a real estate deal, it becomes easy to watch those six figures evaporate away into nothingness and bankruptcy. I wonder if the smart money is on the buy side or on the sell side.

Jimbo’s girlfriend went out with her parents today shopping for houses. She came back saying the houses were nice, but the prices were too high. We decided tonight that we are happy where we are and that chez Jimbo’s girlfriend will be our happy home for a while. I hope her parents are able to find themselves an economical home. I’m sure they will find something very affordable because they are sensible people, and I seriously doubt if they will get caught up in the bubble market.

But it is my concern tonight there is a bubble that is growing out of control and when it breaks, we’re all going to get gooey. I hope when it does, we’ll all be safely out of the way.

At least that is our hope here tonight in Jimbo’s world.

legislative foibles way down south

Jimbo did some wiring in the basement of chez Jimbo’s girlfriend, earlier this summer. We needed an additional electrical outlet, so we bought a plastic electrical box, a duplex receptacle and twenty-five feet of 14/2 Romex. I nailed the box on one of the ceiling joists, stripped the end of the wire and connected it to the duplex receptacle, which I fastened inside the box. I ran the wire upstairs to a hexagonal box where two hot wires were connected with wire nuts and I spliced into the connection. Of course, we flipped off the breaker before doing the connection. Remarkably, it all worked when we were done. At dinner last night, my girlfriend asked me how I knew how to do wiring. I explained that my father did a lot of wiring when I was young and I watched him and helped him and eventually got to the place that I could do most minor wiring jobs. I’ve owned several old houses and when doing any upgrading, the first thing I did was all of the electrical work. It’s not rocket science—its just one of those things that requires some knowledge and experience. As a disclaimer, however, it is important to point out that one has to work safely and not try wiring jobs unless they understand what they are doing.

I remember, through the haze of many decades, the first electrical project my father and I ever did together. For Christmas one year I received a short wave radio kit and dad and I built it. The exotic name of the brand of the radio was “space spanner.” When we were finished I could sit in my room and listen in to broadcasts from all over the world. I heard a number of broadcasts over the years in languages I couldn’t begin to understand, but I remember the one station that came in the loudest and clearest was from Quito, Ecuador. I listened to their broadcasts for hours, with no idea what they were saying, except every fifteen minutes or so they would identify themselves, so I knew from whence the broadcast was coming. From a hemisphere and thousands of miles away, they were making contact with the middle of America.

I sort of lost track of Quito until recently, when I read that legislators from Ecuador have been kicked out of that body for trashing a hotel in Peru earlier this summer (or winter, down there). I guess those South American lawmakers can party and party and party.

Here in the United States, we rely on our rock stars to do the partying. You may recall Joe Walsh’s song Life’s Been Good, where he makes the following statement:

I live in hotels, tear out the walls
I have accountants pay for it all

Anyway, these Ecuadorian lawmakers turned lawbreakers were attending trade talks in Lima and the party just sort of got out of hand. One female legislator even accused one of the other legislators of trying to rape her. I would recommend to her that next time she goes on a bender with these guys that she put that little spray can of mace in her purse. It sounds like these guys are real party animals and you have to be prepared to correct them when they get out of hand. According to what I read, the legislators damaged their room, the hotel lobby and assaulted a bellboy and a receptionist. Because of the shenanigans, these lawmakers are history and good riddance to them. However, if they were United States legislators, they would have been discreet about it and it probably wouldn’t have cost them their jobs. They would have put a different spin on it and it would have come out sounding better at the end.

U.S. legislators would have had their offices release stories saying that in attending the trade talks it was necessary to share alcoholic beverages with the people with whom they were negotiating, as is the local custom. They would further elaborate that, in negotiating with them, it was necessary to be very firm and it was unfortunate that while doing so some minor damage was done. They would tell us they had to let these foreigners know we mean business. If some peripheral damage were done, they’d apologize, saying their actions were necessary to keep America safe and free, and would apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.

And, if anyone in the media spun the story differently, the charge of liberal media bias would ring from the halls of congress to the editorials on The Fox “News” Network. Sometimes these stories get spinning so much they can make one dizzy.

Excuse me. Let me regain my balance. Thank you.

The truth of the matter is that we all are subject to an occasional faux pas, especially when we abuse alcohol, whether we are the front man for a rock group, an Ecuadorian solon or that guy catching some sleep next to the trash dumpster in that alley downtown. I suggest that if you have a problem with the bottle, try to stay out of the public sector or try to find a good spin-doctor. Or, at least, try to sleep it off with raising some kind of ruckus.

