Above Ground Pool

What's wrong with this picture?

Over on LouMinatti, Lou has a post about a bunch of angry people here in Houston that want the city to quit providing free money and housing benefits to the Katrina people. I can understand their anger. Lou wonders:

Have these "stop the welfare" people considered karmic retribution? I don't believe in superstitious mumbo-jumbo either. But they should keep in mind that should a storm similar to Hurricane Carla hit Houston today, we'd see an equal number of Houston refugees on the road who have no homes to go back to. What would these "stop the welfare" people say when a couple hundred thousand Houston-Clear-Lake-Texas City-Galveston residents are driving around southeast Texas with no homes and no jobs?

I posted the following comment:

If I lost my home and job here in a hurricane and had to move to a different city, I'll pretty much gaurantee[sic] you I won't be asking for free money a year later. Wasn't raised that way. I guess I'm just mean.

The Katrina evacuees in question are all pissed off up in arms that their FEMA aid is about to end and are demanding more. This, I am bothered about and I was going to write an eloquent post on the subject but I found someone else who's already said it way better than I ever could. Here's a quote:

What shocked many of us was not the hurricane itself, nor the response of the federal government--outrage against the Bush administration was cultivated later. What shocked us first was the response of the people of New Orleans themselves: the immediate looting, the collapse of the city government as demoralized local police walked off the job in the middle of an emergency, and the thousands of people wallowing in squalor while demanding that someone else come to help them.

Go on over to RealClearPolitics and read all of what Robert Tracinski has to say on "The Unlearned Lesson of Katrina".

posted by Chuck in Houston @ 2:48 PM