At least that’s the way we feel in Jimbo’s world.

a worried man

Back in the 1960s people used to sit around in folk clubs or coffeehouses and listen to folk music. One of the better known groups at the time was The Kingston Trio. They used to sing a song that had the following line:

“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song”

I guess I must be a worried man, because out here on the road tonight, I am singing a worried song, again. But I guess that is just my nature. Tonight I am worried about healthcare again, specifically health insurance. The statistics show that last year a higher percentage of people in this country went without healthcare insurance and I’m sure the numbers of uninsured will rise again this year. Fewer people have it and it is more expensive for those who do.

I read a story on Yahoo! a while back that indicated many public universities are requiring students to carry health insurance, because the schools are getting stuck with bills at college hospitals from treating uninsured students who don’t pay the bills. This is an example of what is happening in our society, in microcosm. Hospitals will treat patients without health insurance, because as a society we are not yet to the point where we will discard the ill to the trash dumpster and the landfill, based on the ability to pay (of course, with four more years of Bush, who knows?). The University hospitals apparently follow that same guideline and eventually it is the University that absorbs the cost of the uninsured. Ultimately, it would be the tuition-paying students and parents who would bear the cost, because not-for-profit institutions would have to recoup the losses in tuition costs or fees, somehow.

In society in general, the hospitals that bear the cost of the uninsured would have to recoup their losses by raising the prices of services which would be borne by patients and the insurance companies who would recoup their costs by raising premium prices.

In both cases, who ends up paying the cost? You do.

I understand why the universities are requiring health care coverage. If everyone is covered, then it lowers the cost for everyone over the long run. Most universities have a designated provider who offers affordable plans that don’t require reams of forms to fill out and massive back and forth between the applicant and the insurance company and frequent rejection of those who are not at their peak athletic prime. Actuarially, college students are young, healthy and easily insurable and can be covered at bargain rates. College is an option, so students who choose not to be covered can change schools.

In society in general, the health insurance companies will exclude everyone at risk, so it is not possible, at any price, to obtain insurance that provides thorough coverage. Therefore we cannot mandate that everyone in the country be covered. As the number of uninsured grows-- especially those at risk-- the cost of insurance will continue to skyrocket. In a capitalistic society, reasonable businessmen will eventually conclude that providing health care coverage for their employees is not a good investment and will discontinue offering it. It is not now nor has it ever been a question of if the government will get involved in the providing of healthcare insurance, but rather when the government will get involved. The last thing I want to see is the government get more involved in anything, but there are things that require a scale that only government can provide, like building reservoirs, interstate highway systems and waging wars, and this is war.

Government shouldn’t actually provide health care insurance. They should offer us a menu of plans provided by private companies, who would make a reasonable profit. The government should regulate that everyone be able to purchase coverage from the company of their choosing and should subsidize the cost of covering the “uninsurable.” Those who chose not to participate would not be required to, but it would increase the number of people covered and bring down the cost of insurance. It would also reduce the amount of money you and I are charged to cover the uninsured. This is not radically different than what Truman proposed in 1948, what Clinton proposed in the mid 1990s and what Kerry proposed last year. It is technology that is almost sixty years old, but somehow we have managed to discard fiscal common sense for all of that time and managed to spend ourselves into an unnecessary hole. It was the congress that pissed away our monetary savings when Truman and Clinton tried to show some common sense and it was basically the Bush administration that defeated the Kerry plan.

Health care coverage is a lot like cell phones. Years ago the cell phone was an expensive luxury for only the very rich. When usage of cell phones began to gain popularity, the prices came down. That caused more people to be able to afford them, which, in turn caused the price to come down more. Simply based on economies of scale, cell phones have gotten so inexpensive that many people are discarding their land-based phones because it is cheaper to use the cellular ones. If health insurance were available for all, the cost would come down the same way cell phone pricing has.

If money grew on trees or there was a steady flow of cash into the government coffers, then there would be no need to worry about this, but the truth is that there is a limited supply of money and our government owes it to us to stop throwing ours away. The only logical reason that universal healthcare is not available is that someone has a financial motivation not to allow it to happen. You may recall that during the Clinton administration, there was an advertising campaign that helped to turn public opinion against universal healthcare. That campaign was very effective, but it was an act of treason. Unfortunately, no one was ever charged, tried and executed for this anti-American act, to the best of my knowledge. It did more harm to our economy and to America in a short period of time than a million Osama Bin Laden’s could do on the most treacherous days of their lives.

Let’s put it on the table. We have run and hid from reality long enough. It is time to stand up and face our obligations before the weight of the obligation is too heavy for us to be able to shoulder it.

Then, we could stop worrying and get some sleep, here in Jimbo's world.

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the cat with the hat

I read today that they are planning to erect a huge statue of former President Harry S. Truman at historic Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. As one who is opposed to excessive government spending as a rule, I think I can look the other way at the $50,000 that congress has appropriated to help fund the statue. The other 400 large to fund the project is being raised by one of those “bleeding heart liberal” organizations that call themselves the Boy Scouts of America. I guess that is why the uniformed youths were selling popcorn in front of Wal-Mart yesterday.

The statue they are proposing erecting shows Truman waving his traditional Homburg hat. Truman was a haberdasher before he was a politician, and he almost always wore or carried a hat. Now, those of you that know me and know that I started writing this blog in protest of the tax and spend policies of the Bush Administration and of the United States Congress are probably saying right now:

“Jimbo, how can you let that 50 large slide by without gnashing your teeth, beating your chest, and if you’ll allow us to paraphrase Henry James, fall on Truman’s grave and weep for the passing of those fifty bills?”

To which I respond, wow, I’ll bet you have the passage highlighted in your copy of The Beast in the Jungle, where the protagonist finally breaks down and expresses his grief over his loss. While I respect your intellect, you people need to get out and party more.

But I digress.

Like me, Truman was, as my father always liked to say, “tighter than the nuts on a new bridge.” Old Harry would not have approved of spending even that amount of federal money for a monument—especially to himself. Truman was a man who knew himself. He knew what he was and he knew what he had to do and one of the things he spent his presidency doing was trying to get the budget back under control after we spent so much money recovering from the depression and the second world war. He was the last President we had who was not afraid to call himself a liberal. So, when you hear the tax and spend “conservatives” blame all our problems on the liberals, Truman is the man they are talking about (and me, I guess).

Years and years ago, the rock group Chicago had a song called Harry Truman, in which they lamented that the people in power were not the finest America could produce.

America needs you
Harry Truman
Harry could you please come home
Things are looking bad
I know you would be mad
To see what kind of men
Prevail upon the land you love

Sometimes it is important to look back and wish we could have leaders of the quality we used to have. Perhaps those days are gone, but if those radical hippie-types known as the Boy Scouts of America are willing to sell $400,000 worth of popcorn to honor the tight-assed old geezer, I guess I’m committed to buying a box. I’ll do it even though Truman himself would have probably said it was all nonsense and that we should spend our money and time trying to take back this country from those who are looting the treasury.

At least, that’s what we think in Jimbo’s world.

a bridge too far, or some kind of nut

I read with interest this morning that a city in the Czech Republic is doing what it can to save the squirrels.

In the Czech city of Sokolov, they have spent nearly $1900 to build a bridge over a busy road so the squirrels there can cross the road, without having to negotiate the traffic. Many of our faithful readers might say that this is not an efficient use of government funds. One might even point out that this kind of money could be used by victims of Katrina to buy two $800 purses and have a little left over to accessorize. But I say that if keeps these little bastards out from under the wheels of my car, it is worth it. The two caveats, however, are that Jimbo would not likely be driving in Sokolov, Czech Republic, anytime soon, and that the bridge may not even work because they are not sure the squirrels will use it.

The mayor of Sokolov says that some people in his town say that the money should be spent on people and not squirrels and the bridge, and the money spent for it is nonsense, but he insists it is not.

There are a large number of mature oaks and walnut trees in the neighborhood of chez Jimbo’s girlfriend. I am, therefore, taking evasive action daily to try to avoid hitting squirrels whose lust for nuts and acorns clouds their judgment and causes them to make last-minute dashes in front of my car for their prized kernel. I’m concerned that if someone built a bridge over the street next to our cul de sac that the squirrels would get halfway across, see a nut in the street below, and come back down to face the danger.

Some of you might say these squirrels are crazy, that the nut never falls too far from the tree. I would like to point out, however, these are the progeny of the individuals who planted the great oaks and walnuts in the first place. In the grand scheme of things, we all may be living in the orchard cultivated by the ancestors of these squirrels, whose grand plan was to propagate a food chain that would feed their progeny forever. Either that, or these squirrels of yore may simply have forgotten where they buried a prized acorn. And, that acorn, like many others and forgotten subterranean walnuts sprouted small saplings that climbed toward the heavens, eventually to tower over all that was below.

We can build bridges for these squirrels, or rocket-powered nut transporting devices, but I think the squirrels will eschew them for the old method of recklessly dodging traffic and hand picking their nuts and acorns. And the nut they will always prefer is the one right in front of the tires of our cars, and they will always decide to retrieve it at the last minute.

So drive carefully.

At least that’s our plan here in Jimbo’s world.

is this a man you can trust?

I wrote a blog the other day critical of the Bush administration’s response to helping the victims of hurricane Katrina. Now I see this picture and I am even more convinced he doesn’t care.

a riddle, a mystery and an enigma

It’s been a week on the road for Jimbo. When I applied for my job they said there would be 10% travel, but when I interviewed for the position, I was given the impression that it would be nowhere near that amount. It seems, however, I manage to be on the road about a week out of every other month.

Last night I saw 196666 on my odometer. The needle on the speedometer covered the first six, so all I could see was 666. For a moment I thought my car was possessed by the devil, but then it changed to 667. At that point I slowed down or sped up and my speedometer needle moved and I realized that my mileage was 196667, so I looked at 666 for ten more miles.

I was busy while I was gone and didn’t have any spare time. I’m home today and resting up. Last weekend we watched the movie Ed Wood. It was interesting, but I don’t recommend it. However, this afternoon I watched the Ed Wood movie Plan 9 From Outer Space. I understand it has been voted the worst movie ever made. I only made it through the first half-hour or so and I am in complete agreement with the voters. Wood used way too much stock footage; his actors were not very good and his cuts from scene to scene were too abrupt. It looked like something an amateur could have made. By the way, his spacecraft were much too fake and they fluttered like aluminum pie pans, which I think they were.

I also watched the 1995 movie, The Last Supper. It was kind of a whodunit, but we know from the very beginning who the culprits are. It had Cameron Diaz and Ron Perlman in the cast as well as cameos by Jason Alexander, Charles Durning, Mark Harmon and Bill Paxton. Nora Dunn played the sheriff, and despite her comedic background, she played it strait.

The premise was, if it were 1909, and you met a young artist named Adolph Hitler and were sharing a drink with him, and you knew what he was destined to do, even though he had done nothing wrong, yet, would you do him in? The suggestion being that one criminal act of murder would save many more later.

A group of graduate students in Iowa are having dinner. One of them has car trouble on his way to dinner and a character played by Bill Paxton gives him a ride. The students invite Paxton to eat with them and, during dinner conversation, he opines his theory that Hitler had the right solution to handle the Jews, and he becomes unruly and pulls a knife. During the ensuing struggle, one of the students kills him with a knife. They bury his body in their back yard and drive his truck into a river. Later we find that Paxton is a rapist and a murderer, meaning that killing him could have been a justifiable act. However, the students realize the impact of what they have done and begin to invite to dinner persons of radically conservative political beliefs and pour them a glass of poisoned wine prior to proposing a toast. After dinner they bury the victims in the backyard.

One of the students is an artist and, in somewhat of a twisted metaphor, he paints on the ceiling of their dining room a stylized version of part of Michaelangelo’s fresco from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His detail shows God reaching out to touch fingertips with Adam, symbolically giving life to man. While down below, around the dining room table, the students are taking away lives, and not just symbolically.

Ron Perlman is a conservative television commentator whom the students watch on their TV and express their disagreement with him. When the opportunity comes around for two of the students to meet him, they invite him to dinner. During his dinner conversation, he convinces the students his views are in line with their own. While the students are caucusing in the kitchen deciding to change their minds about killing him, he is left alone at the dining room table and is able to ascertain the wine is poisoned and the students were going to do him in. He pours everyone a glass of poisoned wine and they drink their last toast to him upon their return, while he declines to drink with them, because he has already had too much to drink.

At the end of the movie, we hear Perlman giving a speech and realize that he is, indeed, a modern-day Hitler. We realize that he was able to use his powers of persuasion to deceive the students into believing he was something he wasn’t. We assume that he will use the same powers to deceive the general public and that we are all doomed someday to follow his leadership.

On a happier note, the students are able to grow a good crop of tomatoes in their backyard graveyard and Cameron Diaz does a good job of landscaping the graves with flowers, and looks good doing it.

In all, if you like a mystery with a twist, you may like The Last Supper. You might find Ed Wood interesting, but I had a little trouble with Johnny Depp dressing in drag and making exaggerated, wild-eyed “Ricky Ricardo” faces. Ed Wood does have the distinction of having the two actors who played Hunter S. Thompson on the big screen in the same movie. You may recall Depp played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and that Bill Murray, who also appears in Ed Wood, played Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam. If you want to go to work on Monday and tell everyone you saw the worst movie ever, then I would recommend watching Plan 9 from Outer Space.

At least, that’s what we think here in Jimbo’s world.

it's all here in black and white

We have a bit of a dilemma here at chez Jimbo’s girlfriend. The little woman needs her eight hours of sleep, whereas “the big man” (as my boss referred to me this week) only requires about six. By the way, I think my boss called me that because I’m a dynamic guy with vision—a man capable of doing things on a grand scale and who can accomplish tasks of large proportion—rather than because of my girth. At least, I’m hoping he did.

The dilemma arises from the fact that during her last two hours of sleep, I am awake, and lying in bed thinking about things. Frequently, my brain gets sore from thinking, so I get up and drink coffee and pound on the keyboard. It is early on one such morning here and I am thinking too much again. There were two kids in the street last night; a week ago today we bought a ceiling fan and there is a disaster going on in New Orleans. In my mind this morning, I am connecting the three. Well, really, the kids aren’t connected. They just got me thinking.

Pardon my French, but we live on a cul-de-sac. I don’t know the exact translation, but that means there is a big circle in front of our house, rather than just a two-lane street. When I turned off of a heavily traveled street last night, coming home from work, on to our cul-de-sac, I saw two very young children playing in the busy street. In the one hundred yards from that intersection to the garage, I had time to mull the situation over in my mind and by the time I turned off the ignition I was telling myself:

“Jimbo, you dumb shit, a hundred yards ago you should have parked the car and chased down those kids.”

I ran back to the intersection and got there about the same time one of my neighbors did and we each rounded up a child. The kids were too young to speak, or didn’t have anything to say, but we asked them where they lived and they couldn’t tell us, so we took them to a house where we thought they lived. This was the house where the black family lives, but there was no one home.

Some of you are probably asking, “Jimbo, when you find stray kids, you try to dump them off on the black family?”

Others are probably saying, “Oh, massa Jimbo, we po’ folks be takin’ care of yo’ kids when you fin’ dem in da street. Yessuh, massa Jimbo.”

Ha, ha.

I then went to a house where I knew the people had foster children and when the guy came to the door I told him we found some kids and asked if they might be his. He yelled to his wife asking if all their kids were there. She said yes and he told me they weren’t his and began to close the door. Then his wife said, “Oh, wait.”

A recount revealed they were two kids short. The guy asked me, “Are these black kids?”

I said, yes. We found a home for them, and it turns out they were, indeed, his kids.

When we had been knocking on the door of the house of the black family, several of the neighbors came out of their houses and two neighbors said they had seen them playing in the street and a third said he had called the police. Until the fourth neighbor and I showed up, however, nobody had made an effort physically to remove them from traffic. I had two thoughts. The first was that it seems as if we are becoming afraid to get involved. The second was, would they have done something if the children were white?

There seems still to be, forty years after the civil rights bill, a division in society.

A week ago today we went to Lowe’s and bought a ceiling fan for a bedroom that Jimbo’s girlfriend uses as her home office. By the way, although I used a few of “those” words during the installation, the fan works well and looks really nice. The Lowe’s at which we purchased it is in a less affluent area of town. There were only two checkout lanes open of the ten or so at the front of the store, and the lines were lengthy. While approximately half of the people in line were as white as we are, there were a number of black people in the line with us. I couldn’t help but wonder whether there would have been more checkout lanes open if the store was located in one of the more affluent suburbs. For those long-time readers, you may recall a similar gripe I made about a K-Mart, which is just down the street from Lowe’s.

http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2005/02/journey-into-k-mart.html

I think I covered the subject pretty well in that February blog, so I won’t rehash it, but it leads me to my third point. Earlier this week we witnessed a catastrophe of biblical proportions. One can only look at what happened on the gulf coast and in New Orleans and wish a better future to all of the people who were affected by this tragedy. Those of you around me who have been listening to me talking about what a piss-poor job the Bush administration did to help these people know how I feel about the government’s response. I realize, however, in the city of New Orleans, there are some logistical nightmares to overcome to respond to what happened, so no matter how well prepared we were, help would have been slow in coming.

I can’t help but think, however, if New Orleans would have been a city that was not comprised of 67% African American residents, we would have reacted more quickly. Had the hurricane hit Kennebunkport, Maine, instead of New Orleans, I would be willing to wager help would have been there before the winds stopped blowing. Considering we had so much warning that there would be bad things happening in New Orleans, we were unprepared. We can all hang our heads in shame that the Republicans in congress and the President did this to us. We can all hang our heads in shame that we cast the pearls of our recent budget surplus before these swine, making them happier than pigs in defecation as they financed their pork barrel projects and left disaster relief to chance.

I guess the government figured that the people of New Orleans could wait for the aid to come much as they have had to wait in the checkout lines of their retail stores. Now, I guess well have to wait to see whether it is our government or the government of some third-world country who shows up with aid first. We won’t continue to be a country that is first-rate if we treat some of our citizens as second-class and end up with a section of the country that is third world.